Standalone ecu for a st205, Worth it? Options

[skogs]

Hi, a workshop is changing the engine in my st205, and they have given me an offer to change the ecu to a haltech stand-alone and remap it for a total of about 900£ extra. Do you think this will be worth it? They will be putting in a Spec stage 3+ clutch while they're at it.

[malpaso]

In my opinion both guys (lagos and delusionz) are right.

I can confirm from my experience: Street mapping is just useful just for "base map" because you can not simply simulate all situations on public road. I passed this mapping on my car as driver and it was pretty scary sometimes . And always final tune up was made on dyno. To get 100% precise results. Sad is it costs money. 4WD dyno rental for 1/2 of day (or even whole day) plus time of professional who tweak the map is not cheap. This gives you great opportunity to find weak spots. For example situation: when you can find on dyno when you reach 7000rpm you are running at 94% of your injector's duty cycle. That means when you get inside bit bad fuel (or your injectors become dirty) + rev you engine to 7000RPMs you will have too lean mixture and risking troubles.... Something like this you hardly discover on the road. That is why I talked about thousands of Euros in my first post here for upgrade like this. In comparison to 10k€ investment to the engine it's wise pay for dyno. Just my opinion.

I can not confirm: how much would be different remapped stock car (no mods, just new map created). When I passed through mapping it was always after some upgrade. From general knowledge (and you can say the same for any car) car makers makes maps very conservative. They count with any possible quality of fuel around globe where car is sold. So map is made as 3x bullet-proof to keep engine safe. When you re-map it you just make it more tweaked to your local fuel quality = you can squeeze more power from it (plus maybe also better curve when making small upgrades). I would not call result like "nigh and day" difference but there definitely is.