Engine Management and Turbo Upgrade : First Impressions

TL;DR 1200 km in winter with no LSD yet  

I got the car back from MH7 on January 25h, we did fiddle a bit to get the fuel pump running. We'll probably adjust the signal more finely in the future.

The road back from Genk felt a bit like a rodeo, on wet with my summer tyres and the throttle pedal mapping that was quite agressive on both ECU settings. I was not able to stabilise the speed to 120kph as the throttle input was RPM-dependent. As I had to get back there to pick-up my regular car, we quickly set a flat/linear throttle response in "commute/wet" mode and kept the exhilarating exponential throttle on the "sport" mode. This gave quite an improvement on the motorway. 

We even talked about activating a cruise control function, and why not some traction control as well as we have a sensor on each rear wheel. That would be a lot of functionality for the weight of 2 switches hidden under the dashboard.

Other than that, I didn't fully anticipate how the exhaust noise would change with the work on the turbo. While it does not look like much, +5mm gives 56% extra room for the gas to flow through the turbine. The turbo also lost its nice gentle flutter, replaced by a strong industrial pneumatic noise when I lift the gas pedal.

The final choce of switch was a 2€ self-adhesive item from Aliexpress, with a nice little molded plastic case and all. It's located on the left kneeplate not far from the OBDII connector.

Driving on wet is not something I want to do in sport mode, as it skids up to and including 4th gear.

On dry (but cold), it does not take much to break traction and powerslide in a nasty manner.

With the winter wheels, putting the pedal to the metal at 70kph in 3rd gear on the motorway did result in some serious loss of traction, with the car going sideways and pushing forward quite hard. I assume the LSD will help putting the power to the ground more efficiently. Maybe it will even be able to go straight.

It didn't prevent us from cruising around during two frosty week-ends, or from commuting to work under any weather. The most slippery experience was related to manure around remote farms.

Let's see how it will behave with the LSD.