Mike Kojima posted on May 12, 2009 06:40
Finally we tested the least pain for the gain part in our test, the Technosquare ECU. The Technosquare 370Z ECU isn’t really a part but a reflash of the factory ECU. You can simply send your factory ECU to Technosquare and they can reprogram it with their performance enhancing program just like how Nissan would do from the factory. A reflash is advantageous over things like piggyback computers because a piggyback fights the closed loop learning control of the stock computer. What happens is that with a piggyback device, the factory ECU often will undo the changes the piggyback makes.
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| Tadashi Nagata of Technosquare reflashes the ECU on our test 370Z |
Part of how Nismo pumps up the power of the Nismo limited edition 370Z is through an ECU reflash and Technosquare does so in a similar manor. Technosquare changed the fuel, timing cam control and rev limit maps to get there gains. We asked Technosquare not to custom tune the ECU to our particular combination but to use their off the shelf ECU reflash to represent results similar to what a mail order customer might get. We did not see as great of a gain on the automatic model as we did on the manual transmission car and the car’s owner chose to be easier on his transmission and retained the stock 7700 rpm rev limiter. If the rev limiter was raised to the usual 8000 rpm, the gains would be larger.
The Technosquare 370Z ECU spun the dyno rollers to the tune of 287 whp and 229 lb ft of torque, a gain of 5 hp and 4 lb/ft of torque respectively. Most of the gains were found above 4500 rpm and were carried on to the rev limit. As we said, bigger gains would have been found if the rev limit was increased to 8000 rpm. In all the Technosquare ECU was the easiest power gain.
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| Technosquare's 370Z ECU reflash demonstrates good power gains above 4500 rpm |
In the end, our bolt on bash resulted in a gain of 20 whp and 9 lb ft of torque. These gains were good, with most of the advantage coming across the entire rev range. On a Dynojet we feel that these same mods will crank out well over 300 whp. This is unusual in naturally aspirated tuning as typically mods for NA cars like the 370Z are more narrowly focused on smaller parts of the RPM range. What is amazing is that with a proper supply of cold air, the Stillen intake could contribute another 8-10 more whp. As a note, we were extremely careful in our testing and did not cherry pick our results. This and the fact that the dyno we used is very conservative means that these are results that should be repeatable anywhere.
Stay tuned, we will soon be testing a quartet of performance parts on a six speed manual transmission 370Z.
Sources
Technosquare
http://www.technosquareinc.com/
Race prep, fabrication,ECU reflash, dyno testing and mechanical work
Stillen
http://www.stillen.com/
370Z Parts, Exhaust system, cold air intake
Berk Technology
http://www.berktechnology.com/
High Flow Cats