Performance Tuning Myths

[sholtby]

Interesting to read about those tunning myths. I agree that the standard airbox with a high flow airfilter drawing cold air from outside the engine bay is the best option.
I dont agree so much with your first comments about coping with 300+ horse power. I think this kind of talk is to convince people to have your ecu upgrade done. A more honest answer would be that the more horsepower you screw out your engine the shorter life it will have on average. From reading a lot of posts the usual person looking for an ecu upgrade tends to look for the one that gives the highest power gain and the Rica one claims to be about the highest although several people on this site have found a dyno session has shown it to be much less but still happy with the extra performance.
The Rica chip is also extremely expensive the US guys are paying about $300-400 but the Rica upgrade is what about £500.
I used to write my own chips for my last car and it isnt that difficult to do. Ignition timing is advanced by monitoring the knock sensor at various load vs rpm values and fueling is achieved by interogating the ecu as to how much it has varied the initial fuel values due to the lambda sensor output.
I'm interested how the tunning companies dissasemble the data on the flash chip. It must be either due to receiving information from Bosch or some other means. The other thing that worries me is if they have fully dissasembled the code on the chip so that all protective settings/values will still work. ie they have just found where to increase the boost and removed the overboost protection for if say the wastegate failed.

Simon