Tuning solutions for N/A 480's & Piggy Back ECU's

[LIP]

Firstly I'd recommend the obvious cold intake induction system & then add an adjustable fuel pressure regulator & up the pressure half a bar.
This will give you a smoother idle, quicker throttle response (no noticeable lag) & you might find your rpm limit increasing a few hundred revs.
You can also modify the throttle linkage to open the second butterfly in the throttle body earlier using a couple of washers & a small bolt.
This doesn't affect normal driving but on hard acceleration you get more air going into the plenum lower down the rev range from say 4000 rpm down to 3500 rpm.
Even with these small mods you'll notice quite a difference providing your car is properly serviced & in good order.
If you want to go further & have much more control over the above modifications & be able to tweak your injector timing, ignition timing, adjust the rev limiter or add another injector then you need a Piggy Back ECU, especially if you want a cheaper tuning solution & are not ECU Map friendly.
Replacing the standard eprom is a specialist job & is expensive especially as the power increase isn't much (you'll get more from the mods above) & the new eprom is fixed, if you don't like the way the car's running after you've had it chipped it's hard luck, you'll need to buy a new standard ecu.
A piggy back unit is cheaper & allows you to tweak the cars sensor signals, including the throttle position sensor (which works well with the throttle linkage mod above) using a laptop.
You can also advance or retard your ignition tables & tweak your injector timings to ensure each cylinder is receiving the same amount of fuel.
It's also easy to revert back to the standard ecu for MOT's & such like & you can switch bewteen an economy or power map even while you're driving!!
I've been chatting to one such company recently who make a couple of brilliant piggy back units one is a full management system that allows you to tweak virtually every sensor including Lambda & another which is more of a fuel management system with more than 500 maps available & is capable of controlling a nitrous sytem.
They also make both of these products for turboed cars aswell.
If anyone's interested in these ecu's (not megasquirt) then give me a shout, they retail around the £350 mark but if there's enough interested people I could negotiate a discount & everyone saves.
And for those not confident enough to know where to start I'd be happy to make my maps for N/A cars available to those who purchase.
Happy tweaking
LIP