Already have. Still prefer the flashed ECU over an AP, and after talking to several knowledgable people there are not too many people making as much, or more power than I am. I did note that there is one other team making more power than I am, but I will also note that so far this season I have not had a single engine failure, and so far the #07 cars engine has run:

9 hours of RA (winner)
multiple NASA Sprint races (won most)
Test weekend at Road Atlanta with NASA (Overall win)
St Petersburg GP World Challenge Weekend Double race Pro weekend
Miller Motorsports Park, Pro weekend
Test day at HPR, JD Mobley, full day of testing, ran all but two sessions
Mid-Ohio World Challenge Weekend Double race weekend
NASA HPR weekend, took an Overall and two Class wins, ran every single session

Motor is still in the car and showing good compression and power.

Reliability with these cars are key, I do not blow engines every race weekend or even every couple of race weekends but we DO run up front and run hard. We cannot do that on an AP. Period.

 

The Racing Beat RACE flash will work with all of that. The exhaust on #07 makes 99db under most track conditions and under 103 pretty much everywhere. #08 has a different muffler arrangement and results in less db without much power loss. Its not a bolt-on pece but I could send pictures of it to you if you can have such a thing fabricated near you.

What you have heard regarding exhaust is wrong. For a STREET car most STREET exhaust will give you not much of a power gain. Exhaust is critical for the RX8's. That said I will reinterate that most off-the-shelf manifolds and exhuast all make about the same power increase and to get a real gain you will need a purpose built track exhaust.

I use Redline 30wt race oil, but am not sure what is available in your area. If I were driving the car on the street at all I would use Redline 10-40 (or whatever fits your temperature range) oil.

 

RB flashes are proven to run too lean and are just off the shelf tunes. For a customer living overseas it's better to have a custom tune made via an AP.
220\225rwhp is nothing out of the ordinary and omniscient sentences should be replaced by words of advice.

My engine has around 35 track hours... with an unfinished AP tune compression is a-ok. Go figure!

 

Interesting-

My cars with the Racing Beat flash run rich, especially at high rpm.
How many n/a cars are making over 200 whp? Woukd be very interested because the highest whp numbers I have heard about are in the mid 230 range (on a dynojet) while my engines- one bone stock keg the other with Goopy apex
seals, no porting, etc just intake, exhaust, and ecu tune nets 224whp consistently on a loadcell land and sea dyno-mite dyno.
I can put whatever ems I wish in the car, including AP, AEM, Motec, etc but no one has convinced me I will gain anything from doing so over the flash, and this includes a guy running a standalone that he has spent a lot if $$ on.i

 

ok guys,

Been running My rx-8 for 3 years at swedish tracks with rb revi+duct, rb header, decat midpipe excoticspeed, rb rev8 catback. Im been consistly lying at 92-93 dB measured at straights.

Last year i started to map My car via flash obd2 thats the way to go, had a piggyback before.

Running ~235 g/s with rich lambda 0,8-0,85 thats good and saves the engine.

 

I think it's funny arguing about the RB flash versus the AP..............

They are both flashes...and cost about the same....except the AP can be altered to be car specific..and is not an off the shelf type tune. The ECU doesn't have to be sent to RB for the AP tunes either.

Otherwise the functionality is identical

What exactly are you arguing about?

 

No, it doesn't.
Proper lambda for power "saves" the engine.

I'm trying to figure that out myself.

Most road race owners are "my way or the highway" types that operate entirely on inference rather than truly empirical data.

If you hand them two bottles of drinking water, they are gonna grab the one that they were sipping the last time they set a good lap and credit it with the success.

 

You are right, too rich isnt good either, was in à hurry posting.

I get more power with leaner lambda but the EGT rises.

 

Not necessarily true, either.
Peak EGT happens at peak torque. The limit is, however, entirely theoretical.
There is really no such thing as "too high EGT" for a rotary engine that is properly tuned.

 

Ok i dont want to argue with you (dont have time)

Last year i run a lean tune 0,88-0,9 L

That tune worked well at time attack events one heat up, ~3 all out and one cool down lap. It even worked at little bit longer sprint races.

But if the event alows it i like to stay out 40min or so, if its a hot day stuff happens high EGT... In one event with really hot climate i made one exhaust gasket to deintegrate, rear lambda sond to go out and one spark plug to fail. I do logg extensive My engine.

This year i gone à tad more rich and i have had zero problems, just run out of pads nothing Else.

So for My climate, my tracks, My driving style and My rx-8 setup it seems to work well.

I like to test things and Next year ill run à super lean tune just to see how far i can push it, i want à new engine anyway.

Sorry for the ipad spelling.

 

I do not often agree with MM, but in this case he is correct on several points.

One thing about rotaries that Jeff alluded to is that lean/rich is not really as cut and dried as with piston engines. Running the motor lean might get a few hp but it will seriously shorten engine life. The side seals just will not last and the side seal springs will break and then poof goes the motor. Running overly rich or with the timing too far retarded will also shorten engine life, as the extra fuel will continue to burn on its way out of the exhaust ports and again, overheat the side seals. This is a predictable, proven failure mode. Remember that AFR is less important to power production than timing, so time spent on a dyno is best spent optimizing timing vs power with a lot of attention spent reading spark plugs.


Also, there is no pissy argument going on here. Show me where the AP or for that matter any EMS has made an appreciable level of HP in a race car using a similar configuration and I will be very interested. However I did a great deal of research before I made the decision to keep the RB flashed ECU's, and what I discovered is RB did a LOT of development on Mazda and Speedsources dime to come up the most power they could from the stock keg, exhaust and intake mods. Yes, obviously AP allows you to "tailor" your tune, and I could see that on a ported or boosted engine, but not on the configuration I am required to run, and the configuration that most, if not all, NA engines run. So the idea of multiple dyno runs and flash after flash hold little to no value, so I do not recommend them. Could I maybe get another 5 peak whp from a "custom" tune? Maybe, but I doubt it, and if even so its not likely to improve the under the curve power, which is the most important to what we are trying to do. I actually have an AEM EMS with a harness adaptor setup on the shelf ready to go and if I thought it would benefit me at all it would already be on there.
Jeff is wrong however about lack of empirical data- ALL I care about is data. Bring the tech, otherwise its all just opinion or preference.
A few more data points-
Both cars shift at 9000 rpm
Neither car ever runs more than an indicated 215deg on the hotest of days and after multiple track sessions. Optimum power production seems to be around an indicated 201deg, with anything above 190 being close
Oil temps are always very stable. Both cars use the OEM coolers and all the plastic ducting. Oil temp is logged via the AIM MXL Pro dash with the sensor in an oil filter adaptor block.

According to Jim Medere at RB, anything over 200 is not good for the motor, but as I said we seem to make best power there, and its where our motor is happy. Power is consistent until approx 210-215 deg then drops off. Operation at anything above 215 deg is shortening the life of the motor, esp if your oil temps are as high. In both my cars the water temp sensors need to be calibrated in the AIM dash, as I have found as much as a 15% variance in the senders output. if you are tracking the car it is very worthwhile to use a display that you can check the CTS calibration with. This is important as the ECU looks at the CTS for fuel and ignition trims and if it thinks it is hotter or colder than it really is then there will be a negative effect on power output.

I could go on, but its late and I am at the track tomorrow.

 

There are no identical engines though, even with the exact same configuration and blueprinting. You say that time spent on a dyno is beneficial but then go for an off the shelf tune? Come on...

 

Come on?? Show me where major gains have been made with an AP or Haltec or anything else vs the RB RACE flash or similar? Please do not misatake me here, you have my complete interest, but so far no one has done so. An engine makes X whp, period. The tune can only get what is there, nothing more. Any tuner who tries to convince you that he "makes" hp is a charlatan and a liar.

With extensive dyno tuning you might be able to gain 3-5whp peak, with maybe 2whp under the curve from one engine to another. This is proven, over and over again, from motor to motor.

As an example of this, I just spent a week chasing horsepower in a BMW M3 race car. Every chip tuner and flash expert we talked to promised gains over the Turner race flash the car started out with. After a few thousand dollars, several days on several different dynos and several flashes we netted 5whp peak and 3-5whp under the curve, and that was all due simply to tweeking the cam timing and had nothing to do with the AFR or ignition timing. This small gain was all there was from a custom flash over the "canned" flash and none of the "40whp at least" gains were realized, no matter how much money was spent or dyno runs made. I get to spend a fair amount of time on the dyno, mine and others, tuning a variety of engine management setups, and this is a fairly common occurrence with stock or near stock engines, there are just no magic bullets out there.

I should mention that in a road race car I also do not care as much about power production as I do about the rest of the car. Power under the curve is what I am concerned with, not peak numbers. Lap times are not about horsepower though, they are about setup, driving, and balance of the car.
And with that I am off to the Mud-Ohio, where as always it is raining when I am here.

 

You're right that a given engine can only make so much power. The fact is that you need a custom-tailored tune for that engine, not an off the shelf one to make the best out of your setup.

Power under the curve also depends. You should always stay in your rpm spot. There's absolutely no need, for race purposes, to make power at let's say 4000rpms.

Also, talking about making power with AFR\Timing is "right" but that's just a part of the overall puzzle. You mentioned cam timing etc for the bmw. Think about intake ports opening for us, drive by wire programming, MAF scaling, interpolation of several maps\fields etc.
You simply can't do that with an universal reflash. That's why the AP is the best solution out there under possibly 5 grand.
Our stock pcm is more modern than most of the actual "budget" standalones (let's leave Bosch, Magneti Marelli, Motronic etc out for now) so a good tuner can really extract the best out of the engine's potential. Both in the pure power department and the "intangibles" that still add to the overall driveability.
RB's flash could do that, if you were to bring the car there and do a full dyno mapping session. As it is sold, it simply can't. Want to argue with that? MAF scaling is individual to each single car (mostly). That should end it here.

 

I think the disconnect lies in the idea that the RB flash is somehow something different than the AP.
They are the exact same thing with regards to what it does to the drivetrain electronics.
d_walker just happens to be happy with how the RB flash works with his particular drivetrain. Others are not and have had significantly different results.
It all depends on the particular balance of the injectors, fuel pressure, MAF calibration, tables, etc.

I've tuned several GrandAm teams that were initially using the RB flash and we made significantly more power (once we got around the cannibalization of the immobilizer and as-build data that happens with the RB flash that, essentially, makes every car in which it is installed a 2004 USDM spec) with a customized calibration than with the RB. It was just that particular setup in that particular situation.

There is no "magic" in either application.

These GrandAm cars generally ALL make 225 HP since they all have effectively the same intakes, exhausts and ignition systems as regulated by the rules. The extra 10+ HP usually comes from the small tricks in the build and the fortuity of the right collection of accessories.

Once again, I suggest you take a walk around the paddock.
Most of your competitors are not going to be forthcoming with the information you desire, but you can glean a lot from their relative silence.

 

FWIW I have three season and about 50 races (I run with multiple racing series so I often race multiple times per month) with the RB flash with no negative results.

One team I'm familiar with that runs a number of RX-8s doesn't use the RB Flash because they had an engine failure shortly after uploading the flash. However, they are just guessing that the flash was the problem - it easily could have been something else.

I'm not saying that the RB is better or worse than any other tune on a stock engine in regards to power - I have no way of knowing this as I'm very much an amateur racer. A stand alone system or custom tune, given cost considerations, is not worth it to me for a possible few hp.

Another side note - My RB flash raises the redline/cutout to 10,000 rpm. Although there is no reason under normal circumstances to shift over 9000rpm due to the powerband of the motors sometimes it might be helpful to delay a shift due to an upcoming braking zone or passing manuever where a shift would cause a problem. In these circumstances I have FREQUENTLY taken the motor to 10,000 rpms with no adverse results. Once again - this does not improve acceleration as the motor's power is dropping off over 9000rpm anyway - it's just a handy tool in some situations to delay or prevent having to shift.

 

We do that pretty regularly.

 

Once again, I know of no one currently using an AP in a race car currently.

 

Well, it is because of one of two possibilities:

1) You haven't walked far enough; or
2) No one wants to talk to you.

 

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Taaddaaaa!!!
Here it is together with my friends MEAN(!!!!!) M3 E46.
Now i´m just waiting for my Swedish plates, then i will begin

 

Holy crap!
Resize that picture!

Way to destroy the readability of an entire thread....

 

Oppps... Sorry! Done!

 

From the sticker on the e46 i guess we'll meet next year
Congrats, now offer Ingemar a beer and let him show his garage. That place is awesome!

 

good thread!

 

Thanks! Been at the ring for 2 years straight. I´m going with a team called GT-Events... They rent the ring for 3days and there is about 80 cars in the event... 60% of the laps you dont see a car before going of the track! :D

The M3 is good for a -7.40 BTG lap (with the right driver off course)

Yes, I have MUCH to learn! And Ingemar as kind to answer all my stupid questions