My Stage 2 Mk2 Fabia vRS

[muggo05]

awesome car mate.

I Will be getting the vRS Combi when it releases here and after looking at yours, i'm liking the white and black option!

Keep the updates coming, nice work.

[vRSy]

Big update time

My new Pace Products Intercooler and radiator package are now fitted to my car. Very impressed with the final product.

Definite improvement in response, and most importantly the power not only felt stronger, but i never noticed any power loss at all, which i normally do after 3-4 WOT runs. Its most noticeable at higher speeds though.

I gave the car a really good workout after picking her up, and im pretty certain there's a notable temperature drop in the engine bay compared to normal. Granted its colder outside than before but im pretty sure its better than it was by a fair margin.

And to put the icing on the cake, not only did they wash and clean my car, after i had explained to them that my oil temps were hitting 130degrees on track and was abit worried so they also replaced my oil with Motul 300V 5W/40 oil which has a much higher temperature range than the stock oils. As well as this they swapped my coolant for Motul MoCool to help keep temperatures in check.

Here you go these are the pics of the new radiator

Stock radiator
Dimensions
28mm thick x 730 wide x 410 high = around 8.4litres




Pace Products radiator
Dimensions
50mm thick x 730 wide 410 high = around 15 litres = 78% increase B)




As you can see, its a fair bit larger than stock.

Stock IC Dimensions
80mm Tube Width
96mm Stack Height
617mm Tube Length
= 4.73 litres



Pace Products IC Dimensions
90mm tube width
145 stack height
550mm tube length
= 7.17 litres
= 35% increase :star:





Well i removed the rear bumper and the ballast weights from the car. Almost gave up as one torx screws was defeating me for about 45 minutes because i couldnt get to it well enough to crack it then unscrew.

So i removed the wheel and arch lining in the end. Job done.

I cant believe they literally just bolted 25kg of metal weight to the rear crash beam. Easy and cheap method of weight loss though



Just driven it, and it is notably improved with the back end being alot more lively. Much less understeer, definitely a bigger difference than i expected to be honest. Probably to do with the fact that they were right out behind the rear wheels that makes it so much more noticable

[vRSy]

Braille B14 115 lightweight battery.

OEM battery is 20kg, Braille B14 115 battery is 5kg.

So between that and the ballast weights on the rear crash beam ive dropped 40kg of weight off of the car now.




Just need to sort out some terminals and then ill be getting her fitted

Took the golf cart to Mallory Park today with the Javelin TD event.

Awesome turnout and variety of cars on hand from Porsche 911 turbos, lotus's, Clio RS race cars and fully stripped out/caged track cars, kit cars, TVRs, a ridiculously fast ford RS van, to my little Fabia.

Weather was horrendous. Really cold and raiing all day, track was soaked, causing loads of guys to have 'moments' all over the track.

Somehow though, despite my worries of my rear tyres being worse for wear and potentially causing a lot of oversteer, the fabia was perfect all day, and really performed well through the bends and the straights. Everyone else seemed to be fighting their cars (wasnt a good day to have RWD), yet mine just felt fine with no real traction issues (apart from exiting the hairpin in 2nd).

The only issues I had were a spot of oversteer exiting Gerards when it was raining because the DSG kept over riding the manual and changing to 4th gear when i wanted to hang on to 3rd :dull:, but when a drier line appeared, it was better as i was in 4th much earlier, also suffered understeer at the cooper Esses, but even then, it wasn't bad, and if anything lined me up for the corner exit with no issues.

Really really surprised at the levels of grip considering the weather, i was expecting it to be like an ice rink. I somehow managed to get into a tripod at one of the corners B). Mostly i'm surprised that a set of Conti sport contact 2 tyres with tread just above the wear markers performed the way they did. They were horrendous at Rockingham both times, yet here, they were fantastic.

Some pictures










That TVR was immense. Me and Mike got a passenger ride in that. He wasnt even taking at past 5k, but was still flying around, and not shy of going sideways either. BUT, im only 5'9" and i had my head at about 45degrees to fit in the car!! small price to pay for the noise though.

As usual though, the kit car drivers were the problem for the whole day refusing to move over for faster cars all day long. With some of them not even having brake lights or anything, which is mega dodgy in the wet, with spray when they arent going that fast :dull:

Oh and people dont like moving over for skoda's

---------- Post added at 07:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:45 PM ----------

Heres some vids my mate managed to get of me.

Apologiesfor the pants music onthis first one, I was messing around with youtube video editerand saved it over the original by accident.

[vRSy]

Been a busy little bee recently

A bit of background

As said elier in this thread, i donated my car to Shark Performance to have them develop a remap for the 1.4TSI back in May last year in return for a F.O.C remap. I had been on the look out for a map and at the time was torn between APR Motorsport and Shark Performance for the job, Shark made the offer of no cost for development, to which i jumped at the opportunity. Saved me £400 B)

This was with shark stage 2, decat OEM DP and everything else standard.


As you can see huge midrange gains and the car went like a rocket. :thumbs: You'll have seen that i have posted many times about the biggest issues with this engine being the massive temperatures of the intake air charge, cylinder block and engine bay etc,Anyway, this is where i began to notice it more and more. The car suffered very excessive heatsoak, very notable on the 1/4 mile strip where it went like the clappers the first 3/4s but power began to wear off towards the end as temperatures rose. The same effect was noted on trackdays and in hot weather so i began to investigate what options I had for cooling to a safer level and ended up with the Pace Products Intercooler & radiator package which helped no end with the heat issues.

Why i changed map

The heat issues were reduced but not omitted, and i had started to get plumes of grey/white smoke from the exhaust at times, if anything it was when the car had been driven for prolonged periods. Shark believed the turbo to be on the way out which is never good news, but i thought well if its going to go pop, then its going to go pop. I might as well look into upgrading/recondition the turbo to be stronger and flow more to make some more power at the same time.

Shark believed this was not an option as the fueling system was maxed out and said they could map a hybrid on, but warned that they expected it to spit all of the pistons out when the injectors fail to flow enough fuel etc, however i was aware of many other tuning companies such as APR Motorsport and other euro tuners had already done this with no fueling issues.

I had also been logging temperatures and other parameters where i found fueling to be relatively low on the high pressure side with plenty of headroom and boost to be very high. The map requested over 2Bar(29psi) of boost of which is massively higher than this turbo is rated at resulting in the car only managing to make 1.6Bar(23psi). Looking at the N75 duty cycle which was showing 100% over the whole rev range you can see the turbo was running at its absolute maximum all of the time trying to manage the requested 2+ Bar and not even getting close. Normally when the car makes the requested boost the N75 duty cycle will drop down to 75-80%ish. This to me was the likely cause of the grey/white smoke etc.

At this point i had now started looking into other maps for the possibility of either hybrids or switchable options with water methanol injection. I considered REVO and APR, and very nearly went with REVO who offered me a very very competitive price for swapping to them, however they werent keen on going any further than stage 2 and wouldn't be interested in a hybrid upgrade which i found disappointing.

I then found out that Jabbasport now had the equipment in house to access encrypted ECUs, and they had already remapped a 1.4TSI Ibiza Cupra of Seatcupra.net which made very good peak Hp figures, but they customized it to his exact requirements limiting the mid-range torque as he requested the peak torque to not rise above stock levels. I liked the idea of a tuner doing the map on car to my specification and jabba also seemed interested in further modifications such as hybrids etc so i made the decision to let them set about my car.

Jabbasport remap

Kev@ Jabbasport began by asking about the current and planned modifications, discussed the forge intake that i had removed, talked about how the last map was, issues with heat on the strip and track, what i liked about the shark power delivery and what i didnt, what would i change, where i wanted gains, what sort of figures were on my mind. We also highlighted that the way the accelerator pedal was electronically linked to the throttle butterfly wasn't ideal. Essentially with the accelerator pedal 3/4 depressed the ratio of pedal movement to throttle opening suddenly increases dramatically, which on long fast corners of trackdays is a pain to modulate. So he also planned to alter the throttle maps to ensure that the pedal:throttle ratio was as close to 1:1 ratio as possible to make modulating the throttle much easier. Well chuffed with that, not aware of any other tuners currently doing this on the 1.4TSI.

My requests for jabbasport

I dont think i made this easy for them.

-I wanted the throttle map changed to emulate that of a throttle cable and a 1:1 ratio of pedal to throttle.
-I wanted a similar midrange to the Shark stage 2 map,
-I wanted slightly more top end, somewhere in the region of 215-225hp depending on the before after results.
BUT
-I wanted this done with much less boost so that i could have some longevity and mechanical sympathy for the drive train and turbo.
AND
- I wanted them to look into the viability of upgrading the turbocharger to a hybrid with regards to heat, high pressure fueling and injector duty cycle.

The results

The car was running the Pace intercooler, Pace Radiator, decat OEM downpipe, and the relevant map details shown below. All other parts were 100% standard.

I have the Shark stage 2 graph, stock graph and Jabbasport custom graph. All graphs have DIN correction which mean that the figures have been corrected to take into account the differing temperatures between the runs to make them directly comparable.
Normally the power & torque curves cross at 5252rpm. This isn't happening on these graphs due to the differing scales and the 2 x Vertical axis. (Thought id point this out before those with quick eyes notice).

Stock power
As you can see the figures look to be spot on. 179.7Hp/257NM (189 lbft). These are bang on what you would expect of a stock car, although bare in mind my car is not stock and has the IC/Rad and DP, so if anything the rollers were reading low.


Shark Performance Stage 2 @ 1.6Bar(23psi)
211hp/375NM(276 lbft). This torque figure seems quite high and is thought to be above the torque limit that people believe is applied to the DSG box on this car. Jabbasport said that the DSG seemed to have 3 x flashes on it, so im guessing shark had managed to access it and raise the limiters. But the torque and power figures here are around the same as the previous dynodynamics run at the beginning of this post(which was done without the intercooler)


Jabbasport custom @ 2.3Bar(19psi) 216Hp/357NM(263lbft)

Jabba had a tough criteria to meet, but have hit the nail in first time. Midrange very similar-slightly less, but thast because of the boost difference, spool of the turbo is faster and earlier, the requested boost is met across the entire RPM band and is 0.3Bar(4.3psi) lower, the N75 duty cycle now runns at a healthy 75-80%, the throttle map has been altered, there is slightly more peak power and they are keen for me to come back with a hybrid turbo B) B) B)



My thoughts

-Power delivery seems silky smooth and very progressive.
Mid-range isnt quite as strong as the Shark map ie, in 5th and 60 for an overtake, but change it down to 4th and its the same if not stronger.
-Top end - Not tried it to much tbh, the weather isnt ideal, but it feels very strong.
-Throttle map change - Seems to be a massive improvment. I had a try with the throttle at 3/4 and it is a lot more progressive rather than a sudden lurch. That was only in a straight line though, never fancied trying it in a fast corner on the roads tonight
Its a little to early to tell if the heat issues have disappeared as its very cold outside but id imagine that theres a huge decrease compared to before.

Theres also NO GREY/WHITE SMOKE.

Im massively impressed that Jabba have managed all the above with 0,3Bar(4.3psi) less boost than the previous map.

Very very happy with the results, very happy with the customer service and even better, Kev has been through the logs and maps with a fine tooth comb and the hybrid IS AN OPTION in the future. theres plenty of room on the high pressure fuel side and injectors. If anything the standard turbo is now the main restriction on the car. An intake will relieve the turbo now as its having to really suck the air in through the stock intake. The ITG should sort that one perfectly. So then its either a Loba Hybrid turbo swap or upgrade the compressor wheel on mine and trim the exhaust turbine a little.

Happy Happy Happy Happy Happy

And as if they couldnt do anything more to please me:

They have changed the settings of the XDS (electronic diff tha VAG use) from setting zero(weak) upto Setting 2(strong) and WHAT A DIFFERENCE.

Was it worth it. I think so, luckily im not out of pocket as thr shark map was FOC, so ive broke even.

[vRSy]

BUT

That wall happened last wednesday. Today is a week on and i am having a different map, from a differnt tuner

So i currently have the custom jabbasport map on my car and its very very good.

BUT the night i got back from having it done i was contacted by APR who have now started to re-enter the APR UK tuning scene and wanted my car for hybrid turbo map development. I had been having a distinct lack of communication from the old APR UK guys(tuningwerkes) so had just given up. Now under new management, its a huge improvement.

APR was my original choice even before i went with shark performance for my first remap anyway, mainly due to the switchable map system. The map isnt going to cost me anything, so that wasnt a factor to consider and ill also get a water methanol injection specific map that i can switch to when using water meth for max output B).

There was alot of oohing and ahhing over the last few days trying to decide if i should change from a remap that i am very happy with, ie why fix something that isnt broken, and Jabba were more than capable of doing the hybrid, but after a few discussions with many people, i have gone for it.

We've decided to take the modifying alot further though, we'll be sorting suspension, brakes, engine mounts etc etc. My situation is perfect for this. Im out of the country for 6 months, thus dont need the car, so APR are keeping it for me and going to go crazy on it on my behalf

Previous Spec
Decat DP, Pace Intercooler, Pace radiator, Forge intake, shark stage 2 remap :|

Current spec
Decat DP, Pace Intercooler, Pace radiator,Jabba Custom remap

Next weeks spec
Decat DP, Pace Intercooler, Pace radiator, Loba LO270 hybrid turbo, APR Stage 3 remap

This shiny little badger is getting bolted to my car

LO270 turbocharger

state-of-the-art “Extended Tip” compressor wheel
5-axis CNC re-profiled compressor housing and backplate
5-axis CNC re-profiled turbine housing
special clipped turbine wheel
optimized clearances
modified actuator
uprated bearing
precision balancing of individual components and CHRA

Not bloody cheap though

Apparently its capable of 270hp with all the bolt on parts and components you would expect a stage 3 car. but i removed my Forge intake as it was restricting power so its the stock intake fitted currently it will choke the power for the minute, but its only a minor mod to sort. Im not expecting 270hp by any means in all honesty, but im expecting to gain plenty over my current 216Hp, especially with a nice big intake.

Very excited.

This time next year, the car should be a very very different beast, but will have had considerably more money plowed into it than previously planned :S ,

Knowing my luck something will go wrong lol

The Polo GTI in this hot tuner challenge test is where my car should be performing (same engine/chassis/tuner etc) except my car wil have alot more power!!

http://goapr.com.au/media/mm-june2011.pdf<<< Makes interesting read

[Tigga1]

They have changed the settings of the XDS (electronic diff tha VAG use) from setting zero(weak) upto Setting 2(strong) and WHAT A DIFFERENCE.

vRSy, can you elaborate, how and what is the DIFFERENCE...?!!!
and should it be XDL or is it XDS...and is there an in between...?

cheers for a great build thread!

[brad]

Well i removed the rear bumper and the ballast weights from the car. Almost gave up as one torx screws was defeating me for about 45 minutes because i couldnt get to it well enough to crack it then unscrew.

So i removed the wheel and arch lining in the end. Job done.

I cant believe they literally just bolted 25kg of metal weight to the rear crash beam. Easy and cheap method of weight loss though

What is the purpose of these? Vibration damping or safety?

[weedub]

Hey Sy
Any further update for us on the hybrid and APR Stage 3 work?

[pologti18t]

What is the purpose of these? Vibration damping or safety?

The ballast at the rear is to balance the extra weight of the motor up front. In the Polo GTI they overcome this by moving the battery to the boot.

Briskoda.net has info on this and the XDL reset

[Transporter]

What a fantastic build thread! Great work.