I probably can’t be too useful as I’ve never run a ‘similar’ tyre before on an Elise/Exige - I’ve used ZZR almost exclusively till’ now. I’ll do my best though! Will likely stick them on for some road mileage this month. 
It’s been a busy few weeks on the car… just not for me for once!
I took the car back down to RRR Engineering after I fixed the alternator for them to look at ‘completing’ the ECU install. I say ‘complete’ because it was always the intention to add a few more sensors and more importantly, the ADU digital dashboard. We couldn’t do it last year as there just wasn’t a shroud solution I was happy with, but RRR have figured something out and used my car as a bit of a model/template for future shrouds - so I hopefully there will be some “Lotus-ready” plug and play options available in the near future.
More on the dash later, but I had one complication first… an evening trackday popped up that I’d half-forgotten I’d booked and collection day for the car ended up being on the same day. Luckily the trackday was an evening session, but it meant setting off for the train station with all my trackday gear in tow 
(yes that oil did leak and ruin that suitcase)
I have to admit I was a little nervous about seeing the dash install in the car. RRR prep a lot of race cars, and do a good job of it - but the fit/finish that I was hoping for is probably something that a racing application simply wouldn’t care about. Probably a bit harsh/unfair to assume they wouldn’t do a good job of it, but I was expecting it to be something that I’d maybe need to tweak or rework myself in future perhaps with some trimming etc. As it came out, I’m chuffed to bits with it.
Terrible picture, sun was everywhere - but it’s the only one I currently have of the screen powered off:
As for the dash itself, the last few years have been pretty big for Lotus fitment digidashes. I loved the idea of the GARW project and tried to buy into that a few times, but due to stock and lack of comms it never really happened. Then the AIM stuff landed which is bloody brilliant and stepped the game up again but for me it was always going to me the ECUMaster ADU once I’d bought into that ecosystem because it adds a fair bit of functionality to my ECU and it’s 100% customisable. Whether or not I’ll ever use that functionality is an argument for another day 
The headline and main benefit is that it adds a tonne of extra inputs/outputs that the Lotus loom doesn’t have capacity for at the ECU end. Because my ECU is a 2zz PnP one, it is a one-to-one match to the wiring harness, which means you can only add sensors on pins that Lotus/Toyota left free in the standard loom… which wasn’t much. My gearbox oil cooler pretty much maxed it out which is why I had the separate SPA Design oil temp/pressure gauge rather than having it logging to the ECU.
With the extra inputs granted by the ADU, I’ve added the following:
- Oil Temp
- Oil Pressure
(SPA gauge is now retired and I have a face vent back, wooo!)
- 4x Wheel Speed signals piggy backed from the ABS system
- GPS position/speed/gyro/etc
These can all terminate to the ADU, and then the ADU sends then as CANbus messages back to the ECU and it all works a treat, so now I can look back at my trackday logs and see how oil temps/pressures were at various places on track. The track day analysis stuff is something that I plan to have a LOT of fun with.
Obviously it also does lap timing, if I participated in track events where this was legal it’s something I’d probably enjoy, but I don’t, so I won’t. IF I did though, it has the popular tracks pre-set into the device and will automatically detect them when you cross the start/finish line and automatically start timing with predictive times/deltas etc. If it’s an unknown track, you can either upload the coordinates of the start line in the ADU software or use a dash button as you cross the line on your sighting laps.
The individual wheel speed sensors gives me the option to use proper traction control, the previous strategy was RPM based and would just look for unusual spikes in RPM and frankly it sucked. No way could you rely on it to drive hard in any kind of dodgy conditions. Now I can set proper slip targets and combined with a 10-way adjustment knob I can have varying levels of aggression for it. It’s definitely something I’ll need to tweak and play with on a wet track and unlikely to factor in on a ‘normal’ day as the car still feels over gripped in most circumstances.
The last core feature is the fact it’s completely configurable in terms of the dash layouts, pretty much whatever you can think of you can setup with a bit of imagination. It’s very flexible and has some good logic built in for configuring alarms and stuff like that (such as oil pressure warnings if RPM exceeds a certain level, AFR warnings at 100% TPS, etc etc). RRR configured the dash with a generic ‘race mode’ one which I think is fairly standard across the range, and their interpretation of a Lotus OEM-style one which I really like for road use. I have tweaked both though, decluttered on some information I didn’t need/want and added some that I did, knocked some of the ECUMaster branding off of it and tweaked some behaviour like the shift lights etc to be a bit more wannabe F1 driver.
These are the screens I currently have setup:
Road:
Race: (since debranded the ECUmaster background)
Diagnostics: (since swapped fuel pressure (not monitored on 2zz) with gearbox oil temp)
I’ll probably add another screen in the near future for ‘tuning’. RPM, Speed, Knock Sensor and AFR Sensor readings etc.
The out of box dashes were pretty good, and really quite usable - but half the reason I bought this was to have something else to mess about with. The only issue with the out of box screens was that the ‘race mode’ RPM bar only went up to 8k, but the shift lights were set correctly for a 2ZZ limiter so it wasn’t a major problem.
In terms of physical inputs it uses the pre-existing button for resetting the trip computer for swapping pages (press), identifying a start line of an unknown track (hold) and acknowledging alarms (press). RRR added a rotary switch for the TC adjust, and also there’s a USB port mounted away for the data logging.
Back to the story, I collected the car from RRR and after a quick training course set off for Cadwell. I was booked on for track time starting at 17:30.
Trackday went well and the new dash didn’t throw any niggles… apart from one very minor one when I filled up with fuel, the fuel bar went to empty rather than full, but over the first mile of driving it filled itself back up again. No doubt some ‘noise filtering’ going on and something I can tweak out, but other than that the fuel gauge behaved impeccably all night.
I’ve not been to Cadwell in an age, and never in this car - so unfortunately I didn’t really get up to speed properly but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I screwed up the schedule a bit and thought the trackday ended at 20:30, so I went out for my final session at 19:55 just in time to see the 20:00 chequered flag That was a bit gutting as I’d had an extended break leading up to that to let everything cool down properly for one last go.
It was bloody hot though, I think I took 12psi out of my tyres after the first session and my GoPro was really struggling. Dismounted it to charge it between sessions and it was unbearably hot to the touch and I later found that it was only recording the first few minutes of a session which was a bit annoying. Starting to fall out with GoPro a bit now tbh, done three trackdays this year so far and haven’t had smooth sailing on any of them yet with regards to footage.
Photographer did a decent job though
Oh, and I melted/lost another two centre caps. 
