Good stuff man, that's an impressive graph! Car probably pulls like a freight train even at your elevation haha.

Stoked to see what it does when you finally get it on the rollers!

 

Can confirm, PSR2860 on a 7.4 PSI Spring doesn't like doing 7.4 PSI, very happy I didn't go with the 11.6 PSI spring like I was thinking about

 

Looks very familiar. That is why 160kpa became my low boost target. Keep in mind I'm starting at 80kpa baro so that's pretty compatible. Nice numbers, sorry the porting didn't seem to help that much but it makes me feel better for being lazy. Excited to see some hig boost data from you!

 

so just to confirm, your 9" countergrams fit with the 11.75 x 1.25 kit? are you running a spacer?

 

Yip, 9" wide and no spacers. Plenty of clearance all around!

 

nice! I have a set of 8" countergrams that i'll probably have to say goodbye to, but I really hope my 9" S1 storm's fit with the bbk, its on my purchase list and i just bought the wheels lol

 

Just a reminder that we have 15x9 and 9.5 6ULs in stock that fit these big boy brakes too

 

I've been slacking on updates again, so going to do my best to quickly get things up to speed.

Ricardo and I decided a full fuel retune would be best, due to some firmware changes that basically meant we gotta retune. Not to mention the weird wideband issue, that at the time we didn't even know we fixed. This was over a month ago now, I think? I forget the exact dates. But off to Ricardos running on pump, and a jug of e85 coming along for the ride.




Ricardo has a cool dodge stealth and his new house is great. I got a ride in the stealth and Ricardo threw it into a corner like some kinda racecar driver, I bet not many of these get driven like that. I honestly didn't think it would handle that well. Great noises and the power was better than I expected on low boost!




Ricardo knocked it out the park, we cut some wiring out of the car that I did when I was.. 18 or 19? I really should have addressed that long ago. But ricardo has all the proper motorsports connectors and we got the Spartan 3 CAN wideband controller installed in his garage.




Scooter had some good company for the day with SuperSmurf in the garage.



We spent ALL DAY tuning, first dialing in low boost (165kpa targets) on pump, then going back to his shop and pulling the drain plug to drain the thing down, filled up with e85 (got around e78) and retuned for flex, then flipped the switch to dial in high boost (again). Targeting 205kpa here. Total ******* ripper, and best of all WE FIXED THE ISSUE that was plaguing me with this car. We pretty much could tell right away by the fueling the car was asking for, which was a great sign, but I've since confirmed that the car is perfect. From cold start to hot and heatsoaked fueling is within 5-10% with EGO handling the rest. Honestly couldn't be happier and the car runs in all conditions better than I ever thought it could on the MS3.

So of course I'm ready to track this thing again...

 

Sounds like my dream day TBH. I want a ride in the Stealth as well haha.

Glad you guys were able to knock all of that out and finish putting all the previous issues to rest. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts about the new turbo setup after the next track day!

 

Drove the car quite a bit over the last month after the retune. It's super nice to drive now, even when cold/warmup, it's perfectly normal and drivable. Kind of a big deal.




Picked up some new aluminum ramps for the trailer. These are 82" long and amazing for loading the car. My co workers didn't believe I could haul them like this, but I told them my car has "infinite vertical space" and proceeded to slam them into the DD pass seat.




With the dash apart I decided to add a fan. Took apart a cigarette lighter USB adapter and stole its voltage converter to take 12V to 5v (0.5A) and powered a 0-12v fan computer fan with it. It spins at a nice RPM running on 5 volts and is just on switched power. I've overheated my pi dash a few times over the years on hot track days and this should fix it.




I also spent a lot of time on a few other things with the dash. First I wrote a little script to dim the dash since it's often too bright and has no auto-dimmer function.. It takes the average sunset hour for each month and dims based off system clock time. Works like a charm and is close enough to sunset with that logic that by the time it's super dark the screen has dimmed.

Also setup a cronjob to ping out, and when I have internet access, auto-rsync my tunerstudio projects folder to my VPS. Super handy for checking logs after a drive.

Last one was to finally set the screen to never go to sleep. Sounds obvious but this old version of raspbian didn't have it built in, and no persistent setting to always have that disabled, so i just set it up to run the commands to disable screen dimming on boot. It was kinda tricky because if you run the command too soon, before the LDE comes online, it just gives you a black screen. Fortunately i have this thing keyed to my home box so I can just SSH in and work on it remotely, just key on in the garage (with car on charger) and I can tweak away on this thing.

Anyways nothing magic but I also spent a few hours working on a dashboard that had everything I need. For instance with the Spartan wideband controller, I no longer have a wbo2 gauge in the car. I actually love this, but I needed to make the wbo2 gauge on my PI dash bigger and front/center.

 

With everything else so dialed on the car, that failing tach was driving me nuts more than ever. Over the years I blamed that tach issue on a bad ground, but recently I went over the entire grounding system on the car and am damn near certain it's perfect. I did a lot of research on grounding and learned about "star grounding" techniques and made sure my car follows that. I.E. all 5v sensors ground to the back of the head, and one ground path from the head > chassis from there. I also cut the black/grn wire that on early 1.6 cars induces a grounding loop (sensors being grounded through the ECU > ground AND through a ground to the block). Now they are only grounded through the ECU. I also re-grounded my dash grounds, inspected and ensured my grounds from battery > ppf were good, etc.

So at this point I wanted to try a cluster. I ended up snagging a lower mileage cluster on ebay for $50 to my door, which I thought was well worth the experiment. Somehow to the gauge hood off without exploding it too!




And with this cluster in my tach issue is fixed. That's a big win that I'm pretty psyched about. It's been unreliable for years now and I just assumed it was something to do with the ECU/grounds/etc and not the cluster itself, or else I would have fixed this years ago. I actually have some revlimiter gauges my brother bought me for xmas maybe 2 years back, and now I feel finally motivated to get those in. That's a winter projects for this year for sure.

 

With the car dialed I was pretty burnt out of miata stuff, but ready to track it again. The heat of the summer coming to an end I was hoping to have it out for Sept/Oct/Nov events. For Sept event I ended up getting a SMOKING deal on a dream bike of mine from a friend and had to go pick it up. Long story short I ended up riding a few hours in some serious weather on Friday afternoon, which put ME under the weather for saturdays event. I had the car loaded up and everything. Probably a bad choice trying to do too much at once, which is pretty status quo for me, but whatever. Sick bike. I've been riding the **** out of it for the last month not really touching the miata.

2016 Superduke 1290 GT. 180HP, 450lbs, all the torque, and an all day riding position. T/C, ABS, rider modes, etc. Handles better than some supersport bikes I've had too. Definitely opened my eyes a bit and I LOVE this thing.

 

Now up to current. Another track day yesterday. I have had the car dialed for a while ready to go, drove it to work a few times this week, found a misfire on high boost and fixed that with some fresh plugs. She's ripping, no leaks, no gripes, no issues. Ready to send it.

Load it up Friday afternoon:




Once on the trailer, torque lugs, give it a once over before tying it down. Run my hands over the tires to check the insides, which I know are a bit worn, and find this:



I really thought I had at least 1, maybe 2 more track days on these. I think the last bit of street driving took them out, though I'm not ruling out an alignemnt issue. I did have the car alligned earlier this year AND marked the alignment, so I actually feel pretty good about that right now. I'll probably get it checked up next year when I put tires on it. I just can't see putting some new tires on it to get 1 event, start the heat cycle, then have them sit in my below freezing garage all winter.

So enter the DD 10AE. Having discovered this at about 11AM on Friday, I had plenty of time to prep the NB. Up on the quickjacks it went, trans/diff fluid changed (motorcraft trans fluid in this 6 speed), bled the brakes and inspected pad life, checked all fluids, threw my race wheels on it. I originally bought these wheels for the 10AE from Ricardo with take-off v730's on them (still a little bit of life on those) with the intent of tracking the 10ae some, then I picked up another different miata (totally by happen-stance, I traded some ECU setup/tuning to my other buddy for that shell) - that is destined for a seat-time build, so I had decided to not track this car. Well, until Friday, when I said **** it and got it ready.





The car looks soo good on those wheels. My dad came out and rode with me all day, which was great. I wasn't worried about lap times at all, just hooning around in a miata and having fun with the top down. It was such a nice experience. I've got some room for improvement in my slow car game for sure, which is exciting, because I know slow car driving improvements will transfer to the turbo car too. Anyways, ended up running a 1:38.4, 10 seconds off my PB in the other car, and got 4th in D class (out of 8? drivers). Not bad for my mostly stock car with sticky tires on it. It was hilarious giving Ricardo a ride and having him give me pointers, it's kind of insane how little you brake on these slow cars and I'm not used to it. Good fun. Props to my buddy Serenio for the pics and vid, that dude is a legend!

 

As much as I love the 1125, that SDGT makes the 1125 feel like a farm implement. So refined and brutal.

Sketched at track stuff without a roll bar in an NA/NB but can't beat the top down fun.

 

Those small quality of life improvements in the tune make all the difference.

Nothing like having a backup Miata to take to the track

 

I was hoping to see the Econoline hit some laps but the 10AE was a nice runner up.

I love having a backup bike to take out if my main one is down. A backup Miata would be stellar!

 

Nothing new on the turbo car front, it's still awaiting tires. I've been CRANKING away on my FD project but have big plans for the turbo car come spring track season. Well maybe not "big" plans but definitely some sticky tires and some minor aero changes.

I did have another great trackday in the 10AE. It's really impressing me for a mostly stock car, I was able to tick off a LOW 36 (1:36.2) and had a blast in it. I beat quite a few spec miata's and other way more prepped cars in it, coming in 4th in class. Sure would have been neat to podium with this thing but oh well. I'm certain 35's are on the table as-is, and these are 2 season old takeoffs that I got second hand from Ricardo. I think he dropped nearly 2 seconds going from these tires to his current setup.



It's at the point for sure where pushing it much harder without a rollbar is dumb (maybe I'm already being dumb tracking it), but it's my daily and I have no plans for a bar or any further development on this car. It does get me excited to get my gutted seattime nb2 going though, slow car fast is so damn fun and cheap/easy to run. That said I did ride in a few buddies higher HP cars and I'm missing the turbo car pretty badly. Here's me riding along with my buddy in his 500whp STI that's the best setup subie I've ever been in. Big tires, good suspension, all the aero, all the power. It's a violent ride. We usually battle for 2nd place but he nailed it since I wasn't there. I think his current PB is a few tenths off mine so I really need to get back in the seat on the turbo car and put a stop to that!

 

Sounds like the exhaust on that Subie blew the damn microphone out of your poor phone

Stoked to see it, dude. I drove my buddy's bolt-on NA6 at our last track weekend and was reminded how much fun slow car fast is. Think it's gotta be something about being on the gas for like 95% of each lap lol. Probably great for your driving skills after riding the bull/just hanging on in your 250+ whp car too!

Pardon if I missed it but how come you didn't bring the turbo NA out? Is it down or needing tires right now? Or did you just want to go head to head against Ricardo for N/A MT.net Suika champion? Lol

 

Haha, that's his external wastegate and boost control. Things crazy sounding blasting off the wall.

The turbo car just needs tires and I wasn't about to buy a set to sit all winter. Spring I'll get some stickies on it and make it back out! No way I was beating Ricardo, he's in the 1:32's and I'm chasing 1:35's!

 

Haven't touched the car much, it still needs tires and it's snowy and cold here in the mountains anyways.

I did pull the cluster to drop in my revlimiter gauges, I've been sitting on those for years but never installed them because of the bouncy tach issue. With that fixed I have motivation to get them done though! Just waiting on a cold miserable day that keeps me from working in the garage on the 7 and I'll do that project.

Only other news is a minor aero change is coming. For now shes got a small *** again.