Mapping the Polo on the road!

By Clinton HulleyVW Polo Classic Project Car
Laptop
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Till now most of the small issues have been sorted out and the car was running good. The car was still running on its base map. The Polo was running well, but I just expected more of the setup. It didn’t feel as aggressive as I thought it would be. The Polo has also not been close to a dyno as the ECU first had to be set up properly.

Jeff Moore, one of the guys from MBE systems in the UK came to South Africa to do the introduction to new ECU software for our company. One evening after work we took on the Polo. The first thing Jeff did was to disable the supercharger and set the bypass valve to stay open. He changed the load input configuration on the ECU to run off the throttle position sensor. With the bypass valve open the engine was a naturally aspirated engine.


Mapping the engine

I was driving the Polo and Jeff was sitting next to me with the laptop. He will tell me what to do and then tell me to stop the car. Alter the maps and then we drive a bit again. We did this for about an hour. We pulled over next to the road and Jeff did some more of his magic. He could see exactly what the engine’s fueling was doing as the Lambda sensors gave him live readings. The compensation maps were all turned off so that he could do the raw mapping. After Jeff smoothed out the fueling map we went for another drive, now Jeff was only monitoring the lambda sensor.

I had to do some driving in anger to get to the higher RPM sites so that he could see if there were any issues. Next Jeff switched on the Lambda compensation maps, he allowed for a 5% fuel trim. The closed-loop Lambda system hardly made adjustments. This is how it should be. The car felt really good and so smooth. Nothing like what the car was before we started the mapping session. The car felt a lot more powerful in its naturally aspirated form as well.

Adding some boost

Next was to set up the boost and the way the ECU would do the fueling for the boost. The ECU had a function or compensation map for the boost. This meant the ECU would be mapped as a naturally aspirated car and as the boost come in the ECU would compensate for the boost by adding fuel. The more you boost the more fuel it would add and it will also start to reduce ignition timing.


Rule of thumb is that for every 0.1 bar boost you add you need to add 10% more fuel as you would be making 10% more power. The ignition timing would be retarded with 1 deg per 0.1 bar boost. What was nice about this setup if you want to set your boost levels higher you could do that in your boost control map. You don’t have to worry about the fueling as the ECU would control that automatically.

We set the boost control map to 1 bar boost, and we enabled the supercharger to engage at 50% throttle and enable the bypass valve control again.

First drive with boost after the new map

Jeff told me I must pull away from a standstill, just so that we could see how the acceleration fueling is working and how the engine behaves. I pulled away and floored the car. The car pulled like a rocket, I just heard Jeff say “F.ck me”. He was really impressed with how the car accelerated even with the wheel spinning and screaming. What was really nice you could still control the boost. It wasn’t an on\off boost setup like the bigger turbo cars. If the cars started wheel spinning I could just reduce the throttle and the wheel spin stops. The car pulled really strong.


I was really impressed. This was only with a bar boost, what would this car do with more…

With a rolling start in 1st gear, the car would start to wheel spin at 5000 RPM right to the limiter that was set at 7000 RPM. It would keep spinning right through 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gear while pulling like a rocket…..


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