Schips thread revisited

[Dave Head <dhead@sundial.sundial.net>]

Here is a post from Dave Lawson in the 9410 archives concerning Ned's view
of Peter Wales and Superchips...  Pretty interesting, I thought. BTW,
downloading more than one month of archives isn't a good idea unless you
have a lot of time on your internet account :-O...
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From: Dave Lawson 
To: quattro <quattro@swiss.ans.net>
Subject: Re: Brainerd Quattro Club event report
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 94 14:23:00 mdt

Hi All,

>Yea I think some of the fastest speeds at Second creek were about 90mph 
with
>Neds turbo lounge chair and the Rx7. My 4000q posted respectable times at
>Second Creek when compared to the TCQ's but that's attributable to the
>tightness of the course.  Brainard is a different world.

The fastest I have seen at second creek in my TQC is around 85-90. As for 
times, I remember you being pretty close to me Bruce. At Brainerd, I was in 
the slower 3rd of the field. My fastest time was 2:25 and has much room for 
improvement. Other times recorded are 2:15 for a 90 20V sedan, 2:09 for a 
TQC with suspension and race tires and stock engine and 2:06 for some highly 
modified TQCs. As usual, those last few seconds cost big $$$. Can't remember 
what the sport quattros were turning.

>> - I met two owners of turbcharged 4000 quattros, one performed the
>>conversion himself, the other was imported from Germany and was converted 
by
>>the factory

>More on these please?

On fellow has turbo charged his 84 4000 quattro. He says that the car has 
been constantly evolving since he bought it in 84. He went the turbo route 
with parts from an 81 5000 turbo. He bought the entire car for parts and 
swapped what he needed to make it work. He was using the stock CIS from the 
4000 along with the stock compression ratio. He didn't put on the turbo 
computer.( Not sure how the engine management on these early cars worked). 
He did install a popoff valve on the intake manifold to regulate boost. At 
some point he burned up a piston, due to using the high CR and running 14psi 
of boost pressure. So he went and re-engineered his design and rebuilt the 
engine. I can't remember exactly what state it is in now, but it is a real 
screamer. He is one of the fellows who organized the quattro club event at 
Portland last year. I guess he had the car there and it was pretty quick.

The other fellow says that there is one in his family and his sister drives 
it.  It is an 86 90(4000) quattro which they imported from germany. He said 
the conversion was done at the factory. This car is somewhere around Ohio or 
Illinois.

>> - I had a very long discussion with Ned Ritchey of Intended Acceleration
and
>>one of the topics was Superchips. If anyone is interested, I can post some 

>>of Neds thoughts.

On saturday evening, a whole group of up went down to the local kart track 
and had a few run groups of Winston Cup go-karts. As Ned always seemed to 
end up with the slow kart, people were wondering if he would tweak the 
governer to get some advantage. After this fun(we ran go-karts for 1.5 
hours), we proceeded to a local watering hole where I got to sit and talk 
with Ned and his daughter.

He mentioned that he heard about the superchips thread on the mail list and 
wondered what I knew. I told him what had been posted and that I thought 
Peter Wales was walking a pretty fine line. As the net has noted, Ned said 
the same thing, that there is no real wording in the advertisements which 
says that they modifiy the computers with a replacement PROM. It only says 
that you will have a performance improvement over the stock configuration.

Ned highly respects Peter Wales who runs superchips. He said he has gone and 
toured their facility in Florida and sat down and talked with Peter at 
length. Peter has built a large engineering facility and is really going 
after the US market with 'automotive computer perfromance enhancements'. 
When Ned was there, he saw some brand new ford on the dyno test stand where 
they were working on remapping the computer. Ned said that Peter and company 
were one of the first to break the new ford code and is able to work with 
it. Superchips is really going after the performance market where there are 
hundreds of thousands of potential sales.

Ned said that Peter has some computer program which he developed which takes 
any PROM code file and within minutes returns where each data table is, what 
data is contained in the table, where the code is, etc. I asked him if this 
one program could disassemble any machine code from any one of the hundereds 
of processors out there, but he didn't think it went that far. Ned also said 
that the new car ECUs have the individual VIN for each car embedded into the 
PROM and that if you go about replacing PROMs as they have done in the older 
cars, the new ones won't work. Ned said that Peter has figured out how to 
replace a PROM in this type of ECU. This new PROM with the VIN inside it is 
supposed to cut down on the aftermarket PROMs and you screwed up you 
computer, you would need to co get a replacement from the factory as only 
they are supposed to know how to program these new PROMs.

We also talked about the Onboard Diagnostic specs that the EPA is requiring 
and how this will affect performance tuning of cars. Ned also showed me his 
portable diagnostic computer which is used to hook up to the later VW/Audi 
cars through some connector on the ECU. He started up his car with the box 
connected and it showed the part number of the computer, the country of 
origin for his PROM, and the current data from the engine, numbers like RPM, 
boost pressure, ign timing, coolant temp, etc. This box also allows you to 
see the errors which have occurred and have been stored in memory. Pretty 
neat stuff.

I had told Ned what I have been attempting to do with the PROM in my TQC. 
That I have downloaded the code and wrote a disassembler to look at the 
assembly language. He said he has seen a few PROMs where someone else has 
done this, and then reprogrammed the PROM such that everything was in 
different locations. When he learned that I had a chip carrier in my ECU he 
offered to install his PROM emulator an 'adjust' the code from stock. He 
said that he can just change 2 locations in the PROM and there will be an 
amazing difference. I had to decline his offer at this time, but would 
definately take him up on it in the future. Ned is truely an intelligent man 
and filled with great performance information about Audis.
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I don't want to Unearth the debate here... Let's remember that this process
with chips is constantly evolving. I imagine when Ned was starting out, his
chips/upgrades were relatively simple and unsophisticated... What's
important to me is that there are people out there doing the work that we
can benefit from. I visited Peter's shop here in Fl and it is a solid
operation with significant money invested - I just wish he had a 4 wheel
'rolling road', not just a two wheel...
********************************AUDI FAN******************************
EMCM(SW) Dave Head
87 5KCSTQ 170K miles and counting...
1.8 bar boost - @ 1.3 the shuttle launches
Maitland FL
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