hi all tech people,

looking at freeing up some horses out of the feli rally car, it has an ecu with steve heads ( won the feli challenge back in the day ) address on it so i assumed it had been tweaked, i did a rally on sunday and met up with him and when i asked about the ecu he said they really did'nt give it alot more power.

Bareing in mind its a standard engine with a 4 branch manifold ( badly blowing STILL ) is it worth looking at something like an omex or similar and would a mapper be able to bring much more power from the engine/fuelling?

thanks in advance

i have got a microsquirt ecu for my rally car and it was the best thing i have brought for the car so far. it gave the car a lot more mid range power, but didn't really change the top end power.

I'm currently converting to fuel injection on my favorit and using a microsquirt ecu aswell. I believe omex ecu's are better and easier to map however they're over double the price.

Darren (djaychela) runs a DTA ecu on his felicia rally car so he might be the best person to speak to.

You will get some extra power from a good map - the standard ECU is very conservative and has a low rev limit. The challenge ones ran more ignition advance and a higher rev limit and felt a lot better on an identical engine. However, you won't get anything like what you should do without fitting a programmable ECU and getting the fuelling and timing right - it's just not going to work like that. It does mean more money, but there's no way round it. I know a lot of people say that Megasquirts are crap or a waste of money etc., but having had two and two cars on DTA I can't say there's a lot in it in terms of hardware (I'm on an old E48), and the software for MS is miles better - the DTA is hideously crap, it really is; you'd think whoever programmed it had never mapped a car in their life. It's like computer software, people swear by the system they know best for the most part. If you are competent, building an MS system will be cheaper and more fulfilling than buying, but only if it goes well (mine certainly did, made a massive difference to the favorit I ran at the time).

You'd need to spend some time looking at the ports etc., to know if you'll get much more - some of the MPi heads had really tiny, restrictive ports in them, others were larger. The exhaust will give you some extra flow, but TBH i think you'd be better off getting/doing some head work and so on and getting all that fitted at once - otherwise you've wasted the money on the map that will be irrelevant once you've changed heads.

I've done DIY mapping which has worked well, have a look at my blog - www.skodarallyblog.com for some details of it...

Matt - sorry for not replying, been snowed under. Still not sure about selling the TBs - I need to make a general decision about what I'm doing with the Skoda and the Seat, and they may figure in the equation.....and I don't want to sell them only to find that I decide to keep the Skoda, sell the Seat and then put ITBs on there to not have any!

_{cheers darren, shall look into it further}

Matt - sorry for not replying, been snowed under. Still not sure about selling the TBs - I need to make a general decision about what I'm doing with the Skoda and the Seat, and they may figure in the equation.....and I don't want to sell them only to find that I decide to keep the Skoda, sell the Seat and then put ITBs on there to not have any!

Ok cheers darren! If you decide to keep them for the seat then i might be interested in just the manifold. Can you let me know as soon as you decide? Thanks