EDMUND’S Project EVO Part III – Dyno Tuning

2008 Mitsubishi Evo GSR: Tuning at Road Race Engineering

From Edmunds Insideline Blog

Adding performance parts is only half the battle. Tuning is key to unlocking the potential of those parts, and once Road Race Engineering installed the Cosworth MX1 cams, our Long-Term 2008 Evo GSR hit the dyno again.

The dyno for all of these runs is Road Race Engineering’s Dynapack, which places a drive unit at each of the car’s hubs.

All of the dyno data here is uncorrected for ambient conditions. Click the thumbnails for a larger view.

To recap, here’s the baseline dyno chart of Project Evo X. It’s what stock cams, AMS intercooler, intake, exhaust and reflash looks like.

In our case, it’s 316 hp and 320 lb-ft.

Overlayed with a stock Evo X, our Long-Term 2008 Evo GSR enjoyed an additional 68 hp and 66 lb-ft of torque in this baseline state of tune.

See the lumpiness in the stock Evo’s (red) result? Overfueling is a fairly common strategy used on stock turbocharged cars to keep the catalyst cool so that it can last 100k miles. Ironic, eh? Evo Xs run so rich at full load that the ignition system can barely punch through the mixture.

Once the Cosworth MX1 cams were in, we went back to the dyno.

With no other changes than the addition of the Cosworth cams, the results were promising. Peak torque rose by 36 lb-ft, and power was lifted by 34 hp.

Still, we knew there was a lot more to gained by tuning. The Evo X has plenty of knobs to turn in its ECU–spark timing, fuel enrichment, boost, phasing of both the intake and exhaust …

And when you change a major piece of hardware like cams, tuning can sometimes more than match the power increase gained from the hardware alone.

Knowing this, Mike Welch, owner of RRE, broke out the laptop and got to tuning. He uses EcuTek to reflash the existing ECU–by simply hooking his laptop to the OBD-II port under the dash, he can upload calibrations of his own creation. All tuning is done via this interface–there is no need for external piggybacks or other magic black boxes.

Although the platform is new, Mike’s already tuned about thirty-five Evo Xs so far, and five of them had the Cosworth cams we’re using.

Right away, he noticed that a boost dip below 4000 rpm and some spots of aggressive ignition timing. He uploaded his base calibration developed from these cars and started doing dyno pulls on our car. Now the dip was plumped with a touch more boost, and over the course of a dozen and a half dyno pulls, he tweaked the timing and leaned out the fueling beyond 5000 rpm a bit.

A few hours later w hen all was said and done, this was the result:

359 horsepower at 6,050 rpm

368 lb-ft of torque at 4,450 rpm

Note the gains across the entire rev range relative to our pre-cam result.

Just for kicks, here’s an overlay of our newly invigorated Project Evo X with a stock Evo X. We’re now +111 hp and +114 lb-ft of torque over stock. Saucy.