Chip Tuning

Fed up with your car’s sluggish performance? Want more power but can’t stand the sight of furry dice? Many motorists are turning to the ‘chip-tuning’ alternative to secretly unleash their car’s full potential.Buy a car these days and you canbe sure that the engine will be controlledby an Engine Management System (EMS) containing a microprocessor in an Electronic Control Unit (ECU). The processor reads values of engine speed, inlet airflow, water temperature etc., and decides when to produce the ignition spark. The processor also controls any fuel injectors or turbochargers fitted to the engine. The engines performance is defined in a look-up table stored in an EPROM, so for a certain engine speed at a certain manifold pressure the spark advance figure is given in the look-up table or ‘map’. Chip tuning or ‘re-mapping’ involves changing the values stored in this map.