Reflashing means rewriting the car’s engine computer software. Tuners do it to change how the engine behaves—like fuel delivery and timing—without swapping the whole computer.
Topic
Standalone vs OEM ECU: Understanding Modern Engine Control
This part is about how tuning changes when you’re working with the factory engine computer instead of an aftermarket one. It explains that the factory and standalone computers often calculate airflow differently, so you can’t just copy tuning habits over.
An aftermarket standalone is a separate engine computer you install to control the engine. The key point here is that it often works differently than the factory computer, so tuning approaches don’t always transfer directly.
OE engine control modules are the factory engine computers installed by the car maker. This matters because the factory computer may use different sensors and logic than an aftermarket tuning setup.
Speed density is a way the ECU estimates engine airflow using RPM and pressure in the intake. It’s one reason standalone ECUs can behave differently from factory ECUs that measure airflow with a sensor.
In ECU tuning, calibration “tables” and “parameters” are the structured datasets the ECU uses to decide how much fuel, ignition timing, and other behaviors to command under different operating conditions. The episode’s point is that while there may be hundreds or thousands, only a handful of tables typically need adjustment for a specific retune.
Ricardo is an engineering company that helps car makers design engines. The episode mentions it to explain Jerry’s experience before he moved into tuning.
The “core ECU” is the main engine computer in their system. It’s the central unit that controls how the engine runs, and it’s meant to be the base for future updates.
HP Tuners is a company that makes tools for tuning cars. They help people change how the engine computer runs, and they’re also working on their own standalone ECU.
EFI is the system that injects fuel electronically. When people say “tune EFI,” they mean adjusting the computer settings so the engine gets the right fuel at the right time.
A wiring harness is the set of wires that connects the engine computer to all the sensors and components. If it’s wired wrong, the engine computer can’t read inputs correctly.
The camshaft is like the engine’s timing controller for when the valves open and close. If you change it, the engine can make different power, but it can also change how clean the exhaust is.
An OE manufacturer is the company that makes the car from the factory. Their main goals are usually things like meeting emissions rules and making the engine work well day to day, not just making the biggest numbers.
Emissions compliance means the car has to meet government rules for how clean the exhaust is. That can restrict how far you can push performance modifications.
Torque is the engine’s pulling force, and power is how quickly it can do work. You can change the camshaft and shift where the engine feels strong and how much top-end power it makes.
Wide-open throttle means the engine is being asked for maximum power. Doing it on a dyno for a long time is like repeatedly pushing the engine to its limit.
Catalysts are devices in the exhaust that help clean up the gases coming out of the engine. If an engine doesn’t have them, emissions control is handled differently.
O2 sensors are small sensors in the exhaust that check how much oxygen is coming out. The car uses that info to adjust the fuel mixture. Some older setups don’t rely on them the same way.
Diesel engines work differently than gas engines: they ignite fuel using compression instead of a spark plug. Because of that, tuning and testing can focus on different behaviors. The speaker is describing research work on diesel engines while using a dyno.
These are sensors that measure how much pressure builds inside the engine’s cylinder while it’s running. That data helps engineers understand what the fuel is doing during combustion.
Air-fuel ratio tolerance is about how “forgiving” the engine is when the mixture isn’t exactly perfect. If the mix is off too much, the engine can run worse and produce more smoke or emissions.
On diesels, “smoke” is often soot that forms when the fuel doesn’t burn completely. More fueling or poorer mixing can make it worse, so engineers watch it closely.
Injector protrusion is how deep the injector sticks into the combustion space. That changes where the fuel spray lands and how it mixes, which affects smoke and emissions.
NOx is a type of pollution that forms during combustion, especially when things get very hot. Engine tuning has to reduce NOx without causing too much soot smoke.
EGR means the engine reuses some exhaust gases instead of sending all of it out. That can help reduce NOx, but it has to be balanced so you don’t create extra soot.
The combustion chamber is where the fuel burns. In this diesel design, the key shape is largely formed by the top of the piston, not just the cylinder head.
Injection is when the engine sprays fuel into the cylinders. The engine can control things like how long the spray lasts and when it happens, which changes how well the fuel burns.
A common rail is a fuel system that stores fuel under high pressure in a shared line. That lets the engine computer control exactly when and how much fuel each injector sprays.
The high pressure pump is the part that squeezes fuel to very high pressure before it reaches the injectors. Higher pressure helps the fuel spray more finely for better burning.
Spray penetration is how far a fuel jet travels into the combustion chamber after injection. It depends on injection pressure and affects where the fuel ends up, which strongly influences mixture formation and combustion efficiency.
These are computer simulations that try to predict what the engine will do. Instead of only testing parts in real life, you can explore ideas on a computer first.
A quartz piston has a clear window so you can see what’s happening inside the cylinder. Engineers use it with fast cameras to watch how the fuel burns.
A high-speed camera takes lots of pictures per second. That’s important because engine combustion happens too fast for regular cameras to capture clearly.
They stop injecting fuel during the test to see what the engine does next. It helps reveal how the burning process behaves after the fuel supply is removed.
They’re talking about a Ford Ranger diesel engine. The key point is that making a new engine isn’t quick—it can take many years before it’s ready for production.
They’re describing a two-step process: first, use computer simulations to predict engine behavior, then test the real engine to confirm it. The simulation helps a lot, but real testing is still needed.
CFD is a computer simulation that shows how air (and sometimes fuel) flows inside an engine. Instead of guessing or only testing on a dyno, engineers can model problems early and fix them faster.
An engine dyno is like a treadmill for an engine. It lets engineers measure how strong the engine is and test changes in a controlled way.
Car
Renault F9Q diesel
The Renault F9Q is a diesel engine model line from Renault. In this story, the work is about improving how the engine burns fuel and meets emissions rules.
Euro 3 is a set of rules in Europe that limits how much pollution a vehicle is allowed to produce. Saying the engine was “nearly meeting Euro 3” means it was getting close to passing those emissions limits.
Term
dialed the engine in
“Dialed the engine in” is calibration language meaning the engine control settings were tuned to achieve the desired combustion, drivability, and emissions results. In modern diesel development, this often involves adjusting injection timing/quantity and related control parameters.
Calibration is tuning the car’s computer so the engine behaves the way it should. It’s basically adjusting settings so it runs smoothly and meets rules like emissions limits.
DPF regeneration is how a diesel car cleans out its soot filter. When the filter gets too full, the car runs a special process to burn the soot away so emissions stay under control.
A head gasket is the seal between the engine’s top and bottom. A copper head gasket is a tougher, metal version that can handle high heat, but it still has to be installed perfectly to seal properly.
Concept
single cylinder prototype engine
This was a test engine with only one cylinder, built to learn how something works before a full production engine exists. Prototypes can be less forgiving, so small setup or tuning issues can cause big problems.
Spark retard is when the engine’s spark happens a little later than normal. Doing it that way can help the engine burn cleaner, especially early on when the exhaust system isn’t warm yet.
Term
catalyst got more loaded
When the speaker says the catalyst got more loaded, they mean the exhaust aftertreatment system was engineered to handle more work—typically by increasing active material and/or improving how quickly it reaches effective operating conditions. As emissions rules tighten, catalysts often need more capacity and better lightoff behavior to meet limits.
Engine-out emissions are the exhaust pollutants coming straight from the engine. The catalytic converter then tries to clean them up after they leave the engine.
Precious metal loading is the amount of expensive catalyst material inside the exhaust converter. More of it can help the converter work better and heat up faster so emissions are lower sooner.
“Light off” means the catalytic converter gets hot enough to start cleaning the exhaust effectively. Before it’s hot, the car can’t reduce emissions as well.
Rhodium and palladium are special metals used inside the catalytic converter. They help turn dirty exhaust gases into cleaner ones.
Term
downstream
“Downstream” here means later in the exhaust system, after the gases leave the engine. The idea is to clean the exhaust with the catalytic converter rather than only changing how the engine burns fuel.
“Cat light off” means the car’s exhaust cleaner (the catalytic converter) has warmed up enough to start doing its job. Before it warms up, the car changes how it runs to heat it faster.
Hydrocarbons are basically leftover fuel that didn’t burn completely. The catalytic converter helps clean them up once it’s hot enough.
Term
CO
CO is carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas that can form when fuel doesn’t burn fully. The catalytic converter helps turn it into a less harmful gas once it’s warmed up.
“Lean” means the engine is using more air than fuel. The car tries to do this carefully because if the catalyst isn’t hot yet, some unburned fuel can slip through.
Hydrocarbon breakthrough is when leftover fuel escapes the exhaust cleaner before it’s fully working. The car tries to avoid that, especially right after starting.
Ignition retard is when the car delays the spark. That helps change how the engine burns so the exhaust gets hot enough to warm the catalytic converter.
GPF means Gasoline Particulate Filter. It helps catch tiny soot particles from gasoline engines and then cleans them out so the exhaust stays within emissions limits.
After treatment means the car cleans the exhaust after it leaves the engine. Instead of only making the engine burn cleaner, the car uses parts in the exhaust to reduce pollution.
Knock is abnormal combustion where the fuel-air mixture ignites too early or unevenly, creating pressure spikes. ECUs detect knock and adjust timing and fueling to protect the engine.
Euro 6 is a set of rules in Europe that limits how much pollution cars are allowed to produce. It affects how the engine and exhaust systems are controlled.
WinOLS is a computer program tuners use to change how a car’s engine computer is calibrated. It helps them adjust settings the ECU uses to control things like fueling and timing.
CAN bus is the car’s internal communication system. A “CAN bus device” is an add-on that plugs into that network so you can read or control information from the car.
An ECU is the engine computer in your car. It reads sensor data and decides how to run the engine, and this episode is discussing how newer ECUs are more complex.
The induction system is how air gets into the engine. If you change it, you can change how much air the engine can use, which affects power.
Car
LS1 engine
The LS1 is a V8 engine family from General Motors. Here, they’re talking about tuning it by changing the intake and exhaust parts to make more power.
Car
HSV
HSV is an Australian brand that makes performance versions of Holden/GM cars. The hosts are saying it’s basically the same underlying LS platform as the US cars, but tuned differently.
“Extractors” are performance exhaust headers. They help the engine breathe out better, which can add power.
Term
VE system
A “VE system” is a way the engine computer estimates how much air is entering the engine. It uses a model (VE) to help decide how much fuel to inject and when to spark.
Car
LS2
The LS2 is another V8 engine in GM’s LS family. The discussion uses it as the next step after the LS1, with more tuning and emissions-related changes.
Car
LS3
The LS3 is another GM LS V8 that came later than the LS2. They’re saying the tune/calibration can differ between countries because of fuel and emissions rules.
The BMW 7 Series is BMW’s large, high-end luxury sedan. It uses advanced electronics to control the engine and other systems. Your podcast context is about different versions of the car’s control units and how they relate to engine management changes.
Term
E40 controller
An “E40 controller” is a particular version of the engine computer. When the controller changes, the way the engine is controlled and tuned can change too.
Term
E38 controller
The “E38 controller” is another version of the engine computer. Different computer versions can need different tuning to work the same way.
Term
NOC system
The “NOC system” is a control/emissions-related setup that can vary by country. The key point here is that Australia’s configuration wasn’t just a simple copy of the US tune.
Instead of a cable connecting your pedal to the throttle, the computer controls the throttle electronically. The tune can command the throttle to reduce and then increase again to shape power delivery.
A torque request is the ECU’s target amount of engine torque it tries to deliver based on driver input and control strategy. The host describes how the ECU’s torque request changes the throttle behavior in the mid-range, which is why the same engine can produce different peak power figures.
Lambda one is a specific fuel/air balance where the engine burns the fuel in the most chemically “balanced” way. It’s commonly used for emissions control, and the tune can change it when the ECU is allowed to run differently.
LIVE
within the company they used to do sort of profiles on people like this is Jerry and he's
the engine calibrator so they did one on me and it went on Facebook and there's a lot of abuse
that happened right because people were like he doesn't know how to calibrate shit he's useless
I can make the engine leaner and I can get a little bit of fuel economy and I can get a
little bit of that small power so he doesn't know what he's doing.
Welcome to the HBO TuneIn podcast, I'm Andrei your host and in this episode we're joined
by Jerry Beshet from HP Tuners in Australia.
I think when it comes to reflashing or retuning factory engine management systems, particularly
tuners who are already familiar with aftermarket stand-alones do tend to struggle a little bit
because the operating principles of most OE engine control modules do vary quite dramatically
from an aftermarket stand-alone.
For example aftermarket stand-alone generally almost always is going to be working on the
speed density principle whereas the majority of factory engine management systems prefer
to use a mass airflow sensor.
When we look into all of the tables available in a factory, ECU as well, it can on face
value be a little bit daunting.
We're going to have hundreds if not thousands of tables and parameters that we can adjust
and this can be a little bit overwhelming.
The reality is fortunately there is generally only a handful of tables that we actually
do need to address.
Now we get into Jerry's background which in itself is quite interesting given that he
used to work overseas for Ricardo consulting engineers and Ricardo actually designed and
developed engines for a number of OE manufacturers.
He jumped across to Australia and started working as the lead calibrator for HSV or Holden
special vehicles and then he ended up at HP tuners.
As part of this discussion we talk about the differences between an aftermarket stand-alone
and a factory engine management system and we talk about why people are scared off by
factory reflashing and also some of the areas that people frequently go wrong.
Hopefully this way you'll be able to avoid some of those same pitfalls.
Then we dive into one of HP tuners' newer products which is their core ECU.
So in a departure from their main business model, HP tuners are now actually developing
and providing their own aftermarket stand-alone ECU.
We find out why HP tuners have gone in this direction, what they've done to distinguish
or separate themselves from the other aftermarket stand-alone ECUs on the market and what we
can expect from the core ECU in the future as development continues.
Before we jump into our chat, for those who are new to the TuneIn podcast, High Performance
Academy is an online training school.
We specialise in teaching people how to build performance engines, how to tune EFI, how
to construct wiring harnesses.
We also cover topics on fabrication, 3D modelling and CAD, race driver education and data logging
just to name a few.
You can find all of our courses at hpacammity.com forward slash courses.
All of these courses are delivered in high definition video modules that you can watch
from anywhere in the world provided you've got an internet connection.
This means you can learn from the comfort of your own place and you can learn at your
own pace.
All of our courses also come with a 60 day no questions asked, money back guarantee.
So if you purchase them for any reason at all, decide it wasn't quite what you expected,
no problem, let us know, we'll give you a full refund.
And for podcast listeners, you can also use the coupon code podcast75 that will get you
$75 off the purchase of your very first HPA course.
We'll put the coupon code in the show notes to make it nice and easy for you to find.
Lastly, if you like free stuff, then I've got a great deal for you.
We are constantly partnering with some of the biggest names in the aftermarket performance
industry to give away some great prizes.
You can always find our latest prize at hpacademy.com forward slash giveaway.
It might be an aftermarket ECU or dash, it could be some engine components or engine
building tools or just about anything in between.
They are great prizes and we will ship them free of charge to your door if you're the
winner.
There's no tricks here, no purchase required to get your name into the draw.
Alright enough with our introduction, let's get into our interview now.
Welcome to the podcast, Jerry thanks for joining us and as always let's start by digging
into your background a little bit and figure out how you got interested in cars.
Well from the age of six, my dad had me under the bonnet, he had a Peugeot 404 and had me
cleaning the carburetor and pulling out a spark plug when I was tiny.
And I even got pictures of me under the bonnet when I was small.
And so I was the only child that he says that was interested in sort of helping and fixing
cars.
I used to pull a tire off and get involved.
And then through the years I had a little motorbike and we fixed that up and just mechanical
things interested me.
And then I studied mechanical engineering and then I got a job at Toyota on the production
line when I was when I left school and that sort of showed me that yeah I'm not going
to be a production line worker, I want to do something so I went and studied mechanical
engineering which sort of led on to the rest of my career I suppose.
All right, so at the point you sort of decided mechanical engineering was a good idea.
What did you sort of see in the future for you as to where you wanted to get to?
Well, growing up in Durban in South Africa, Toyota used to have Toyota had a program
where you could if you got onto the training program they would sort of pay for your studies
and you would work as a development engineer at the factory on the cars.
It was the only sort of opportunity and I really thought that was a good idea which
sort of motivated me to just study and get involved.
I think that's the main driver I suppose.
OK, so with mechanical engineering there's a lot of directions you can go within that
degree.
I'd probably say that maybe 40 or 50% of my podcast guests have done a mechanical engineering
degree and they obviously end up in engine design or Formula One or working for an OE
manufacturer or anything.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what parts of the mechanical engineering degree
you really sort of jelled with?
What was your passion in there?
Yeah, so that's a good question.
I mean there's lots of aspects you do, mechanics and machines and thermodynamics, fluid dynamics.
I really enjoyed thermodynamics.
I really enjoyed that side of my studies and when I started getting towards the end
of it I was really interested in working in a power station.
A power station, OK.
Yeah, like a power station and doing all the thermodynamics of a power station.
Steam turbine lines and all that stuff.
But then I had to move, if I got a job in the power station I would have to move thousands
of kilometres away from home, which was like I wasn't so keen to do that.
And then I got a job at Toyota.
I applied and I went through the interview process.
There were quite a few people and somehow I got through and eventually I got accepted
as a trainee, which meant that they paid for my final years of study and they paid me while
I was studying and I got a job at Toyota at the same time, getting experience.
So it was a win-win for me.
Getting paid to study as well as getting your tuition paid for it sounds like a pretty
good deal to me.
I assume there's some payback period where if they pay for your degree you have to work
for X number of years?
Correct.
So I had to work back to, I think three years was the payback period as a trainee engineer.
So your salary wasn't a full engineer salary but in Durban in South Africa there wasn't
much opportunity so it was one of the good opportunities.
So getting that was just fantastic.
So I took it with both hands and ran with it.
Absolutely.
Why not?
I'm just interested though with a company like Toyota, how much of the development and
R&D is done in South Africa versus Japan?
I mean looking at it from the outside, obviously it's a worldwide international company.
Looking from the outside in, I think a lot of people would just simply assume that all
of that sort of work is done inside of Toyota Japan.
Yes, so South Africa, they assemble the car CKD so they open the boxes, they build the
cars but there are some local cars that are built locally.
There was a couple of cars that built sort of locally that don't exist anywhere else
in the world.
I'm not sure that's still the case now, it might have changed but back then they used
the Territor engine and gearbox and then we also modified the camshafts for more power
and there was a Dano.
So lots of local engineering from body perspective, suspension, brakes, lots of local content
which needed engineering work.
Okay, I'm really interested to come back to that camshaft upgrade.
It sounds almost like you're running an aftermarket performance shop there but you're selling
production cars.
Where I'm going with this is usually when an OE manufacturer is designing a new engine,
power and performance is probably nowhere near the top of the list and usually at least
from my understanding it's all about emissions and the camshaft design is a massive driver
of tailpipe emissions.
So to be able to do this in Durban, is the emissions standards less or did Toyota just
leave so much headroom in that engine that you could fit a more aggressive cam, make
more power and still be emissions compliant?
It's a good question.
So back then in 1986, 87, 88, 89, there was a need for a little bit more torque and power
on the high-ice and the high-lux.
So my engineering director, his name was Bruce Havett-Tupler and he was just a fantastic
engineer.
He was like, hey, we can get more power on torque over this engine so we changed the
camshaft design and Toyota were like, no, you're not doing this.
And we were like, yeah, no, we need it.
So they said, OK, we'll accept the engine can pass a 200-hour full-power durability.
And so it only made, I think, about 17 newton-meters more and about eight kilowatts or something.
It wasn't a fantastic, huge upgrade, but it passed and so we were allowed to use it.
And then at the factory, they machined the blocks, they made the cams, they machined
the pist... everything was done in-house.
So those engines were built in-house.
So we could modify the engines and it was all good.
OK.
That 200-hour durability test, so literally just like it says on the label, 200 hours
wide-open throttle on a dyno.
Correct.
200 hours full-power at full-power, rated power.
That is quite the torture test.
Well, no, that's actually quite a mild one for, GM have 400-hour cycle testing, Ford
have a 400-hour test, Renault have a torturous 200-hour full-power test they use.
OK.
So not actually out of the ballpark, not unheard of.
200 hours full-power is maybe the norm, but some have worse testing than that.
Right.
Just circling back to the emissions aspect though, is that something that was required?
Did you sort of stack up and see how it compared or is it just not a consideration?
Back then, I don't even think the engines had catalysts.
On that particular variant and still running leaded fuel.
Yeah.
So they never even have O2 sensors.
Yeah, if we're still running leaded fuel, we're probably not too concerned about emissions.
Let's be honest.
All right, all right.
That's it.
Yeah.
South Africa, I think South African emissions came in in the late 90s only, I think.
Yeah.
OK.
Yeah, definitely would have made life a whole lot easier if you didn't have a very stringent
rulebook to match for your meeting.
Absolutely.
Well, let's continue.
So where'd you go to from Toyota?
So what happened is when I finished my studies, there were affirmative action happened in
South Africa and I was told that there was no job for me.
So I was like, oh, you're great.
So then I left South Africa and went on holiday to the UK.
And the South African round was so bad that after sort of 30 days, I had no money.
So I was sort of looking for jobs in the UK and bumming around.
And then I applied for a job at Ford, which I never got, and I applied for a job at Recorder
Consulting Engineers to run their dyno, the research engine dyno, and I got the job.
So got involved in a research development program working on diesel engines, just running
as an engineer running the engine dyno and collecting the data,
doing the reports, analyzing cylinder pressure, and trying to work out how to make a high-speed
direct injection engine work with high-pressure fuel pump.
OK, let's just come back one step for a moment.
For those who aren't aware of Recorder Consulting, what is this company, what does it do and
who are its customers?
So Sir Harry Recorder was the founder of the company and he developed the first diesel
engine in the war during the war in 1940, I think it was around that time, 1935, 1936.
He was a fantastic entrepreneur, he developed the first diesel engine.
So he started the company, the company grew, and it's basically a research company.
So they do work for Ford, Renault, they did work for GM.
They're based all over the world now.
There's head offices in Shore and Barcy in the UK, and they're also in Detroit as well.
They are directly competitive to AVL, which is another engine development company, and
Motto Moden, which is the company of France as well, they do engine development.
They work on Formula One engines, they just do everything, all sorts of...
Yeah, OK, I think that lays the groundwork of the scale and level of company that you're
now working for.
So when you're running the dyno here, you've just talked a little bit about the instrumentation.
Can you maybe expand on that, what instrumentation specifically have you got on these engines?
What are you using it for?
What are you trying to find?
So in-cylinder pressure transducers, the engines are semi-coupled with pressure and temperature
sensors, and then you're looking at the fuel burn rate and the amount of smoke that the
cylinder produces.
You're looking at you studying air-fuel ratio tolerance.
So as you're developing the chamber, you swing the air-fuel ratio richer and richer in our
diesel and you see how where the smoke turn up is.
So you get to 18 to 1, 17 to 1 and 16 you're looking at the smoke turn up,
so the tolerance to that and the power output.
So we had set points that we would test and then we would change the injector whole number.
So you see you had a five-hole injector or a six-hole injector, you would change that.
Then you would change the swirl of the head, so the amount of swirl that the head had,
and you'd change the protrusion of the injector into the chamber.
So you studied all those parameters and then you would design a new piston or a new shape
to give you better tolerance of smoke and NOx, which is emissions, so you would study
the amount of EGR that you could put into the engine and where the emissions would be.
So not only are you developing for performance or power, you're also developing for emissions.
Alright, a bunch of follow-up questions there.
For a start, for those who maybe aren't sort of involved in the diesel engine world,
when you say combustion chamber, it's not really like a gas engine where the combustion
chamber's in the head, the combustion chamber on these engines is essentially the design
at the top of the piston, isn't it?
Yeah, in the piston, yes.
So what sort of changes to the injector design and the combustion chamber design,
how do these changes drive something like smoke output?
So that's a good question.
So there's so many variables, when I was working on them, we had the high pressure fuel pumps
and we couldn't adjust the fuel pressure.
Oh, so it's just fixed?
No, as your delivery increased, your fuel pressure increased.
Oh, of course, yeah, okay.
So then we were like, with all the studies, for three years, we were working on this and developing
and we're going, hey man, if we could have more pressure, we would be able to clean this engine up
and we could see what was going on.
So you're looking at the duration of the injection, you're looking at when the spray
comes out of the pistons moving away and the spray is coming out.
So you have to put the nozzle deeper in into the chamber and we thought, you know,
if we could have a common rail, we could make this work.
And so Lucas Verity were the first ones who approached Ricardo and said, hey, we've got this injector
and if we could have a pump that could deliver the pressure, we could make this work.
So then they gave us their common rail injector and we got an electric motor
to drive the high pressure pump and produce and we control the pressure through a rail.
We started doing this development on the same engine that we had.
It was a single cylinder hydra and we started seeing the benefits of common rail.
So we could drop the pressure, we would have multiple injections.
So yeah, all those things came into it.
The pressure holds in the nozzle, the swirl of the head.
So we had twin ports, we could close one port down and increase the swirl
and open the other port with full power for less swirl and better volumetric efficiency.
I'm guessing here that going through a test cycle like you've just been describing
is going to be a pretty slow process.
I mean if you need to try a different combustion chamber shape which involves making a new piston
and obviously rebuilding the engine with that new piston, that's not something you're going to be
doing a test one day and testing this new combustion chamber shape the next day.
So the question I've got here is, is this modelled in CAD or some type of software first?
So you've got a bit of an idea in the direction to go with the combustion chamber shape,
the swirl etc. Or is it literally, we think this is the way we want to go
or evidence so far has suggested we made this change and it worked.
Can we go further? How's it'll work?
Yes, so back in the 90s we had empirical drawings and we had models that predicted
the penetration of the spray with the pressure and then the technology was getting better.
So computational models were getting better, computers were a bit slower than my first computer
back in 1993 was a 2A6SX20 with...
Yeah, it's almost hard now.
We're so spoiled with the technology we've got available to sort of think back to what it was
the technology was like back then, so yeah, fair point.
The hard drive was a 20 meg hard drive, double-spaced 240.
So you used empirical ways of drawing things out and modelling it
and then we also had a quartz piston where we filmed the combustion with a high-speed camera
and then we would run the engine at full power and cut the fuel and then take the head off
and then look at the piston and go, yeah, it's burning outside the piston
and because it was a single cylinder, you could open the crank, the crankcase,
there was a door, you could open the crankcase and take the conrod, loosen the conrod
and pull the piston out. You could change your piston in a day.
So you could see what was going on, you could physically see what was going on
and you make some changes and then design a new piston and put it back in and repeat the test.
Yeah, it did take a long time.
Just out of interest with that process, how are you manufacturing another piston to test?
I'm guessing going and casting these would not be very practical?
No, so we had blanks and then the old machine shop at Riccardo would machine the pistons.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
They had lays and CNC machines that could do it, yeah.
So what's the sort of duration, I guess, in terms of time, months or years
for the development of an engine like what you're just talking about there,
that combustion chamber, injector, swirl to test?
So this particular engine, we were developing it for Ford.
It was the Ford Ranger engine, the diesel engine that you've seen in the past
and that engine took about nine years to develop.
Wow, that's the lead time on it.
Wow, that's huge.
So the very first engine was built, I ran the engine number three,
that was built off the prototype production line and that engine rang for nine years
and I think the engine was in production in 2002.
So about nine years, 19 years, yeah.
In terms of, you know, if you look at how this process goes today,
if a manufacturer wants to design a new engine,
am I right in assuming now the majority of that would be done in the virtual world
with simulation and then just validated in the real world?
Yes, absolutely, it would take a lot quicker.
And I'm guessing also much, much cheaper for the manufacturer as well.
A lot cheaper, but still four to five years still.
Do you know, obviously we're going through your job history, your work history
and you're not working in that role anymore, do you know how well the simulation
actually stack up when it's validated in the real world?
Is it close or is there still some room for error?
It's a lot better now with CFD, computational flow dynamics
and the models are so good now, they can predict where the failures will be.
It's come on, it's a hundred times easier now with all the models.
Okay.
How did your role sort of progress during your time at Riccardo?
So I ran the engine dyno when I started there in 93,
I ran the engine dyno for three or four years, three years,
and then these French guys came over from Renault and wanted to see what we were doing.
So because I speak French, I showed them around and spoke French to them
and explained to them what we were doing.
And at the end of the day, they were like, congratulations, you've got your new job.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
And they were like, what do you mean?
They go, no, we're looking for somebody to come and lead the F9Q diesel
common rail development at Renault in France.
So congratulations, you've got the job.
Okay, sounds like you didn't really have a lot of choice in it then.
So it was like, oh, so then things move pretty quick.
And the next thing I was living in France, working on the engine over there,
and the combustion chamber was just diabolical.
It just didn't work.
They were just making black smoke everywhere.
And I changed the design straight away and bang, the engine was nearly meeting Euro 3.
And then we were testing the Nippon Denso common rail system in the Bosch common rail.
And we dialed the engine in pretty quickly within a year.
And yeah, it happened.
And then Ricardo got me back because they had blown up the single cylinder engine three times, I think.
And the director was like, I want you back.
I don't care how much it's going to cost me.
Because when you ran the engine, it never blew up.
So I went back to Ricardo, so the French were difficult to get along with.
And my wife was pregnant then as well.
So we went back to the UK and I just ran the single cylinder program.
And then I worked on the Ford P&E power and emissions program from then onwards.
But my last year of work at Ricardo, there was not much development work that sort of slowed down.
And then I got into, they needed somebody to calibrate the, do calibration.
Yeah, sure.
Vehicle calibration.
So I got involved in that because of my previous experience on the dyno.
So we started calibrating the cars for drivability and emissions.
And then we had the DPF regeneration program that we needed to do at Ricardo.
So I got involved in that.
And I did that for two years before I came to Australia.
All right, again, a bunch of follow up questions in there.
I'm guessing with your time running that, actually, no, the first question is,
why did this engine blow up three times a single cylinder engine?
What was being done wrong?
Because every morning, you know, every morning when you come and meet your baby,
you've got to borrow it or you've got to turn it over by hand.
And because the gas, it's a single cylinder sort of prototype engine that had a copper head gasket,
and it always leaked.
Okay.
So you had to sort of turn it over and make sure there was no leaks.
And you have to turn all the taps off at night time before you went home.
You sort of had to spend an hour shutting it down, letting it cool down correctly.
And the guys who took over and were running it, it was a, I think it was a young student.
He sort of, no one showed him what he was supposed to be doing.
And then he would rather in the morning, motoring the dano and it was just hydraulic
and then blow the engine up or bend the conrod.
All right.
So just maybe a bit of a lack of, lack of training and knowledge on the part of the person
who took over from you.
Correct.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
No one really wants to be breaking engines on a test cell like that though.
What?
I'm guessing that over your time running that you couldn't help but pick up a lot of information
about the tuning process, but moving into full blown calibration.
What was the learning curve like there?
It was actually, I was lucky because back in the early 2000, the emissions weren't too
hard and it was 0 to, you know, you didn't have to spend much time trying to get the
catheter to light off.
You had heaps of time.
Yeah.
I think you had like 90 seconds or something for the catheter to light off.
So you had a bit of spark retard and then it would work.
The emissions weren't that difficult to pass either.
So it wasn't too bad.
So you can concentrate in there more on just general tuning, drivability, power, et cetera,
without a focus on must meet emissions at all costs.
Everything else then works around it.
Yeah, that's it.
I mean, and then over the years as the emissions got tighter and tighter, the engine out emissions
never changed, but the catalyst got more loaded.
They got precious metal loading like massive amount of precious metal to get the cats to
light off.
So we had chemists who would design the cats with this, you know, rhodium and palladium
and all the, and that was left to the catalyst specialists, right?
So we would give them the engine out of emissions and then they would give us a catalyst and
say this should work.
And then we would tellerate that and get the cats to light off over 300 degrees and the
emissions were pretty good to them.
Right.
So it wasn't so much a drive around reducing the emissions output directly out of the out
of the course ports.
It was more about dealing with it downstream with better catalysts.
Yeah.
You've used that term cat light off as well.
Maybe for those who've got no idea about how the emissions systems work, can you just
give us a quick overview?
Yeah, so the emissions test is you've got to soak the car in the lab for 24 hours and the
average temperature of the start of the test is about 22 degrees.
So the vehicle has to be soaked for 10 hours and then you have to start the engine and you
have the limits, the emissions limits that the government set.
So for the start is the most critical part and you have to get the catalyst up to about
350 degrees to start the conversion process.
So it starts to convert the hydrocarbons and the CO and the NOx emissions very, very as
quickly as you can.
Now, the optimization process was you try and run as lean as you can to not have hydrocarbon
breakthrough because the catalyst is like a sponge.
First it absorbs some hydrocarbons and then it will start to convert NOx and hydrocarbons
and CO.
Yeah, so some engine optimization and then we had cat light off strategies running a lot
of spark retard to heat the cat up to get it to go.
So with the ignition retard, and you can hear this on modern cars for a hell of a long time
now, when you first start them in the morning, they'll generally rev a little bit higher but
you also hear they've got that retarded sort of engine note to them and that'll happen
for maybe 10 or 15 seconds and then it sort of calms down and sounds normal.
So that's what's happening there.
That's exactly what's happening.
So they run the engine at higher RPM to get the energy that you need, spark retard to
get more energy and that heats up the catalyst and that's why you see from, you know, a nature's
V car or a holding car that had under floor catalyst that were 1.5 meters away from the
port, from the exhaust port, they slowly, slowly came right up this far from the exhaust
port because you need the energy right on the catalyst immediately to pass the emissions.
Yeah, and these emissions standards just continually got more and more stringent as well.
Well, yeah, the emissions, I think, me personally, I feel that the government really made a big
mistake.
They've made the emissions targets a lot stricter and all the manufacturers, there's been a catalyst
closer to the port.
The engine out emissions haven't changed over the last 20 or 30 years.
Maybe they reduced a little bit.
I would say, you know, maybe 15% better, but they really haven't changed that much.
The technology has gone into the catalyst and DPF and GPF areas.
So that's where the cars pass the emissions.
So it's all in after treatment, not specifically making the engine cleaner itself.
Correct.
And even the engine control modules were have been desired.
They're not engine.
They don't run the engine.
They control the after treatment.
So it's after treatment control.
So the engine ECU and software is more to control the after treatment and protect that and make
sure that the engine is doing the right thing for the after treatment.
Okay.
It's a lot to take in.
It is, right?
I mean, if you just need to run an engine, you need the air fuel ratio to be correct and
you need spark and some spark, some knock and some corrections for temperature.
That's it.
But if you look at the engine technology, the ECU technology now, there's like 20,000
maps in a GM controller.
And it's all about the diagnostics and the after treatment control.
It's a confusing world.
We've ended up in this situation, but this is what we're dealing with.
Yeah.
And so I've always said it's not about, you know, why isn't the emissions test just test
steady state?
Like, you know, and you get conversion efficiencies and it's all good.
All the emissions are made in the first 10 seconds of a start.
That's all that's happened when you meet Euro 6.
You're passing the emissions in the first 10 seconds.
Right.
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Alright, let's get back to the episode.
Alright, so let's continue with your journey here.
What was next after Ricardo?
Oh yeah, then I came to Australia and I got a job at Holden Special Vehicles and they
were looking for a celebration engineer because things were moving from the old ECUs to newer
technology and more complex and I applied and I got the job.
Brad Dunstan was the engineering manager at the time and he gave me the job.
I got involved with Holden so I worked at Holden extensively and at the Proving Ground at Lang Lang.
And we started tuning the cars and making more power and we had the dyno.
We had an ex-4M1 engineer, Carl Gibson, who ran the engine dyno at HSV.
He helped develop new extractors and different induction systems to make the V8, the LS1 engine
perform better.
Alright, so we should probably clarify for those from the US market, HSV, General Motors
in Australia essentially is the same as the LS platform that we see in the States.
Yeah, okay so carry on.
So with Carl we developed different extractors or exhaust manifolds.
I don't know, the US cars call it, they don't think they call it extractors.
Probably manifolds, I think we can pick up what you're putting down though.
And then we changed the induction and I think the engine went from 255kW to 265kW to 285kW.
On the LS1 platform then we had the Callaway 300kW engine that had ported heads, CNC heads
and it ran mathless so it was a VE system.
So we tuned all those cars for a few years then the LS2 came along.
And the progression was new engines and more difficult emissions.
So it was a steady progression from 2001, GM was changing the software, there was new ECUs.
The technology was improving rapidly at that time.
From 2004 things changed significantly to an E40 controller and the E38 controller came along
and LS3 came in 2008-9.
On face value I would have made the assumption that the calibration would be not a lot different
between the US delivered LS2, LS3 for example and what HSV we were delivering
to the showrooms in Australia, am I completely off the mark there?
They were similar but they were differently different, the fuels were different in America.
So we had to do a lot of work here in Australia for our vehicle and our configuration in our vehicle.
So the NOC system was different, the airflow systems were different, the emissions were different.
So it was significantly different.
Each program only took a year, I mean we had a lot of few cars.
The team group took a fair number of engineers, I think there were 80 engineers
in the end doing some HSV work and then a GMH work.
So we had the V6 platform to calibrate, the V8 platform to calibrate as well.
One of the aspects that I always found mildly amusing was in the generation, I think it was the LS3
and you had the club sport and then the R8, if I've got that round the right way,
the R8 was the 325 kilowatt and the club sport was 317 kilowatt and you had that badge on the back of the car.
And the engine was exactly the same and the only reason there was a difference in output
was because the torque request basically through the mid range would just close the drive by wire,
throttle down to about 60 odd percent and then it would open up again.
So the actual stated difference, 325 to 317 kilowatts, doesn't sound like much and it's not.
But I think through the mid range, the club sport was down about 35, 40 kilowatts but of course in the aftermarket
you just go into this one table, max it all out and straight away you've got your R8 power
for the cost of a couple of credits on HP Tunis.
Quite interesting to get the opposite view from the people inside of HSV actually making
those decisions and making that difference.
So yeah, tell you a quick little story.
Within the company they used to do sort of profiles on people.
This is Jerry and he's the engine calibrator.
So they did one on me and it went on Facebook and there's a lot of abuse that happened.
Because people were like, he doesn't know how to calibrate shit.
He's useless. I can make the engine leaner and I can get a little bit of fuel economy
and I can get lots more power so he doesn't know what he's doing.
So there's things you have to do like you have to pass emissions.
You've got to run lambda one.
So you will know you can turn the closed loop system off and just run it lean and you can get better fuel economy.
But the knocks goes through the roof and you fail straight away.
And then at HSV there's a lot of politics.
So the politics was always around the power of the engine and marketing always got involved.
And then marketing, the numbers on the car were more marketing numbers than actual engineering numbers.
So the power differences came from small changes that we made,
small improvements in some hardware, very subtle improvements.
Like if you look at the 317 to 325, I remember the collector on the extractors changed
and we gained a bit of power there.
But yeah, it was a difficult time around that era trying to get power.
I mean, I think there's nothing specifically wrong with differentiating the engine performance via a calibration.
I mean heaps of manufacturers do that.
One that's very obvious to me is because we've gone down this path.
My wife's got a 2021 Porsche Cayenne GTS and that's powered by the 4-litre twin turbo V8.
But that same engine is used in so many different cars, the Audi RS6, the RS Q8, the Bentley Bentayga
and I think also the Lamborghini Urus.
And so it's the same base engine but the power is anywhere from I think the GTS Porsche was 460 horsepower
and the Lamborghini Urus is 700.
So with the calibration change you end up with basically the same power as the Urus.
And what I like about that as well, obviously the drivetrain, the engine specifically
is going to be reliable at that power level because they roll off the showroom floor in the Lamborghini
with that power and it still has to have a warranty on it.
So I kind of feel like making a change to that and just bringing it up to the top spec of that engine
should be as safe as any change you can make.
Yes, there's a few things like for HSV to actually announce to the world what power we make,
you have to do the ECE power test.
The ECE power test is the engine has to run at full power for two minutes, full power, two minutes
and the power has to be stable within 1%.
It can't change by more than 1%.
That's actually, that's hard to do.
Yes, so on the engine dyno we used to have to start the engine running at full power
and then wait for the oil temperature to stabilize, the coolant temperature to stabilize
and obviously it's controlled but there's a point where it's got to stabilize
and then you'd watch the power number, power and torque and they have to stabilize
and they have to sit there for two minutes and then you can take the average number
and announce that to the world.
So what are the challenges for you as a calibration engineer in making the engine
consistent over that two minute period?
So obviously you're going to end up building a huge amount of temperature in the combustion chamber
over two minutes at wide open throttle.
Yes, so the inspector comes, he comes and he witnesses the test, he comes to the dyno
and he sits there and he watches.
So it's not like you do the test and then you do a report, he comes and watches the test
and so everything you have to show him that cap protection is on, everything is on.
There's no cheating involved and then you have to run the engine.
So prior to him coming you have to run this test a lot to make sure it's going to meet the targets when he comes.
Just as you were talking there, you mentioned cap protection which a lot of people might not
sort of understand what's happening here but the catalytic converter can easily be damaged
if the exhaust gas temperature exceeds a certain point and most OE calibrators though,
OE manufacturers will model the temperature of the exhaust gas instead of directly measuring it
because sensors are expensive and once that temperature reaches a certain point,
that threshold will then go into cap over temp protection mode and dump in a bunch more fuel.
Basically target a richer mixture to bring that temperature down.
So I mean I see this on the dyno if I've got a factory car and Honda K20 actually was one
that sticks in my mind, I tuned this for a friend and he'd put a Jackson Racing Supercharger kit on it
and I was tuning on Honda data and I couldn't get consistent if your ratios.
You'd do one run and it would be right on my targets and then you'd do another run
and maybe towards the top of the run, all of a sudden you'd just drop off a cliff rich
and it took me a while back then to figure out what was going on.
It's cat over temp protection, that's fine, I didn't have a catalytic converter so problem got.
My point here is you'd need to be in cap protection from the start of that two minute test
because if it dropped into cap protection midway through, you're definitely going to be
more than a 1% variation, aren't you?
So what you have is you have in the catalyst protection on GM software,
there's a modeled temperature.
You can't actually see it in HP tuning, it doesn't exist, that table's not there.
So you have an airflow table and an engine RPM table and so engine airflow and RPM,
you dial in a 3D table and you dial in the catalyst temperature
and then based on that temperature that it's seeing, it'll go,
hang on, I need to add a bit more fuel if it's over temp or under temp.
So what we're going to do is run the engine on the dyno and we'll look at the temperature.
We've instrumented the catalyst with three thermocouples, one in the front,
one in the middle and one at the back of the catalyst
and we'll look at the highest temperature and we'll tune the model to protect the catalyst
from going over 950 degrees Celsius, it can't go over 950.
So depending on, so when you're running full power,
we will have optimized the model to work exactly correctly for that condition.
So essentially it's not going to change your airfield ratio target during the test?
No, because it'll stabilize and it'll go into the model and go,
hey, I'm running at 1050 degrees.
Yeah, you did say that you have to let everything reach equilibrium first anyway.
Correct, well it'll just sit there and be optimum.
Now that makes sense, I was sort of just wondering if it went into cat protection
and it wasn't originally, that would be a big problem, but yeah, that makes more sense now.
So between model years, the catalyst actual substrate changed.
We went from a 400 cell cat to a 600 to a 900 cell catalyst.
Some of them could handle higher temperatures, so you could change the cat protection model.
But in a vehicle and doing dyno runs, it's very different just sitting steady state.
So when you do a dyno run, you accelerate hard, you put fuel into the catalyst,
and then you back off in the catalyst exotherms, and you actually get a much higher temperature.
So the second run, so on the second run, you can actually get a much higher temperature,
which means more fuel, whereas if you're sitting steady state, it sort of stabilizes
and it just sits happily.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
I'm just interested, from an OE calibration standpoint,
what's your software look like? Is it anything like HP Tuners?
Obviously you're going to have access to every table and parameter, which we don't.
It's very, very different looking.
So we used ETAS software, and the tables were very similar.
Like the spark tables are the same.
The cat protection tables are the same.
The VE tables are the same.
The map meter curve is the same.
A lot of the start tables in the HP Tuners and start idle control tables are very similar.
The torque model is the same, but there's a lot missing.
That's the HP Tuners have given you the bare essential that you need to tune the engine.
While I haven't seen what it looks like with every possible table available and displayed,
I kind of go in and say that's probably a good thing that HP Tuners have pulled back access.
It's confusing enough to novices, I think, getting into the world of reflashing as it is,
without having a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need.
Well, let's be honest, even in HP Tuners, if you're doing a basic calibration to suitor
over the radiator intake, maybe headers and an exhaust,
there's a limited number of the parameters and tables even that we've got access to
that you actually need to optimise, correct?
Yeah, there's a lot of tables in there, and some applications,
there's a lot of tables you'll never use because you don't need them or they're not used,
but a lot of the diagnostics, you don't see in HP Tuners,
you don't see 95% of the diagnostics that are available to you in terms of diagnosing O2 sensor,
map sensor, crank sensors, cam sensors, all the sensors,
and all the evaporative emissions diagnostics and calibrations aren't there.
Just to answer the question, the manufacturer's software is huge,
it's a massive amount of software.
Sure, to be expected.
It's probably a good segue into your current role after HSV or Holden in Australia
basically stopped producing vehicles, so you're currently working at HP Tuners.
So what's your role been at HP Tuners? Take us through that.
So at HP Tuners, they wanted somebody, they saw in the market,
they were having difficulty with people understanding the software
and how to use the software effectively and tune the engine.
So they wanted somebody who could teach students or beginners to intermediate tuners,
to even advanced tuners to help them understand the software and how to tune the car.
So I had an interview with Andrew, who was the director,
and he took me on board and started helping and I did some books,
some books on how to use the software to tune.
The books never ever made it to production, but so that's something that might come out again
and maybe we'll revisit that area.
So I was teaching people, I went to Chile and we had a class over there of like 60 students
and I went to QA a few times and taught people over there.
Here in Australia, there was a few classes at VCM Performance
and we taught people with the students how to tune an engine
and you would talk about VE tables, you know, math meters
and how to tune the math meter using closed fuel, spark and idle control.
So I was doing that and then that sort of was going really well
and then HP Tuners decided they wanted to start making their own ECU
and then I got involved in that.
So this is core ECU.
I wanna talk about that but before we jump into that, there's a few more interesting aspects
I think that you've just sort of glossed over that I wanna come back and talk about.
In terms of people learning how to reflash on the HP Tuners platform,
or for that matter, any platform realistically, as I see it,
the HP Tuners software just gives us an interface so that we can download the raw file out of the ECU
and then it can display the various parameters and maps in a way that makes sense to us as tuners.
So what do you think are the parts that...
Why is it sort of scary for people who already maybe know how to tune on an aftermarket standalone
to transition across to reflashing factory engine management with the software like HP Tuners?
It just depends on the person, right?
So some people sort of get it, they get what numbers they need to put into the table.
That's the question that I get asked all the time.
What numbers do I put in? How do you know what numbers to put in?
So I tell everybody I say, yeah, so some people who have used aftermarket ECUs
just can't get their head around the software.
So you gotta learn the software.
And the other thing is they gotta get their head around the scanner.
The scanner is what gives you the information you need to be able to adjust the tables.
And I think the scary bit is a lot of people don't want to learn the new software.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
It's definitely a learning curve coming from an aftermarket standalone to an OE controller.
I'd say there's a couple of aspects as I see it.
I mean I went through that transition but that was probably 20 plus years ago now
so I kind of feel like it all is just like the back of my hand now, I know it that well.
I think the operating principles, one issue, speed density is the way almost every
aftermarket standalone works.
In a lot of instances OEs will prefer a mass airflow sensor for the longest time
I hated those things.
And then I actually came to admire them once you understand how they work.
If you've got the calibration dialed in, I mean it's directly measuring the massive
air entering the engine and that's all the issue needs to know obviously along with
injector characterization in order to achieve your target air-fuel ratio.
So you ask for an air-fuel ratio, that is what you'll get.
I think a lot of that also came from, if I can the Gen3 LS1 days, the mass airflow sensor
at least on the Australian domestic market cause as I saw it was a restriction.
You could do a mathless tune and pick up a little bit of power.
From the Gen4 onwards, I don't, I mean there's probably a point where they do become
restrictive but that wasn't such an issue.
And if you look at it from the perspective of what you need to calibrate, there's a
two dimensional table for your mass airflow sensor calibration, frequency versus airflow.
If you want to do a speed density conversion, now you're opening up this big volumetric
efficiency table that you have to tune the entirety of the table.
So it is actually a very simple way of tuning once you understand it.
So this is a very long winded way of getting back to the point I was making.
I think getting the head around a mass airflow sensor when you come from speed density
is one thing that puts people off.
The complexity of, even as we just talked about, we don't have access to most of the
parameters that the OEs do, but even so it can be a little bit daunting as you're sort of
moving through the various tabs in HP Tune as the editor.
Again as I mentioned before, most of them we're not going to need to adjust but they
are all there so it's a little bit overwhelming.
And then the other aspect that I think is problematic is that in most instances we're
not tuning live, we're gathering our data with a scanner, analysing that, deciding what
changes we need to make and then we have to shut the engine off, make those changes
and then physically flash the new file into the ECU.
So I think that's where I see the problems.
100% agree with you.
I think that the aftermarket ECUs are live tuning.
So in the old days you had a pulse width table for your fueling.
You just go in there and dial in on 14 milliseconds lengths and it's done.
You don't have to worry about the airflow measurement because your spark
tables were against map manifold air pressure and your fueling was manifold air
pressure and you put in a pulse width and that was it.
Whereas now it's a bit more complicated.
Even the speed density in a GM table is based on intake air temperature.
They've got a valve temperature model.
All these other parameters come into it and then you put in a number.
You don't know what that number is.
It's just some weird number but it's calculating an airflow and then the
fuel system then goes, hey, this is my air, what's my flow rate?
And it puts in a fuel value that you get a pulse width.
That delivers a certain amount of fuel and then your O2 sensor is correct.
The fuel pulse width to give you the lambda one target.
Some people don't quite get it that the airflow is the most important thing to tune
but your fuel calculations have to be correct before you do your fuel.
So people change injectors and then they redo the airflow calibration
without changing the fuel curves.
So you're just baking a massive error into the whole system
and trying to fix it with the mass airflow sensor calibration.
Correct, then what happens is because you haven't done the fuel correction,
the fuel curves correctly, your airflow is completely wrong
and your spark table is miles out and now you have to go in the spark table
and correct the spark.
So some people who are not used to these systems are scared because they go,
I'll try to tune this, it doesn't work.
I think it's understanding the principles and then also having a sensible workflow.
The other thing, that error that you just talked about will do
and I know this from first hand experience, is it will misrepresent the torque output
and that becomes problematic when it sends a torque output to the TCM
which is about half of what the engine's actually producing
because then you destroy the transmission in quite a quicker order actually as it turns out.
That's a real situation that happened to me in my old shop many years ago.
One of the tuner who was working for me at the time
ended up getting given incorrect injector data and the rest of his history
including one transmission.
We did finally get to the bottom of it though.
Yeah so you have to understand the principles of how an engine works.
I mean an engine is an air pump, right?
So if you change the camshaft, you should know,
hang on, if you change the cam, it's going to be pumping a bit more air.
It's not going to be pumping, how much more air is it going to pump?
This camshaft, if an engine makes 250 horsepower standard
and you get a cam, it's going to give it 300 horsepower.
The increase in airflow at wide open throttle is only going to be 15% or maybe 20%.
So if your numbers are something you halved, you go,
hang on a second, I changed my injectors, there's got to be something wrong here
because the air pump should still be pumping a bit more air, not significantly less air.
Yeah and I think that's that sort of skill of kind of understanding
what the changes you need to make are actually telling you
and that should be a red flag that, hey, something's not stacking up here
and realistically that should point you straight to the injector characterization data
because if you have to reduce the airflow, yeah, that's sort of a big glaring red flag there.
I mean the reality is sometimes people modify the engine,
they put big injectors in and then the fuel pump can't deliver the fuel pressures,
the fuel pressure is dropping and then they're still trying to fiddle the airflow system
and they haven't actually realized, I've got another problem here,
like the fuel pressure is a problem.
So I think it's understanding the whole picture.
You've got to understand the whole picture.
Even in a standalone, that's something that we teach in our courses
because I've seen so many people get caught out by it.
You're doing a ramp run and everything's good
and then maybe you raise the boost a little bit further
and you get to a situation that at a higher RPM your air fuel ratio is just starting to taper off lean.
So you start putting some more numbers in your VE table
or your intake to pulse width table or whatever it is
and three iterations later you're still moving just as lean as you were before.
Well to me, straight away, if you have to do that,
then that probably should be a bit of a hint that something's not right
and if you're making those sorts of changes and you're seeing absolutely no effect
then it's got to either be that you're already tapped out of injector duty cycle,
you've got the maxed or your fuel pressure is dropping away.
Correct.
When I started working on cars, I was working on distributors and carburetors
and I learned about emulsion tubes and chokes and then a sturdy fuel injection came along
and we learned more about fuel injection and then I worked on diesels
and we've progressed with the technology.
So I think yourself, older guys like me, we've progressed with the technology
as the technology has become more and more complex.
PWM pumps that you can boost harder and fuel pumps and different injectors
and direct injection and all this technology, we've progressed slowly with it.
So we understand it, we know how it works, we've got an eye for it.
The young kids of today who come in and are learning, these guys are deep in it, man.
That's actually something I had not considered but you're dead right.
I mean I've also started with carburetors and distributors
and I guess you build up that foundational knowledge.
I mean the basic concept of how an engine works obviously hasn't changed.
It's just all of this technology that's been applied over and on top of it
to try and improve power, torque, specific power output
and also as we've already talked about, keep the emissions in control.
Yeah so the poor kids have recently interviewed King at HP Tuners
and got him on board and I've been teaching him about calibration
and he absolutely loves it, he's picked it up.
I've been helping him a lot for the last two years and he's become, he's so smart.
I mean he's smarter than me, he's got a newer processor.
Really smart kid and he's loving it but yeah it's just, for me it highlighted the fact
that these poor kids, they're deep into the electronics and the control side
and all the new technology which we slowly grew with so we understand it all
and they haven't had that opportunity.
I built my own laptops and desktop computers back in the early 90s
but it's harder now for somebody to go build a computer and get it all working.
It's harder to modify cards and get the canbassers working and everything working
like you were saying before.
I think it's just harder for the kids, for the young engineers now to pick these things up.
It's harder.
They make sense.
Couple more aspects I just want to dive into in the GM world of calibration
which again these are a couple of aspects that I think people new to reflashing struggle with
and that's the fact that GM use the mass airflow sensor
but also have a speed density sort of background model as well.
So we've just talked about how good a mass airflow sensor is
and why most OEs tend to prefer them.
So if they're so good why do we also have a speed density subsystem?
So the GM system is interesting because the GM ECUs were designed to work with a math meter.
They were never designed to run speed density.
The primary calculation comes from mass airflow.
So when you're running steady state the mass airflow sensor is extremely accurate and it's beautiful.
When you do a transient from say you say you're running at say 35 kPa
you're cruising along at 60 kilometers an hour and fourth gear
and you slowly you just accelerate slightly up.
You just accelerate slightly.
The manifold filling effect means that you go slightly too rich using a math meter
because it over predicts that the airflow coming in
and that meant that the emissions would go rich
which meant that you get higher hydrocarbons at the tail part.
The catalysts don't catch those extra hydrocarbons.
So the speed density system was there to catch to stop that from happening.
So as soon as you go transient it's called transient.
Manifold air pressure will change from say 30 kPa to 35 kPa.
It's a transient maneuver.
It goes to speed density and you can predict the airflow more accurately
so you don't put the extra fuel in.
So speed density does still have its place.
And just in terms of that transient, you just said there sort of 30 to 35 kPa
so a 5 kPa change in manifold pressure
I am assuming that's also with a time factor in it.
Yes.
So it's only a relatively quick change that it'll transition to speed density
and then once equilibrium is established again we're back to or steady state,
we're back to the math.
That's correct.
So you could go for, you could go, you know, if you look at the drive cycle,
for example, you know, you've got the US, the US drive cycles
and you've got the Euro drive cycles.
They're very, very different.
So you have to tune the car for those drive cycles
which later on became illegal against the spirit of the law.
But all the transients on the Euro cycle were tuned in that, in speed density.
In all those transients.
And then steady state, you go back to math meter.
So I think one of the issues I saw, maybe the education is out now to the point
where everyone does know about these subsystems.
But I think a lot of people in the early days didn't know about the speed density side of the equation
and would tune, you know, make a massive change.
Then they'd retune the mass airflow sensor and the drivability wasn't there
because they hadn't retuned the speed density side of things.
So on transients, then something wasn't right.
A lot of other tuners wanted to make their life easier.
So just disabled the speed density system altogether, ran it solely off the math.
And then, so as long as you understand that you basically have to tune the math calibration itself,
then fail the math, then to the speed density system, then enable everything again
and then it basically should run as GM expected.
When we went to Gen 4 onwards, that gets a little bit more complicated
because now GM bring in virtual volumetric efficiency.
So can you, and the problem here was at least initially as well,
HP tuners didn't actually have a tool to display a proper VE table that we could make sense of.
We just got all of these parameters for the quadratic equations which I'm not great at math
at the best of times but that's not going to be helpful.
Question here is, what is virtual volumetric efficiency and why did GM go in that direction?
The virtual volumetric efficiency is basically just an improved VE table.
That's it. That's the best way to describe it.
So it says virtual, it's actually using speed density.
It's the same and you don't put in a VE number.
You put in, it's a calculation, it's the formula for the mass of air at a certain temperature.
That's it.
There are advantages with doing it in this way as opposed to having a physical table
inside of the ECM as I understand it for engines with variable cam timing
because obviously as the cam timing changes, so does the volumetric efficiency of the engine.
It can't be dealt with with multiple VE tables but the way this is calculated, it can do that on the fly.
So in particular, just to go back to that last question, the reason why they've changed as well
is because the processing power of the ECU, it's very time consuming to access a 3D table.
So the x-axis and the y-axis and then it gets the number.
It's a lot of computational power.
The virtual tables are much faster.
They are heaps quicker to calculate the air.
That's one of the main reasons why they went to that system as well.
And that's one of the main reasons why they're also going to neural networks.
The neural network is much quicker, a lot less processing power, so the computers could become cheaper.
Okay, just makes it a little bit more difficult from the aftermarket perspective
in terms of being able to display things in a way that allows us to actually adjust
or make sense of it and adjust it.
Absolutely, yes.
And then the neural networks is the next step as well to that process.
And I remember when I left GM in 2020, they were talking about doing neural networks with Spark,
neural network for airflow, torque model, everything, neural networks.
Right, for those who have never heard the term neural network or artificial neural network,
can you give us a high level view without going down the rabbit hole on what it is and how it works?
It's just basically modeling.
It's a nice way of modeling the engine.
That's the easiest way I can describe it.
It's complex, how it works, but it's a very easy and quick way to model the engine.
If you've got an engine and you run it on the dyno, the torque surface,
you can model that torque surface very, very accurately with a neural network
because it's just a way of mapping the engine.
And it's just a bunch of numbers that predict what the engine does.
And it's really, really quick for computing power.
It's really, really quick.
So you get the number out much quicker than a table.
Okay.
And we're just essentially in the aftermarket now reliant on companies like HP Tuners
to find a way of breaking this down into something we can actually work with.
We're having to be a math legend.
Oh, yeah.
Without HP Tuners and the clever guys there that actually make it possible,
we wouldn't be able to tune an engine now.
Yeah.
It's just too complex.
All right.
There's one more thing I just want to sort of come back a bit.
We've kind of sung the praises of the mass airflow sensor when it's calibrated properly.
And I do stand behind that.
If it's as good as we've kind of been talking about
and you've got the speed density system in the background there to pick up the pieces
for transients, why do we still see on a completely stock engine
with no modifications at all?
The fuel trims, both short term and long term closed loop trims
varying quite significantly.
You would think, if you're sort of uneducated on this,
you would think with everything we've just talked about
that the closed loop system's really not going to be necessary
and the trim should be always sitting at zero.
And that's obviously not the case.
Yeah.
That's a good question.
The other thing that we don't realize is the injectors, the fuel injectors,
they don't, I mean, they can vary a little bit.
A little bit of fuel can change.
It can move.
Everything moves around a little bit.
The fuel pressure moves a little bit.
The injectors from shot to shot or they deviate a little bit
and then they trim and they adjust themselves.
So you see a 3% change.
The calculation and airflow changes, the temperature changes,
the manifold air pressure changes.
So all these little changes mean that you don't get perfection
and when I was calibrating for all those years
and at Renault, when I worked for Saab and Ford and even GM,
anything that's within 5% of the target, which is 00 correction,
is deemed acceptable.
Yeah, okay.
That actually aligns quite nicely with my own personal stance on it.
Obviously, we'd like to see those trims at zero,
but as you've just mentioned, not realistic.
I sort of aim for a plus and minus 3% to 5% and if I'm within that range,
I'm going to be pretty happy with myself.
That's it.
So at GM, they would flow 1,000 injectors to get a flow curve, right?
To take a batch of 3,000 injectors to generate the flow curve of those injectors.
They would do a 5x5 matrix, which is for the induction system.
They would take five throttle bodies, five zip tubes, the tube,
five map meters, five air boxes, five filters,
and then you do a mix and match of those and generate the flow curve for the map meter.
You don't use an engine, so they would be on a float,
would be on a float like Nippon Denso, would do a 5x5 matrix
with a mixture of all those components,
mix them around and redo the flow curve.
I don't know how many flow curves you would get,
35, 40, 50 air flow curves,
and then you take an average of all that and generate the flow curve for the map meter.
So essentially we're dealing with mechanical products.
There's always going to be some level of variation,
and that's what you're dealing with.
So then you get a car, you're driving it,
and you're in the aftermarket, you get it,
and you look at it, it's a standard car,
and you look, hey, why are the fuel trims like 10% on this vehicle?
The last one was perfect, was 2%,
because the mechanical parts are different.
So then in the aftermarket, you can dial in that car a lot better
and make it better because the mechanical parts are different.
Yeah, I think people make the assumption that mechanical parts
are always going to be exactly the same from one to the next,
but yeah, obviously that's just not going to be the case.
Now I'm interested as well with your training of people in the HPTuners world.
Is there any sort of common reoccurring mistakes
that you see people making over and over again?
Not really, no.
The guys in the training, some of them are pretty knowledgeable.
Some of them want to know what's the magic number,
but there's no magic number.
It's funny you say that actually early,
just as we started HPTuners,
we ended up getting asked to do an in-person seminar in Dubai
from Link Engine Management here in New Zealand,
who we worked really closely with.
So we did that, and I think the night before we started the actual training,
we kind of had a bit of a meet and greet with all of these tuners.
It was quite a casual chat.
And I just don't remember had one guy come and sit down with me
and shake my hand and introduce himself.
And he looked me in the eyes.
He said, so in this training, you will teach us the number.
That's correct.
I'm like, what do you mean?
He said, you know, the numbers to put in.
There's no numbers.
You need to understand what the engine wants,
and you give it what it wants,
and that's going to be different for every engine.
And he looked at me like he had just been let down,
and he did not come to the training.
So there are people out there who genuinely think
that there's this magic number or a set of magic numbers,
and you apply those, and that's your job done.
I wish that was the case.
Then again, I wouldn't be in business right now either,
so maybe I don't wish that was the case.
But I was asked the exact same question.
I was in the Middle East.
We went away.
There was an engine on the Dino.
A car on the Dino was a Hemi.
It was making 700 and 700 horsepower.
They were like, this has been tuned by the best tuner in Kuwait.
And the numbers are the special numbers.
So I said, well, you know, let's have a look.
I don't know what the numbers are.
Let's have a look.
So we ran the car on the Dino.
It made 700 horsepower,
and I looked at the numbers for a Hemi,
and it had like 19 degrees of timing in it.
And I'm like, that's pretty advanced.
So I said to the guys, so here's the data.
Look at this, you know, 19 degrees of timing.
It was running pretty lean as well.
And it was running like 13.5,
if your ratio or something, you know, for memory.
And I'm thought, you know, for Hemi,
it's a little bit lean.
Maybe it's a little bit oversparked.
Let's just try and drop the spark down a little bit.
And they're all like, no, no, no, it's going to lose power.
It's going to lose power if you retire the timing.
I said, maybe not.
Let's have a look.
So I pulled three degrees of timing out of it,
and it picked up like 15, 20 horsepower straight away.
And then the faces dropped like, you know, everybody was like,
they were looking and they couldn't believe it.
And they said, how is it possible?
I said, because it's too advanced, you know,
it's got too much timing in it.
And they just couldn't get their heads around it.
They want more power.
And I said, no.
Yeah, I think if you don't understand what's actually going on
inside the combustion chamber, it's easy to,
for as long as we've been in business,
we do a free lesson.
We invite people along and we have a car on the dyno
and do a couple of demonstrations.
One of the really powerful ones that I do
is using the MBT function on the mainline dyno.
You'll sit in steady state and basically sweep the timing
between maybe five degrees and 50 degrees,
and you get the curve as you'd expect.
And then the dyno will say, you know,
26 degrees for this particular operating point,
that's MBT, that's given you the peak torque.
And as soon as you see that visualisation,
the penny drops, but yeah, definitely more is not always more.
Another little story I'll just add into here as well,
we've got a course called Understanding Air Fuel Ratio.
And in my experience, I think that's probably
one of the more misunderstood topics
in the world of air fi tuning.
And the reality is you sort of jump online to a forum
and ask what air fuel ratio should I run my XYZ engine at
and you're gonna get a dozen different answers.
There's no consensus.
And I actually remember this from earlier in my career,
the LS1, LS2, the LS2 was relatively new at that point
and I was tuning VZ Holdens with that engine in it.
And also tune at the same time a huge number
of naturally aspirated Hondas.
So a B series or a K20 that's gonna make really good power
and torque and be pretty immune to knock
if you tune it, maybe 0.90, maybe 0.92 lambda,
somewhere in that vicinity it's gonna be happy.
Try applying that same logic to a completely bone stock
VZ Holden with an LS2 and you can make it run at that air fuel ratio
but it's gonna knock so you have to pull a bunch of timing out
in order to stop it knocking.
And then you'd send it out the door because that's my number,
that's my air fuel ratio number 0.92, whatever you happen to be.
If on the other hand you got a little bit more curious
and sort of thought to yourself, well what will it do
if we run it richer?
And let's try 0.85 for example.
Now you're cooling the combustion charge temperature,
you have moved away from knock, oh look at that,
we can now add another three degrees of timing.
So with that richer air fuel ratio,
we've now got more timing in it and the engine overall
is making more power.
I mean it's not 30 horsepower but it's also probably 10 or 12
and I'll take that if I can get it.
And I think that's the aspect of the danger of relying on
this is the number.
Every naturally aspirated engine I'm gonna tune to 0.92 lambda,
well yes we could do that but you might be leaving power and torque on the table.
Yeah and you would get more consistency with the slightly richer air fuel ratio
and the more timing and the power is there all the time.
Whereas if you ran 0.9 lambda or 0.9 air fuel ratio
and less timing, it might overheat, you might knock a bit,
it might pull out more timing.
So you know the ALS engines love running rich,
that's why we ran them rich always,
as rich as possible to keep them cool.
Yeah I think it's just a case of understanding that you can't apply
the same numbers to every engine and expect perfect results.
So yeah experiment, that's what tuning is all about.
Alright let's move on to your current sort of job inside of HP Tuners
which is the core ECU.
You sort of started to allude to that earlier.
Can you kind of give us a rundown on first of all why this product exists?
It's obviously a big departure from HP Tuners
which has always been about reflashing the factory fitted ECU.
Now you're looking at making a standalone.
I think what happens back in 2023, the company worked,
we've got to diversify the company a little bit
and try and have additional products that we make and sell.
And one of the drivers was let's make our own ECU.
We've got this technology, we know how all the software works.
We read GM, we read Ford, we know how the algorithms and how everything is controlled.
So let's make our, can we make our own ECU
and you know how easy would it be to sell this ECU in the aftermarket.
Not for vehicles that are already in production,
but for the guys got a project car or a drag car.
And that was I think the idea behind the whole thing used to
make an ECU to support hot rods and drag cars.
So when you say diversification straight away,
I've got an alarm bell ringing.
Does this mean that HP Tuners are thinking to themselves
that as time goes on, it's going to become hard
or potentially impossible to reflash newer vehicles?
That was the thinking back when GM changed from Global A to Global B
and it was harder to get into the ECUs.
So yes, but now that they've cracked it, maybe no.
Sure. The way I've sort of always seen it is
the OEs probably don't want us in there messing around.
And every time they come out with an ECU that's supposedly uncrackable,
I mean, I think it was, oh God, the Ford ECU in Australia
that came out in the Falcon with the barrel engine in it.
I think I'm talking the Black Oak or something.
I think it was called.
Black Oak, yep.
Yeah, I think so.
And that was going to be untunable and I think
that people were tuning those in about three or four months.
So that didn't age well for Ford.
But yes, it can be increasingly difficult.
The way I look at it is there's some incredibly smart people
working in companies like HP Tuners
and all of the other reflash suppliers around the world.
It's a huge market.
There's billions of dollars to be made worldwide.
So there's a huge incentive to put these clever people's heads together
and actually come up with solutions no matter what the OEs throw at us.
But I don't know.
Let's see what the future brings.
I think it will get harder.
It'll get harder and harder and harder.
Computational power gets bigger.
More encryption is happening.
So they're talking even now about flashing and encrypted flashing the ECU
with an encryption fully encrypted.
So if you don't decrypt what's on there to actually run the engine,
you're never going to get it.
You can't tune it.
But also there's still a market for people who want to modify cars,
build hot rides and make things happen.
And I think that our ECU is okay for that because we've used the knowledge
that we have from OEMs to build our ECU
and make it as close to an OEM ECU as possible
without the additional complexity.
Okay.
That was going to be essentially my next question,
is learning from how OEs function and what they place into the ECUs.
She'll come back a step further before I get into that.
I think what people need to understand is when GM are developing an engine
and a calibration, they've got the ability to basically have the entire firmware
of the ECU designed solely with that particular engine in mind.
So it's possible to come up with strategies, functions, parameters
that will help that engine run as best as it possibly can.
The flip side of that, if we look at the traditional aftermarket standalone world,
you've got one ECU that essentially you can wire into almost any engine
and get it up and running.
And obviously in that case we don't have all of these engine specific strategies
and functions.
So coming back to...
So on that basis we could potentially expect a factory ECU on a late model car
to do a better job of running that engine than an aftermarket standalone.
It's not always going to be the case but we could expect that.
So yeah coming back to the other part of my question was what did you learn
that you could apply in the core ECU from OEs?
So the experience that I brought to the table was the algorithms,
first of all the control algorithms and if you break down specific components
of OEM ECU like for example cruise control, how do you make cruise control work?
So how do you calibrate cruise control?
So the algorithms from that point of view I brought to the table,
we have that in the core ECU.
Then we have math meter and VE tables.
So the core ECU can run two math meters, can run four math meters, can run one math meter.
And for example if we're going to tune a barrel engine, which we will be able to do in the future,
we can use a math meter, no VE tables.
So you can swing the cams, it doesn't matter where you go,
the math meter is going to tell you what airflow you have.
Whereas the Ford software has 36 calibration tables for VE calculation
and they don't use math meter.
So I think there's 25 spark tables and 25 VE tables on the coyote.
So eventually when we can do a coyote motor in a hot rod, you run a math meter
and you'll be able to tune it pretty quickly.
Here's a question actually on that basis because as I see it,
there's a couple of different ways of skinning this cat.
You can do it like Ford have done here with all these map points,
which is complicated from a turning perspective.
Honda do the same essentially with their case series.
You've got just a set of different fuel and spark tables separated by cam position,
also in that engine, also separated by high and low cam with the VTEC.
So that gets complicated.
But I mean I tune hundreds of cars with an aftermarket standalone ECU
that have continuously variable cam control and I've done that quite happily
from a single VE and a single spark table.
But we work on the premise that every time I transition through 120 kPa,
4000 RPM, that my cam is going to track to the exactly the same target.
So if that's accurate, then we don't need all of these multiple tables.
Can't we just simplify it and do it the way the aftermarket have done it?
Yeah so that was a huge point of discussion with HGM.
So when we were calibrating the V6 LA4 and the LGY engines
then we were like we'll just calibrate to the exact cam positions that we have
and it'll be perfect every single time.
And it was like no, because if we want to change the cam positions
then we have to recalibrate the engine.
So we'll calibrate the whole thing in every single position humanly possible
that we can move the cams and do whatever we want whenever we want and it'll be calibrated.
So the airflow system, the neural network, it took three months to collect 43,000 data points.
This is serious, this is real, 43,000 data points on the engine dano
with the cams in every single position intake and exhaust cam and turbo and boost
to calculate them, to model the air so you can move the cams to any position possible
and it would know what to do, would give you a result.
I totally get that and I suppose if you're looking at the options available
that is the more complete and accurate method, no argument.
It sounds like an engineer has come up with this process.
In your experience looking at the two options, does it actually make sense
and does it reward the additional work required to do that
or can we just do it like I've suggested?
Absolutely you can.
The only other aspect of this scenario that I saw come out of this which is
outside of my pay grade, is if there was benefit in being able to adjust the cam timing position
for emissions at a certain point.
So what I mean by that is maybe at cruise 2500 RPM part throttle, our cam timing is normally x
and maybe in some conditions moving it to x plus 10 degrees is going to give
improved tailpipe emissions, in that case if that's something that does need to happen
then yes we need a way of accounting for that.
That's a good point and just jog my memory.
So when your engine is cold you would have the cams in a certain position
and the cams would transition to a different position when they were warm or hot.
So you needed to have that ability to calculate the air.
So that's why mainly you do it and when you go into extreme climates like you know you're super hot
or you're super cold you have to move the cams around for optimum emissions
and performance and fuel economy.
OK, again some requirements that we don't have to meet in the aftermarket.
Correct, you don't need to meet those requirements right.
And I think when you're selling the car in global markets you know there's people that live in Colorado
for example that are up at 2000 meters, the cams are in a different position to when you're at sea level.
Sure, yeah OK.
Alright I think I well and truly derailed the conversation there but we'll get back to the core issue.
So it sounds to me like you could basically run it much like a GM controller
with a combination of MAF and speed density for the transients or one or the other.
So you've got complete control there.
Well once again the speed density in a GM controller was mainly there for emissions control
and so we've run MAF and it runs beautifully, we've run speed density, it's really good.
Some clever guys came up with artificial intelligence VE table tuning.
So you don't have to actually punch any numbers in, you just collect the data.
As long as you've built the car correctly with the fuel pressure and the regulator that's all good
and your O2 thing says you're a wide bansal in the exhaustive position.
You just drive the car around on the dyno for 15 minutes at different speed and load conditions.
You collect the data, you put it through the AI processor and it bangs out a VE table
that's within 1% accuracy.
What's AI about that process?
I mean is it any different to any of the issues that have some auto tune functionality
which will populate a table with trims and you can apply that to the table?
What's the sort of AI aspect of this?
It looks at the actual engine and calculates the theoretical airflow that you can actually
and it's got some smarts that sort of predict where you should be.
So you can do all that in one quick hit.
Right, so one quick adjustment and you should have that VE table within 1% is that what you said?
So I built a VE table that was like 20% out here and 10% out and the wrong way
all upside down and just crazy drove the car on the dyno for like 10 minutes
and it spat out a VE table that was like perfect everywhere.
Okay, that is impressive.
Really impressive.
I was blown away.
I was like, oh my God, this is just next level.
It's really good.
And yeah, you're right.
I mean all the other systems that just learn, you just drive around and you learn,
you look at the number, yep, it's correct.
Now you just punch the number and it's good.
But this is just an easier way to actually get a gene file out here.
Okay.
From a personal standpoint, I'm sort of a little torn with self tuning functionality.
I think it's a good thing in general and particularly for novice tuners,
the ability to maybe not have to have all of their attention focused on the fueling,
they can consider spark and actually just operate in the vehicle at the same time.
Yep, great.
I also think that with traditional, I'm not sure about your AI solution here,
obviously I haven't used it, I think with traditional self learning systems,
it can be problematic because you do need to still understand what you're trying
to achieve so that you can drive the car appropriately.
I mean you want to try and be very smooth on throttle because you want to stay out
of transient enrichment, transient alignment.
I want to stay as central as I can in each cell so that I'm not relying on
interpolation between surrounding cells.
So yeah, also just filling out as many cells as you can get access to as well
so you can do a really thorough job.
That sort of stuff's easy to gloss over.
I think some of these issues now that are also incorporating long term fuel trims
so you can drive the car for a month, obviously the more data points you get,
the more likely you are to get a better result.
I do find when I'm on the dyno, I can hand tune probably quicker than auto tune
so I still, even with probably just a couple of exceptions, I really like ECUs
that have sort of a key you can press, like MoTeC has Q for their quick lambda.
Stay central in the cell, press Q and you might have to do it twice
but normally one hit of the key and you're done.
So that makes tuning that sort of thing really quick and easy.
Where I think tuners still are going to have some work to do though is
at this point I haven't seen anyone come out with an automatic way of tuning spark
so what can you tell us about that?
Yeah so that's maybe something we're going to look into.
The automatic spark tuning is interesting because you've got to get the knock sensors
to actually work correctly first before you can do that.
Yeah correct, yeah.
And a torque feedback would be handy.
And a torque feedback would be really good.
So that's a good question, even the OEMs, same thing.
How do we do this?
And we did a lot of spark hooks on the dyno with non-knocking fuel
so you have 135 octane fuel and then you do a spark hook and find the optimum spark
and then you calibrate the knock sensors from that point onwards
but doing automatic spark calibration, that's next level up.
Yeah I actually had an interview, should I mention the company?
Maybe I shouldn't, we got asked after we'd done the interview at PRI to not put it up
because the engineer wasn't actually allowed to talk to the public
which I thought was interesting at a show but anyway this was a very high end ECU
and it was able to run in cylinder pressure monitoring on each cylinder.
And okay now I can expect yes it could auto tune the spark
which was the topic of that discussion that unfortunately wouldn't ever make the light of day.
But also I mean that's completely out of reach for mere mortals.
The cost and time involved with instrumenting an engine with in cylinder pressure monitoring
are absolutely just unrealistic for anyone outside of a high end race team war
or an OEM manufacturer, yep.
So AVL make a spark plug with in cylinder pressure transducer in it.
There are issues with those systems, the spark actually interferes
with the transducer you see some weird numbers.
It works well in some areas, some RPM ranges and then bad in some RPM ranges like higher RPM
it doesn't work so good.
But yeah some special filtering and software can fix all those problems
and you can see knock long before it starts to be audible.
You know once spark is audible, once knock is audible
it's pretty violent in the combustion chamber it's happening you know.
When you say audible, do you mean audible to your ear
or do you mean audible to the piezoelectric knock sensors that the engine is equipped with?
No, to your ear.
Yeah okay yeah, no I totally agree.
So once you hear it you know it's...
It's been happening for a long time and when you can hear it in the cabin it's bad.
That's one of the GM systems are very very sensitive to that
so they tune with in cylinder pressure transducers
and you can hear it long before it's actually happening.
So when you're keeping the combustion chambers cool like 20 degrees
you can handle the knock, handle the spark
and then as the engine gets hotter and hotter with intake air temperature
you see the timing can get ripped out because knock's happening.
Yeah okay.
Alright moving on, one of the I guess the big advantages with reflashing
has been that you're keeping that communications between all of the different modules inside of the vehicle
so the TCM, maybe the gauge cluster et cetera.
You know it's possible to rip out the factory engine control module,
fit an aftermarket stand alone, wire it in and make the engine run
but the car won't change gears.
So you have mentioned, it sounds like this core ECU is sort of targeted more at the
home built cars, hot rods as you mentioned.
Is there any consideration there around keeping communication networks, can networks happy
so you could run it in the entire vehicle?
What the native vehicle I should say?
Absolutely, we are back engineering all the cam messaging
so there will be a, you could plug and play basically in a VE or a VF
in the Camaro, more specifically to GM vehicles in the US.
So I'm talking about GM vehicles because that's what we targeted the ECU for,
it's for LS engines primarily, not direct injection yet but that's coming as well.
So mainly for LS engines and yeah everybody, the aftermarket is asking for 6L80,
6L90 gearboxes, can we control those, can we talk to them
and can we keep the standard dash and the answer is yes we're working on it
and that is going to be coming in the future.
Okay so this kind of then goes full circle and now I begs the question
if you get to that point where, you know just to give your example there,
the VE or VF Holden, you could run the core ECU and keep all of the electronics happy
or of course as we already know we can reflash it using VCM editor.
A, are you kind of cannibalising your own market for reflashing
and B, at what point, how do we make a decision of which direction we're going to go
whether we're reflashing or whether we're going to fit the core ECU?
You absolutely right, people ask the question all the time
and it's only for the people really that have modified their engines so much
that they need not just control, they need boost control,
they've got massive injectors like you know they've got two sets of injectors for example
we can control 16 injectors.
Yeah that makes sense.
So we can run you know a set of 60 pound injectors or two sets of 60 pound injectors
or a set of 60 and a set of 80 pound injectors for the engine or idle beautifully
and blast off and get the fuel that it needs when it's running 1500 horsepower
where the standard controller is struggling to control nos and boost
and those big injectors, just can't do it.
I've seen that reflash market change so much over my career
and to start with you'd always get asked whether someone should reflash
or fit enough to make a standalone and back then it was never black and white
but it wasn't too difficult to sort of put a line in the standard like oh for me
at this point I personally think now it makes more sense to go to an aftermarket standalone
and as time's moved on that line has become increasingly blurry
and now there isn't necessarily a limit, you can make 1500 horsepower
reflashing the factory controller so it's not that you can't do it
but sometimes it just makes more sense to go to an aftermarket standalone,
get the control strategies that you actually need and particularly
if you're going to get involved in some serious motorsport
having the onboard data logging, again yes all stuff that we can do
but it's kind of with a reflash sometimes I feel it's a bit more like a workaround
than something obviously the OE never intended for us to be doing these things.
You know 2014, 15, 16, 17, if you had 600 horsepower you were like
hey man I've got 600 horsepower, I'm unbeatable.
Yeah it's not like that now.
Now 15 and horsepower you're not coming anywhere right?
No one's going to be impressed.
No one's impressed, it was 1000 horsepower back in 2020
and then now it's 1000 horsepower plus
and so you need two fuel pumps maybe, you need more injector,
you need supercharging, you need intercoolers
so the core ECU is told that at that market so we can run three fuel pumps
we can actually draw three fuel pumps, there's strategies in the software
that you can calibrate to get the three fuel pumps working
we've got two drivers for the intercooler pumps
we can control NOS, the NOS heater blanket, all the typical NOS controls
we've got a boost builder function
we can build boost on the line if you get a drag racing
we've got four maps, you can formap selectable boost maps in control
it's just more for those guys who have gone to the next level
who need all that control for their half powered vehicle
and they're going to go drag racing and they also maybe want to do things like
the drag challenge and drivers from A to B on the street
we've got cruise control and we've got ABS and traction control
in our ECU that will help them achieve what they want to do
OK, alright so at the moment you've got these supporting LS
wouldn't have really thought there was anything too engine specific
around the LS which would prevent you from putting that on to
a bar or a coyote engine or for that matter just about anything else
in my mind I'm sort of thinking well that makes sense
if you've got all of that reverse engineered canvas information
because obviously that is unique and specific to the GM vehicle
obviously there's trigger modes, the ECU needs to have trigger modes
to suit the particular engine so it knows engine speed and engine position
is there anything else I'm missing here?
No, that's it, that's pretty much it
I think right in the beginning when we designed this ECU
the cam and crank chips that we used were not able to change
we weren't able to change the configuration
because we designed the ECU for LS only
and then because the demand is everybody's asking for
for all the other engines we had to change some of the componentry in the ECU
to be able to handle the configuration changes
so you can actually now configure different cam trigger wheels
like the crank and cam trigger wheels
Yeah okay that makes sense
and over time we're going to see this roll out to all these other platforms
Yes, we want to do focus on LS and say right
we'll just focus on something and get it right
so get this absolutely working perfectly
and only when it's working perfectly will we then go to other platforms
Yeah that makes a lot of sense
and it's not exactly like the LS market is small
so you've got a few people out there
and it's a small team of guys
it's a small team that's developing this
I think there's ten of us
and yeah it's still a big challenge to get the software working
and get all the algorithms working
and do all the testing and we did a lot of testing
we've done heaps of testing
like engines on dinos
we've done massive amount of driving and road trips
and we have I don't know
but a lot of testers in Australia testing now for us
Drag racing, Cavals performance is one of them
and dare motorsport as well
so yeah
How does the workflow or interactions go between
HP Tuners in the US and Australia with the development of the CCU?
So I'm the only one in Australia that works on call
and the rest of the teams in America
and we talk nearly every single day
they'll send me some software
I'll test during the day here and give them feedback
so then when they wake up they get the data
so we actually go a lot quicker
it's sort of you know it's 24-7
we just work on a 24-7 whenever there's a problem
or we found something that needs to be repaired or fixed
but we communicate quite well online
And whereabouts are you with the CCU at the moment
in terms of the availability for public consumption?
Yeah it's for sale
you can buy one at VCM Performance in Australia
you can purchase them from there from VCM
and then they have for sale in the US
Okay
How long have they been available for?
I think about two or three weeks ago I think
Yeah I thought that was the case
so last time I spoke to someone at HP Tuners
they went for sale yet
Yes so they've for sale now
I think they've got a few in stock
In Australia there's also a market that's quite new
and people have been using Haltech and MoTeC
and Link ECU
so it's relatively new for us
and there's a few people using them
and they like it
That was going to be my next question
is how do you get someone who's been using a specific platform
be it Haltech or Link or whatever it might be
for the last 10 years and those are inside and out
how do you get them to swap to a
let's call it what it is I guess an unknown entity for them
That's a good question
that's a sales and marketing job
Fair enough you just need to make the product work
not sell it
I don't know how to do that
I couldn't sell water to someone who was dying in the desert
Not your department I totally get that
but for me that is a consideration
for me as a tuner
I'd have to be looking at what is the proposition
that this brings that's going to be enough
to make me learn a new platform
and find out its idiosyncrasies and quirks
there's got to be something in there
the compatibility aspect that we've discussed
I think that's a no brainer, that's huge
and yes there's definitely been some benefits
that you've talked about there with the AI
calibration of the VE table
that's huge, the ability to run on MAF
or speed density or both
that's also an advantage as I see it
Some feedback from the aftermarket was
how quickly can I fit this ECU and get the engine running
that was a good question
so is it going to take me a week, is it going to take me a day
how quickly after I've got the engine wired up
and the ECU in will it take me to tune
is it going to take me a week to tune this thing
is it going to take me a day, an hour, how long
so we did the test
we sent an ECU up to Cavals with the harness
we sent it up to him on Monday
Tuesday afternoon he had the ECU installed
the wiring done and the car tuned
and he never knew anything about the software
or the ECU
okay that's impressive
he connected it up, he opened up the software
he called up the injector curve, it looks like an LS1
injector curve, you put the numbers in
with the wizard, the engine started
he dialed it in, it idled, tuned the VE table
done, he was blown away
but how easy it was to use
I think that that speaks volumes
to dealing with any new product
is making it easy
intuitive as well
obviously every aftermarket standalone ECU
is trying to do the same thing
but they're all going to look and feel a little bit different
and just the vast number of ECUs that I have used
and I'm sure someone had a reason for it
but you use it for why on earth
have they done it like this, it makes no sense
or it's just not intuitive
or the workflow doesn't make any sense
I think something that's really well thought out
just flows and it does become easier to use
and quicker to use therefore as well
so we try to keep the core ECU software
similar to sort of a GM
so if you've used HP tuners to tune things
the MAF curves and the VE tables and the spark tables
you're already going to feel at home
it all feels, the software looks different
it looks different, it's newer
it's different to HP tuners VCM suite
which is the scanner and the editor
it looks different but it's a more modern version
of all that and it works in a very similar way
Alright look Duri, I think we've probably
got about as much out of you as we need to
about the core ECU
great to get some insight into the product
that I must admit to start with
and I think I might have said this
at one of the shows to someone on the HP tuner stand
why does this make sense for HP tuners to be doing now
but I think we probably get it
I will move on to finishing this thing up
and we've got the same three questions
we ask all of our guests so the first of those
is what's next in the future for you
I will continue working on helping with the development
of core ECU for the next couple of years I think
after that maybe continue helping
I really enjoyed training and helping people
the youngsters, helping them to tune engines
to get involved, I really enjoyed giving out
the information that I have and helping others
it's a great feeling to see young engineers
who are interested to coach them
to help them to answer their questions
and they go away knowing more
it's really nice and I really enjoy that
I kind of share that passion as well
which I'm probably understandable given what we do
but I did find when I was tuning professionally
it was great sometimes you get a car came in
that drove horribly and you transform it
and it drove really nice, made more power
and the customers happy and you've helped that one person out
which is great but now with what we do
every now and then it's not all the time
every now and then we'll get an email coming back
and someone will say I've actually now got a career
in the performance automotive industry tuning
or whatever it might be thanks to your courses
knowing that you've actually changed the trajectory
of someone's life is incredibly rewarding
and when I hear those stories it really does
sort of make me feel proud of what we've achieved at HPA
Absolutely, it's a really nice feeling
to know that you've helped somebody
it's a good feeling, yeah I have to agree with you
so that's where I think I'm heading in that direction
OK, more training. Alright next question
is there any advice you'd give to a younger version of yourself
to help reach where you are today in your career faster
that being said your career's kind of being
not necessarily a direct straight line
all interrelated with the automotive industry
but yeah designing combustion chambers
and designing an aftermarket stand-alone issue
are very much pulsed apart
Yeah so first of all you have to have an interest in the subject
you have to be interested in cars
and modifications and that kind of stuff
and then you have to have some sort of qualification behind you
if you want to work for Ford or GM or Chrysler
or any of the car manufacturers these days
you need to go and do some studies
so you study either electronics or mechanical engineering
and then get involved and start teaching yourself
as much as you can with the Harp Performance Academy
with these other resources available to you
now these days on the internet and you have to learn
you have to get some experience and you have to do some ground work
and then yeah hopefully you can make the transition
from sort of a hobby into the automotive industry
Yeah I think the old saying is if you do something you love
you'll never work a day in your life
it's not entirely true I don't think
there's always yeah not every day is going to be
you know rainbows and unicorns
but I mean it certainly helps if for the main part
you are doing something that you're passionate about
the other thing you sort of touched on there is
I think people want to fast track everything these days
it's all about instant gratification
but the usual saying is that you need to do something
for 10,000 hours before you achieve expert status
hey maybe it's 8,000 maybe it's 20,000
but there's some truth in that nothing is going to
fast track just physically putting in the time
and really understanding your craft whatever that may be
so yeah my sort of little addition there would be
don't think it's going to happen overnight it does take time
It does take time and also my experience from being in this industry
from the age of 18, 17 I haven't stopped learning
Oh no you never stop that's why I'm still passionate about it
Oh I haven't stopped learning and then I see the new things
that are coming along and I'm like oh my god
I'm never going to understand that this is like
this neural network stuff is like oh my god
how are we going to do this but then you get stuck in
and you use your experience and your knowledge
and the next thing you know you're doing it
so don't be frightened, just get stuck in as well
you have to get stuck in
I think if you can break it down into smaller bite size pieces
rather than this massive problem
that's how we solve problems is one bit at a time
don't have to be overwhelmed by the entirety of the issue
Alright Gerry last question for today
if people want to follow you or HP Tuners
see what you're up to maybe find out more about the Core ECU
where are they best to do so
You can go on to the HP Tuner website
hptuners.com is one hptuners.com.au as well
and then the Core ECU is on there and all the products that we sell
are up there
I don't have sort of an Instagram page or a Facebook page
that I post up post on so I'm pretty quiet from a social media point of view
but it's all basically HP Tuners
We'll put links as always into the show notes
to make it easy for people to find
look Gerry I really appreciate your time today
really interesting learning about your background
and digging into some of those finer details
that I've always wanted to ask about
with the GM control strategies
we wish you all the best
Thank you very much for having me Andre
it's been nice talking to you
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Tuned In
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About this episode
A deep technical conversation about why standalone ECU tuning doesn’t map neatly onto OEM reflashing, with the hosts contrasting speed density and mass airflow strategies, calibration-table complexity, and the practical limits of aftermarket tools. From there, the discussion widens into emissions, catalyst lightoff, torque management, and how modern ECUs juggle diagnostics, aftertreatment, and protection logic. The guest’s background in diesel development and dyno testing adds real-world context to how engine control evolved.
From carburettors and distributors to neural networks and AI-driven ECUs, Gerry Bechet’s career spans the full evolution of modern engine control. From his early days at Toyota South Africa to high-level development work at Ricardo, Renault, and Holden Special Vehicles, Gerry has been right at the heart of OEM engine calibration and development.
In this episode of Tuned In, we dive into Gerry’s journey through the automotive industry, starting with his early passion for mechanics and progressing into a career as a mechanical engineer specialising in engine development and calibration. We unpack his time at Ricardo working on diesel engine R&D, including common rail injection and combustion chamber design.
The conversation then shifts to OEM calibration at HSV, where Gerry worked on GM’s LS platforms. We explore the realities behind factory tuning—balancing power, emissions, durability, and even marketing demands—and why factory ECUs are far more complex than most people realise.
We also break down the tuning myth of “magic numbers,” why airflow modelling is everything, and how small errors in injector data or fuel pressure can throw an entire calibration off. Gerry shares real-world examples that highlight why understanding the fundamentals still matters—no matter how advanced the software becomes.
Finally, we get into Gerry’s current role with HP Tuners and the development of the new Core ECU. Designed to bridge the gap between OEM-level control and aftermarket flexibility, this standalone system brings advanced strategies like MAF and speed density integration, along with AI-assisted VE tuning. We discuss where it fits in the market, who it’s for, and how tuning technology is continuing to evolve.
This episode is packed with insight—from old-school engine fundamentals to cutting-edge ECU development. Whether you’re a tuner, engineer, or just passionate about performance cars, Gerry’s depth of experience makes this one well worth your time.
0:00 Standalone vs OEM ECU: Understanding Modern Engine Control 4:26 How did you get interested in cars? 8:04 Working for Toyota in South Africa 12:02 Where did you end up after Toyota? 14:02 What are you trying to find when you’re running these engines on the dyno? 20:07 What is the time frame on developing one of these engines? 21:52 How did your role progress at Ricardo Engineering? 25:10 How was the transition to engine calibration? 26:43 How does an emission system work? 31:56 Tell us about your time at Holden HSV? 43:29 What does OE calibration software look like? 45:24 What’s your role at HP Tuners? 47:15 Why do people who tune stand alone ECU’s find it hard to use HP Tuners?58:00 If MAF is so good, why do we have a speed density system? 1:01:12 What is virtual volumetric efficiency and why did GM go in that direction? 1:03:52 What is a neural network? 1:08:11 Are there any common HP Tuner mistakes? 1:14:19 Why have HP Tuners made a stand alone? 1:23:53 How does the Core ECU operate? 1:27:33 Automatic spark calibration, What can you tell us? 1:30:26 Is there any consideration for CAN networks? 1:32:14 How do we decide to reflash or fit the Core ECU? 1:37:32 How does the work flow between the US and Aus work on this ECU? 1:38:53 How do you get tuners to swap to your EC
