What ECU to use, so many choices?

By Clinton HulleyVW Polo Classic Project Car
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The engine was almost at the point where it could be fitted into the car. With the build at this stage did not mean anything if I didn’t have a proper ECU for this engine. My old engine was still a distributor engine with plug leads. The new engine had individual coils, one per cylinder. The local ECU just could not do any of the features I needed.

It was round about this stage that we started dealing with MBE as work. This was a UK company that did really fancy ECU’s. They were more focused on the OEM market and not aftermarket. MBE is in partnership with SBD Motorsport which is their aftermarket distributor. One of the cars that feature the MBE ECU is the Ford Noble.

Noble Sportscar

As we were an OEM company, MBE dealt straight with us. I did a lot of work on these ecus with one of the co-founders of the company Jeff Moore. He was a great and helpful guy. He also knew a lot about engine control as they have been in business for a lot of years.


So what ECU did I use?

On one of his visits to our company, we were doing some work on the dyno and I started telling him about the engine I am building. He was fascinated with the Idea. He told me that I must use one of there ECU’s it was the same unit that we used at work, and it is called an MBE 975.

MBE 975 ECU

This was a great unit. He sold me one at a really good price. On his next visit, he brought one with him for me. He supplied me with an ECU, all the plugs I need and the CAN connector to connect the laptop to the ECU. I told Jeff about the functionality I needed for the bypass throttle he asked me to send him an mail with the functionality I needed. A few days later I got an mail with updated software. It had the supercharger bypass valve functionality on the software.


The ECU could drive a drive by wire throttle. It could measure exhaust gas with Lambda sensors. The ECU could do sequential ignition and injection control. Another nice feature the ECU could do is Lambda control. It would measure the exhaust gasses and then adjust the fueling automatically if the reading wasn’t right. Closed-loop Variable Valve Timing cam control was also one of the features the ECU could do. The 20 valve head I was using on this build had Variable Valve Timing. This was a great ECU.



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