Ben Copeland recommended Dale at Bailey Performance, so I got the car booked in for a session yesterday. Dale will do a full eight hour day on your car for £250, starting at 10am and going through til 6pm, or as in my case yesterday 6.30pm.
I arrived just before 10am and it was straight into the workshop with the car. Once the Emerald software was installed on a laptop it was time to connect it up to the ECU and for Dale to take a look at the map that the car was running.The map was set up for throttle position, which is fine for carbs and injection but for a turbo engine it needed setting up to read MAP. This was where we started to realise how user unfriendly the Emerald software is. A slow plod through the 65 page manual and no hint of how to change the settings from TPS to MAP. Luckily pressing and clicking in a few places on the screen gave us the answer.
Trying to reset values in the tables was less than simple too, every change needed the map reprogramming to the ECU, it was going to be a long day for Dale, but after a couple of hours he had definitely got to grips with the Emerald system.
A first run on the rollers showed the car was running all over the place, so a load of changes were made to try and get the map somewhere near to being usable. This was another test for Dale as a one unit alteration in a load site on the fuel table would send the AFR from very rich to very lean. Cue lots of changes to MAP compensation tables, injector scaling and signal smoothing to make the changes to the various tables work.
Once the map was sorted it was time for the power runs, first run saw 233bhp at around 8lbs of boost. 'How high do you want to go?' asked Dale. ' Give me a safe 250 and keep all the pistons in the engine and I'll be happy' so a bit of adjustment on the actuator and it was time for another run, only this time boost was lost early and power was down.
Another adjustment on the actuator and fitting a bleed off from the actuator allowed the engine to hold boost for longer on the next run and produced 272.2bhp, but there was a little dip in the graph just before max power. A couple of small changes to the ignition map and a final run saw the figures rise to 278.4bhp and 295.5lb/ft of torque at 13lbs of boost.
Next job was to set the cruising fuelling so there is still some economy in there for long distance driving.
Last job of the day was the road test and OMG, the turbo starts spooling from 1800rpm and the car was so much more responsive than it had been. The damp roads near Dale's place proved to be a bit challenging, but the drive home was absolutely brilliant once I got a bit further north and out of the drizzle and could actually try to put the power down.
So if you want your motor sorting by someone who will dedicate a whole day to it, go over and above to get things right and all at a decent price then get in touch with Dale at Bailey Performance in Telford.
