Base

The race car is an around 1200 kg weighing Honda Civic (8th generation) with an 2.0 Liter inline 4 engine, which was tuned by an local tuner on the dyno with around 225 whp (wheel horse power). The customer was already quite successfully running this car on a local track. The challenge here was to improve the engine calibration that way that the car gains a better driveability and controlability to improve corner handling. The requirement for 2023 were, no change in hardware, but improvements on calibration and race strategies were welcome.

Goal

- to improve the driveability to win at least 1 s on a roughly 85 s circuit laptime

- to improve the reliability of the engine and car by adapting fluid systems of the engine, setting the safety modules of the engine for the application

Process

After analyzing logs with the status quo the drive strategies were discussed to find out the most laptime reducing one. With respect to that, the calibration was tuned and improved to change response of the engine and the torque curve accordingly. Further safety modules were adapted to the application, e.g. ignition maps and correction tables were fitted to the temperature range, engine response demand and lambda level. We also tested the improved corner racing strategies and found a very good strategy finally

Result

- engine response was significantly improved

- laptime could be set several times to personal best of the customer, in total -1.2 to -2.0 s (depending on track layout) on a roughly 85 s circuit

- reliabilty could be improved, even by pushing redline to 8600 rpm on an unopened 220,000 milage engine