The UK's (maybe even Europe's) 1st 1.4L 16V Seicento

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

On fuel costs we used less than half a tank to map our car and that included the 80mile round trip to get there and back, TBH any time spent on a rolling road is going to use fuel IIRC our car covered about 60miles on the rollers which is a fair amount when lots of it are spent at WOT. Any mapping be it standalone or standard should have r/r time to quantify all mapping is correct.

Yeah I know the Sei is Marelli my mistake thinking ahead to next part of sentence but all new Fiats are going Bosch ME systems, they have to as they have fly-by-wire throttle which is Bosch so to control it need the matching management, hence why just about every single European car now runs Bosch apart from Ford who run there own systems IIRC.

This is all very well, but the Bosch system are so integrated with cars now its getting more and more difficult to do any sort of mapping on them, and even going aftermarket is going to be tough as the ECU is linked to everything, even the headlamps!

What would be nice if someone had the knowledge to do what I am getting done to my Webber Marelli IAW ECU on my integrale, I'm getting it rebuilt with a new baby board, faster processor to keep up at high revs, &  I can run wide band lambda, wasted spark coil or over pack, anti-lag if I wish etc and all encased in the standard ECU so plugs straight back into standard loom, so you have the benefits of both aftermarket and standard, its too perfect and all for £400. You even get software to load on your lap-top/PC so you can down load all the graphs/tables and view everything, its almost to good to be true.

Nikola over at RP Labs is such a nice person to deal with I can't wait to fit it to my car and start mapping it with my new tubular manifold, 3" straight through custom exhaust system and garret GT2871R roller bearing turbo, MSD uprated Ford EDIS ignition (better than Fiat wasted spark system) its going to be fun.

Have a look at his site makes interesting reading.

http://www.rplab.co.yu/index.html

[j333evo]

Hi Peter,

On fuel costs we used less than half a tank to map our car and that included the 80mile round trip to get there and back, TBH any time spent on a rolling road is going to use fuel IIRC our car covered about 60miles on the rollers which is a fair amount when lots of it are spent at WOT. Any mapping be it standalone or standard should have r/r time to quantify all mapping is correct.

Yeah I know the Sei is Marelli my mistake thinking ahead to next part of sentence but all new Fiats are going Bosch ME systems, they have to as they have fly-by-wire throttle which is Bosch so to control it need the matching management, hence why just about every single European car now runs Bosch apart from Ford who run there own systems IIRC.

This is all very well, but the Bosch system are so integrated with cars now its getting more and more difficult to do any sort of mapping on them, and even going aftermarket is going to be tough as the ECU is linked to everything, even the headlamps!

What would be nice if someone had the knowledge to do what I am getting done to my Webber Marelli IAW ECU on my integrale, I'm getting it rebuilt with a new baby board, faster processor to keep up at high revs, &  I can run wide band lambda, wasted spark coil or over pack, anti-lag if I wish etc and all encased in the standard ECU so plugs straight back into standard loom, so you have the benefits of both aftermarket and standard, its too perfect and all for £400. You even get software to load on your lap-top/PC so you can down load all the graphs/tables and view everything, its almost to good to be true.

Nikola over at RP Labs is such a nice person to deal with I can't wait to fit it to my car and start mapping it with my new tubular manifold, 3" straight through custom exhaust system and garret GT2871R roller bearing turbo, MSD uprated Ford EDIS ignition (better than Fiat wasted spark system) its going to be fun.

Have a look at his site makes interesting reading.

http://www.rplab.co.yu/index.html

[halfpint]

it's an ace car aaron. you have put alot of work and time into it. 
if u ever wanna give it away i will be firs in the queue. lol

[J.R Racing]

I take it the RP labs can't do anything for my ECU. aka. Marelli IAW 59F M1 ? Would it be any good anyway. Or work out cheaper than a custom ECU?

[Jamie86]

And I know the Seicento is quicker than the Ignis.

But not quite as quick as a 17year old french flimsy hatch 

LOL, yeah that's last time I take i give you a  place in Glasgow to sleep for the night & take you out and show you around and help you buy a car ya & give you my most welcome company on the drive there and back, cheeky wee booger 

And now I think of it, where is this French legend now 

It's still just as quick 

Just has a slight wobble under acceleration

[j333evo]

It's still just as quick 

Just has a slight wobble under acceleration

Slight wobbly, yeah like a drunkard! 

Forgot to add about the whole ECU thing, and answer a few queries.

We did look at  a few avenues, notably Megasquirt as well, for its cheapness and wealth of knowledge on the internet. It is a good set up, but I think only if you really want to build one yourself and learn about how an ECU really works, and that wasn't something any of use really wanted to do.

Looked at DTA as well, as the below £1000 ECU market has a few options including Omex, Halteck, motronic, and I think some lower end MoTeC stuff, but we went with Emerald in the end as its cheap, reliable and the clincher was that it is used extensively in the kit car market on Rover K-Series engines, Caterhams etc and is made right here in UK and was designed by Dave Walker who needs little introudction in terms of tuning cars, the gus a legend.

This meant that we could use the base map from a 1.4 16V K-series figuring its a starting point and you get it free with ECU if you ask for it. It let the car start first time, but was massively rich, so it was a matter of at first tweeking back fuelling and setting a rev limiter of 4K until we could get it to rolling road to get it set up right.

Now for future 16V Fire engine owners the hard work is done, if someone bought a Emerald ECU they could then for a small fee purchase the map that was created for our car as the intelectual property of it is held on the PC at 1320 Autos, this would lessen the cost by a considerable amount as it would then be downloaded on the ECU and the car would be running, there would need to be some additional rolling road time as there will be differences like we used 2L MG Maestro injectors and a custom fuel rail, whereas most people will end up using a 1242 16V inlet manifold and fuel rail from a Punto on there conversions, so injector flow properties will differ.

I'm not doing some selling job on Emerald, but its good, I know someone who has it running his integrale now, and of course the 27L 64V V12 Rover SDi from Practical Performance  magazine now runs it, so if it can run that 1500lb ft @ 1500rpm behemoth, it can probably run most things.

As for James query on the RP Labs stuff, the beauty of it is it can do anything a standalone ECU can, but has the simplicity of a standard ECU in that it plugs straight back in to the loom and as Nikola loads it with a  standard integrale(or Cosworth same ECU's you see)  map it is literally a plug and play device. As for doing other types of ECU i am not sure, may be worth asking him as he is a very nice guy to deal with.

Aaron.