Sealed DME's
One of the new rules for 944 Cup for the 2011 season, is the requirement for a sealed DME or electronic brain for the motor. The DME contains a chip which has a program, called mappings, that determine how the motor should work. For example, at a certain RPM, with a certain throttle position, set the fuel mixture to x, the amount of fuel injected to y, and trigger the spark plug at z. These days when you tune cars, you use a computer to program the chip instead of twiddling the carbs as of old. The thing is, the mappings are pretty small, and the chip's storage is pretty large, so there can be multiple maps on one chip. In theory, if you wanted to cheat, there could be one mapping for running on the dyno and putting out legal power and another mapping with greater horsepower when running out on the track.
To make a level playing field for the competitors, and if you want to win points and tires in the series, you need to submit your DME to a service provider, who will burn your single chosen map to a chip and then seal the box. I sent my 2 boxes off to Behe Performance to have this done. John was unable to duplicate my box with the AutoAuthority chip, since they encrypted the mapping, but the stock box was fine. And after a discussion with John, it's likely that the stock box would be making as much if not more power than the chipped one. That is because the AutoAuthority programming was done back in the 90's when gasoline wasn't tainted by ethanol. John told me he's finding levels of up to 16% ethanol in sampled fuel on the east coast. And the stock mapping would be a better fit until I get a custom tune.
Here's the stock DME with the seals.
To make a level playing field for the competitors, and if you want to win points and tires in the series, you need to submit your DME to a service provider, who will burn your single chosen map to a chip and then seal the box. I sent my 2 boxes off to Behe Performance to have this done. John was unable to duplicate my box with the AutoAuthority chip, since they encrypted the mapping, but the stock box was fine. And after a discussion with John, it's likely that the stock box would be making as much if not more power than the chipped one. That is because the AutoAuthority programming was done back in the 90's when gasoline wasn't tainted by ethanol. John told me he's finding levels of up to 16% ethanol in sampled fuel on the east coast. And the stock mapping would be a better fit until I get a custom tune.
Here's the stock DME with the seals.
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