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Yo! Been a while since I updated this. Not a ton has happened since I last posted in here, but a couple really major things have taken place that affect the way the car drives and runs. I'll start in chronological order:
Switch to Haltech Elite 1500:
The last time I posted in here was back in June when I dropped some photos of the car after a wash. It's funny, because after I took those photos I went to put gas in the car, and when I went to leave the car wouldn't start. The situation was as follows: I'd go to start the car cold, and after a few seconds of cold cranking it would fire right up. I usually kept the car on a tender just to make sure there was enough juice to fire the car up. After about a half hour of driving, if I shut the car off it was about a 50:50 shot of the motor not firing up, such as after filling up with gas. I'd go to start the car, the starter would crank times laboriously, then just die without firing up the engine. I'd either have to have a jumper pack or cables handy just to start the car again! I initially thought the root cause was battery heat soak, so I ditched the small Odyssey battery I was using in favor of an Optima Yellowtop. When that didn't solve it, I tried everything to insulate the battery from the heat of the exposed header, thinking that's what was causing the drop in voltage. I wrapped the battery in heat insulating material, I put reflective gold tape on the black factory heat shield, all making no difference. I started asking questions in the AEM community (I was running an Infinity 6 at the time) and discovered that the Infinity was extremely sensitive to voltage on startup. If the voltage was even slightly too low, the ECU would lock up and not start the car. It took countless calls to AEM customer support to diagnose this, and my tuner made a million adjustments to the cold start settings to no avail.
Between this problem, and the other issues I'd been having with the Infinity to this point (broken wideband controller out of the box mis-calculating AFR in closed loop, the connection port breaking, multiple O2 sensors fried, car constantly needing retunes) I was sick of the issues and anything to do with AEM. Some years ago, the car was running a Haltech Platinum Pro PnP standalone and I had just about zero issues with that ECU. The car would start and run like OEM, which was at this point outside of my wildest hopes and dreams for the Infinity. I started to explore the possibility of switching to Hondata or back to Haltech when my friend suggested I try the new Haltech Elite 1500 ECU. Although the ECU had been in production for a couple years at this point, Haltech had just released the plug-and-play jumper harness for the S2000. In keeping with my mentality of only buying the best parts for my car (what I thought the Infinity would be back in 2016...) I made the jump and ordered an Elite 1500, PnP jumper harness, and Haltech WB1 wideband controller.
The installation was super straightforward, and after some tweaks to the Haltech basemap the car fired right up and ran like a top. It's incredible, even during the first cold start on the ECU I could tell that this thing was going to fix all my issues with the car starting. Even on the base map, the car would fire up after 3-4 cranks and settle into a nice and smooth idle, just as it should. My tuner got the car up and running on a basic street tune, and even then the difference in drivability was pretty noticeable. I pull up to a stop now, clutch in, and the engine almost immediately arrives at its preset idle speed with zero hunting, no dips, no drama. Also, really surprisingly, my fuel economy has shot up by nearly 30%. With street pads and tires installed, the car will comfortably do 280+ miles on a tank cruising down the highway. Now, that's not how I typically use the car, but it's EXTREMELY encouraging because I've been wanting to make the 800 mile trip north to the mountains some time this year and now I won't have to worry about stopping every 200 or so miles to fill up... and I know it will actually start back up. As far as modifications go, this is one of those lateral moves that actually results in a HUGE quality of life improvement. I could genuinely daily-drive this thing now, which is HUGE because this is, at the end of the day, a street car!
I got the car dyno-tuned, and the car made 230whp/168 lb/ft of torque on an old, big-drum Dyno Dynamics dyno. Considering I'm running the stock airbox, pump 93, and a 70mm single I'm pretty happy with that. Nearly a year after making the switch to Haltech, I have no regrets or complaints, apart from that I wish I did this sooner.
I’ve been going back and forth between aem v2 (what everybody typically uses) and the platinum pro. I think this might sway my opinion In the haltech direction...now if I can just find a tuner who can tune haltech in my area. Any noticeable differences between the 1500 and the platinum pro??
I was pretty happy with the sound of the T1R 70R-EM, but for a single exhaust it was pretty hefty, and it had been through some REAL abuse. I did at least 2-3 laps of Sebring with that thing dragging along the racetrack, which scraped up the muffler pretty bad, and it was just in poor shape overall. My good friend SHG_Mike was in the process of transitioning his car to more of a street-friendly setup, which meant he was looking to sell his LiteSPEC Ti 70mm single, which is an item I've always coveted. I've always wanted a titanium exhaust on my car, but I wasn't too fond of the typical J's racing singles, or the Tomei single. Anything Amuse was out of my price range, and I've found them to be brittle and not really up to the task for hard track use. This LiteSPEC exhaust had been cleaned up, re-packed, and re-welded for strength by Mike, and it sounded GREAT on his car, so when he offered it to me for a steal I couldn't refuse.
Obviously the first thing that strikes you is how insanely light the exhaust is. The whole exhaust including hardware and gaskets weighs ten pounds. The T1R I pulled off the car (pictured above) weighed 33 pounds! Once installed, I fired the car up and, uhh... it's loud, now.
VERY loud.
Here's a video of me ripping around some local backroads with my buddy recording:
The car is properly, inappropriately loud now. It's glorious. Everything about my car is, by track car standards, very low-key and under the radar. That's very much not the case anymore. Every little downshift, any time I roll into the gas feels naughty now. The sound the car makes when the computer switches to the big cam is straight-up race car. It bangs and pops on overrun, but not artificially so like every new Porsche or BMW. Sometimes, when I'm driving at night, I catch a quick flash of light in my rear view as a pop of flame comes out. Can you tell I'm excited by all this?
I'll likely keep this exhaust until I get bored or tired of it, but the only logical step from here on out is a 3" titanium exhaust. That's likely going to cost an ungodly sum of money, so I think this exhaust will be on the car for at least a few years.
Last edited by Ricky_Flowers_; 05-12-2020 at 09:16 AM.
I’ve been going back and forth between aem v2 (what everybody typically uses) and the platinum pro. I think this might sway my opinion In the haltech direction...now if I can just find a tuner who can tune haltech in my area. Any noticeable differences between the 1500 and the platinum pro??
The Elite is a much more powerful computer than the Platinum Pro. Bot use VE tuning, but the Elite has more computing horsepower so the tune is managed better in real time. Fuel trim corrections happen quicker, it fires up faster, runs a bit smoother, etc. That having been said, the Platinum Pro is an EXCELLENT computer that should suffice for your needs. My only gripe is that if you want to go flex fuel, or add any sensors, you need to buy an expansion pack for it. With the Elite, you just wire the sensors directly to the ECU. You only need to buy the computer, the harness, and the wideband of choice. It's probably 15-20% more money, but if you're planning on wiring-in sensors to the computer I think it's worth it to go with the Elite.
Obviously the first thing that strikes you is how insanely light the exhaust is. The whole exhaust including hardware and gaskets weighs ten pounds. The T1R I pulled off the car (pictured above) weighed 33 pounds! Once installed, I fired the car up and, uhh... it's loud, now.
VERY loud.
Here's a video of me ripping around some local backroads with my buddy recording:
I plan on making the switch to flex fuel in the near future, so one of the logical upgrades needed to support this is a set of larger injectors. This was pretty much a no-brainer, as injectors are not something I want to **** with, and I've heard nothing by good things about Injector Dynamics. I used to run an older set of ID1000s back in the day, so I figured the logical step here would be to upgrade from the OEM injectors to a new set of ID1050x injectors.
There's really not much to discuss here. They installed very easily with the optional OEM adaptor harnesses, don't leak, and the car runs perfectly on them. They're a good bit noisier than OEM injectors at idle, but that's not something that bothers me at all.
It's definitely not for the faint of heart LOL. It came with a silencer that I can put in for long trips, but I think I've covered 1-2 miles at most with that thing installed. Just good to have for when the world returns to something resembling normalcy and we can all congregate at the dragon again, as the 800+ mile trip to and from the mountains is gonna leave me with some hearing loss
05-12-2020, 08:37 AM
