MAPerformance
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- Nov 30, 2017
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- Cottage Grove, Minnesota
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- www.maperformance.com
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- 2017 SI Coupe
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Over at MAPerformance we spent the time testing each of our performance upgrades. We went back and forth between different combinations and made over 200 dyno pulls to verify and enhance our products. We did a number of comparisons with stock tuning, hondata tuning, and our own MAPerformance tunes.
This is an update to the previous post with much more information provided.
Torque Modeled ECU
One thing to keep in mind with the Civic Type R FK8 is that it uses a torque modeled ECU. These new-age computers are quite sophisticated and use a number of advanced strategies to calculate the actual power output under a given scenario. The car is designed to hit a target torque and if it can hit that it will do it with the least boost possible. Companies like Hondata help simplify these complex systems and make it easy for us to request new targets to see what the car is actually capable of making and test parts in a more traditional way. Due to these torque strategies, most modifications on many modern cars actually give little to no actual power output change. So for us to see if things are improving with a factory calibration you have to look for signs of efficiency changes such as wastegate position, pressure drops, etc. We however spent the time to take both approaches on our quest to improve the performance of the FK8. In our testing, we ran factory calibrations as well as tuned calibrations to push the components further.
Intake Testing
The first project we had was finding out how much of a difference we could get from just modifying the airbox. We wired up a handful of extra sensors and started seeing what kind of issues we could start to improve on. We found that the factory air box with the hood open vs closed actually showed a very significant difference in air pressure. This was seen in both the turbo inlet pipe and the airbox itself. We could even see a difference in the wastegate position shifting up and down. This was a good sign that we could improve the overall intake design. This also shows that cars that make power on the dyno will actually have potentially lower performance on the road due to less available air. For this reason, we did all of our testings with the hood closed. For each test, we verified our temperatures and environmental conditions were within a very tight margin. After we did all of our testings we went back and re-tested the components on the same day to try and get the most consistent results.
Intake Air Pressure Analysis
So starting off let's take a look at the pressure drops we were seeing before and after the MAPerformance intake was installed..
There are two sets of lines in this chart. The white / blue are the MAPerformance intake. And the orange were taken with a factory intake. We placed 3 sensors in the intake tract:
-Ambient air pressure place in the fender to remove any positive pressure effects from cooling fans
-Airbox Pressure sensor
-Turbo Inlet Pressure Sensor
You will see almost a 10% air pressure drop at redline with the factory intake. This is showing that the factory intake is not able to keep up, even in factory conditions. These days manufacturers work hard to try and make the best flowing intake but due to the format of the FK8 there really isn’t enough space to put a large, high flowing, and quiet air box in the space they had left over. From our view of our testing it looks as if Honda chose to prioritize noise and size over the pressure and flow of the box. In the aftermarket world many individuals favor the enjoyable tones of a turbo so we can easily knock this decibel reduction off of our list of requirements and make room for more air volume! To do this we worked by custom designing an offset velocity stack to mount a massive 6” air filter on. This will easily give us a massive pressure drop reduction over the factory filter. We wanted to go as big as possible but due to the turbo inlet pipe it was difficult to fit so we designed multiple versions of velocity stacks with an offset center to see what would be the most efficient. We then tuned the factory airbox, and the MAPerformance airbox and plotted the results on the dyno.
We actually saw it again. But.. Was this just a simple dyno error? Let's dig deeper!
Below We have a plot from our Hondata software. This shows the current air pressure and the wastegate position. The factory wastegate has a range of 8mm. 0mm being forced shut squeezing all the air we can into the turbo, and 8mm being completely open and pushing all of the air into the exhaust stream.
Stock Intake - Tuned
MAPerformance Intake - Tuned
The dyno above did show more power everywhere. But the plots are showing that we are making less boost pressure at redline. So where is the power coming from? Let’s compare the wastegate plots. The MAP intake was able to achieve similar boost levels with 4.34mm vs 3.42mm on the stock intake. This is almost a 1mm or over a 10% shift in wastegate position. (Note: wastegate flow vs position is not linear). This pretty much backs up.
Now let's back up and let's try a factory calibration just to verify our data. Just to make sure we didn't just get lucky. The plot below is with the stock calibration. Remember when we said the car is torque-based? We weren’t kidding… You’ll notice the car makes almost the exact same horsepower!
The dyno above did show more power everywhere. But the plots are showing that we are making less boost pressure at redline. So where is the power coming from? Let’s compare the wastegate plots. The MAP intake was able to achieve similar boost levels with 4.34mm vs 3.42mm on the stock intake. This is almost a 1mm or over a 10% shift in wastegate position. (Note: wastegate flow vs position is not linear). This pretty much backs up.
Now let's back up and let's try a factory calibration just to verify our data. Just to make sure we didn't just get lucky. The plot below is with the stock calibration. Remember when we said the car is torque based? We weren’t kidding… You’ll notice the car makes almost the exact same horsepower!
But what is going on behind the scenes? Lets look into our boost and wastegate plots just like we did with our own tune!
Stock Intake - Stock Tune
MAPerformance Intake - Stock Tune
This time around we are almost the same power. But at much less boost. So we line up at 4.58 vs 5.05mm A small but noticeable gain. As we raise the boost, the demand on the airbox increases which would cause further gaps between these two scenarios. And when we use our calibration we were able to run slightly more timing just from the lower turbine speed.
Intake Air Temp Testing
A concern that many people bring up when picking out an intake is the problems with increased air temperature. So we built an air box that would still use the OEM air passageway through the bumper, but sealed things off to keep the warm air temperatures out. Below are a pair of plots showing the results:
Stock Intake - Tuned
MAP Intake - Tuned
So after many pulls and the car getting warmed up we still didn’t see even a 4 degree temperature increase. We would consider this in the range of error since we did test the stock intake earlier in the morning and the MAP intake later in the day and were seeing barely any temperature changes!
Materials and Assembly
We started by mapping the area left when removing the factory airbox, and set out to design a semi-enclosed airbox that would protect the filter from the heat of the engine bay, but not restrict any flow. While utilizing the largest K&N filter we could fit, we designed a box and custom billet velocity stack to place the filter in the optimal position to create a swirl of air entering the box and allowing cool air to be pulled into all areas of the filter.This is an update to the previous post with much more information provided.
Torque Modeled ECU
One thing to keep in mind with the Civic Type R FK8 is that it uses a torque modeled ECU. These new-age computers are quite sophisticated and use a number of advanced strategies to calculate the actual power output under a given scenario. The car is designed to hit a target torque and if it can hit that it will do it with the least boost possible. Companies like Hondata help simplify these complex systems and make it easy for us to request new targets to see what the car is actually capable of making and test parts in a more traditional way. Due to these torque strategies, most modifications on many modern cars actually give little to no actual power output change. So for us to see if things are improving with a factory calibration you have to look for signs of efficiency changes such as wastegate position, pressure drops, etc. We however spent the time to take both approaches on our quest to improve the performance of the FK8. In our testing, we ran factory calibrations as well as tuned calibrations to push the components further.
Intake Testing
The first project we had was finding out how much of a difference we could get from just modifying the airbox. We wired up a handful of extra sensors and started seeing what kind of issues we could start to improve on. We found that the factory air box with the hood open vs closed actually showed a very significant difference in air pressure. This was seen in both the turbo inlet pipe and the airbox itself. We could even see a difference in the wastegate position shifting up and down. This was a good sign that we could improve the overall intake design. This also shows that cars that make power on the dyno will actually have potentially lower performance on the road due to less available air. For this reason, we did all of our testings with the hood closed. For each test, we verified our temperatures and environmental conditions were within a very tight margin. After we did all of our testings we went back and re-tested the components on the same day to try and get the most consistent results.
Intake Air Pressure Analysis
So starting off let's take a look at the pressure drops we were seeing before and after the MAPerformance intake was installed..
There are two sets of lines in this chart. The white / blue are the MAPerformance intake. And the orange were taken with a factory intake. We placed 3 sensors in the intake tract:
-Ambient air pressure place in the fender to remove any positive pressure effects from cooling fans
-Airbox Pressure sensor
-Turbo Inlet Pressure Sensor
You will see almost a 10% air pressure drop at redline with the factory intake. This is showing that the factory intake is not able to keep up, even in factory conditions. These days manufacturers work hard to try and make the best flowing intake but due to the format of the FK8 there really isn’t enough space to put a large, high flowing, and quiet air box in the space they had left over. From our view of our testing it looks as if Honda chose to prioritize noise and size over the pressure and flow of the box. In the aftermarket world many individuals favor the enjoyable tones of a turbo so we can easily knock this decibel reduction off of our list of requirements and make room for more air volume! To do this we worked by custom designing an offset velocity stack to mount a massive 6” air filter on. This will easily give us a massive pressure drop reduction over the factory filter. We wanted to go as big as possible but due to the turbo inlet pipe it was difficult to fit so we designed multiple versions of velocity stacks with an offset center to see what would be the most efficient. We then tuned the factory airbox, and the MAPerformance airbox and plotted the results on the dyno.
We actually saw it again. But.. Was this just a simple dyno error? Let's dig deeper!
Below We have a plot from our Hondata software. This shows the current air pressure and the wastegate position. The factory wastegate has a range of 8mm. 0mm being forced shut squeezing all the air we can into the turbo, and 8mm being completely open and pushing all of the air into the exhaust stream.
Stock Intake - Tuned
MAPerformance Intake - Tuned
The dyno above did show more power everywhere. But the plots are showing that we are making less boost pressure at redline. So where is the power coming from? Let’s compare the wastegate plots. The MAP intake was able to achieve similar boost levels with 4.34mm vs 3.42mm on the stock intake. This is almost a 1mm or over a 10% shift in wastegate position. (Note: wastegate flow vs position is not linear). This pretty much backs up.
Now let's back up and let's try a factory calibration just to verify our data. Just to make sure we didn't just get lucky. The plot below is with the stock calibration. Remember when we said the car is torque-based? We weren’t kidding… You’ll notice the car makes almost the exact same horsepower!
The dyno above did show more power everywhere. But the plots are showing that we are making less boost pressure at redline. So where is the power coming from? Let’s compare the wastegate plots. The MAP intake was able to achieve similar boost levels with 4.34mm vs 3.42mm on the stock intake. This is almost a 1mm or over a 10% shift in wastegate position. (Note: wastegate flow vs position is not linear). This pretty much backs up.
Now let's back up and let's try a factory calibration just to verify our data. Just to make sure we didn't just get lucky. The plot below is with the stock calibration. Remember when we said the car is torque based? We weren’t kidding… You’ll notice the car makes almost the exact same horsepower!
But what is going on behind the scenes? Lets look into our boost and wastegate plots just like we did with our own tune!
Stock Intake - Stock Tune
MAPerformance Intake - Stock Tune
This time around we are almost the same power. But at much less boost. So we line up at 4.58 vs 5.05mm A small but noticeable gain. As we raise the boost, the demand on the airbox increases which would cause further gaps between these two scenarios. And when we use our calibration we were able to run slightly more timing just from the lower turbine speed.
Intake Air Temp Testing
A concern that many people bring up when picking out an intake is the problems with increased air temperature. So we built an air box that would still use the OEM air passageway through the bumper, but sealed things off to keep the warm air temperatures out. Below are a pair of plots showing the results:
Stock Intake - Tuned
MAP Intake - Tuned
So after many pulls and the car getting warmed up we still didn’t see even a 4 degree temperature increase. We would consider this in the range of error since we did test the stock intake earlier in the morning and the MAP intake later in the day and were seeing barely any temperature changes!
Materials and Assembly
With this we were able to build a box that bolted in with no modification utilizing factory bolt locations, we then sealed that box to the hood and utilized the factory air box inlet to feed the box with cool air. From the box and velocity stack, we then feed our in house TIG welded 304 Stainless intake tube that creates a smooth transition, that matches the size of the factory MAF housing and feeds the factory cast turbo inlet.
This whole package has a unique look, utilizes the highest flowing components we can fit into the factory allotted area decreasing restrictions, increasing airflow, and adding that ever needed intake volume missing from the factory intake!
If you are looking for an intake that will work now, and grow with you as you modify your FK8 for years to come, look no further than our MAPerformance FK8 Civic Type R intake.
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