Our powertrain team, led by Brandon Shaffer, took our car to the dyno at Evolution Dynamics this month. It was the team’s second time at the dyno, with our first time being almost one year ago.
Our time at Evolution Dynamics went exceptionally well and we were able to get five people who had never been a part of the process to play a role in tuning and data acquisition.
In the first half of the day, we spent most of our time tuning our lambda values, which indicate the composition of the air/fuel mixture in the engine. Without manipulating timing, this provided us with a significant increase in power, but most importantly, also an increase in reliability. After this, we began working with ignition timing. We iterated through timing values and created an MBT graph which allows us to see peak combustion efficiency as it relates to each RPM range. With this data across several manifold pressure ranges, we are able to create the most ideal spark timing possible.
A “Maximum Brake Torque” graph we can use to optimize spark ignition advance. It allows us to see at what point our engine begins to experience autoignition.
Torque and horsepower data. The green line shows a run from December of 2022. Blue shows where we started when we went to the dyno last week. Red is what we were able to achieve by the end of the day.