Small update: Tomorrow we are headed to the track in the morning and Rif is going to try to beat the existing record he set last time.
Yesterday we took an in-depth look at the adaptations in his car and found that there was timing retardation of about 3 degrees across all cylinders. This is nothing bad - we've actually seen some stock cars with 7.9 degrees pullback in the past.
As I started looking further into this issue, and how to make the tune the most optimal for his track sessions, I decided to look into the service history of his car. His car has roughly 37,000 miles on it now, and the service records did not indicate that the spark plugs had ever been changed!
The factory interval for this is at the third oil change, so technically this service should have been performed automatically by the dealership at about 31,200 miles. We installed new plugs into his car, changed the oil, and freshened up the brakes.
Rif also had a slight bit of weight reduction by changing the seats to Recaro Race seats, and programmed the car to accept the race seats without warning lights and re-enabled the airbags.
Tomorrow we will be logging his vehicle on the track with 91 octane gas to start to see how the spark plug change affected the combustion quality. We will be logging the car on the track using factory software as well as a tool that we've used quite a bit before called BMWLogger (available from
http://**************.com). We used BMWLogger pretty extensively during our track testing of 240E software prior to our release in September of 2012.
The creator of this program was nice enough to offer overlaying video from the track on top of the datalog, which we are excited to share when he is completed. He has also added support to the application for logging air fuel ratios, which is a very welcomed addition.
With the new plugs and weight reduction, (although Rif is using the same used tires from last time), we're hoping that he can set yet another record tomorrow. After that we will be testing and data logging using higher octane fuels to see how much of an improvement can be had there. On Sunday he will be going to Willow Springs as well to test the higher octane calibration on that track.
We will definitely keep you all updated!
