I joined The Purple Garage in August of 2025 and at the time the club had recently finished a full engine rebuild on Deep Orange 9 (for more information on Deep Orange cars click the button) and getting ready to fix the engine map. The team was also working on Deep Orange 3 fixing some oil leaks and preparing to get it back up and running which required wiping the ECU and building an engine map from the ground up. Being a student organization mainly comprised of Masters and PhD Automotive Engineering students we would spend our Saturdays in the lab working on these projects

When Deep Orange 9 was originally completed it was never fully tuned. The club was able to get access to the CU-ICAR chassis dynamometer and tune the cars transient fueling maps. When we started the engine map had some zones that were not running well due to the ECU air to fuel ratio values and the O2 sensors having large differences. This makes the ECU make adjustments to fueling making the engine bounce around idle very rough pulsing between a higher and lower rpm instead at steady singular rpm which is desirable. In order to fix this we needed to have the car running and driving at a steady speed and make adjustments to the Manifold Air Pressure (MAP) map that has RPM on the X axis and Pedal Position on the Y. These two values will make a grid with MAP values that tell the engine how much fuel needs to be injected at that state.

When we fixed the MAP values we then went into the adjust the spark timing map and the transient fueling map. The transient fueling map was dealing with how the ECU should manage cases of rate of the change of pedal position. This is important to look at as when you apply the throttle or lift off how does the engine react to the command that is being sent.

Overall the tuning day was very successful and the car is now running in a healthy state and we are now waiting to take it out to a track and begin tuning the suspension.

Deep Orange 9 Engine Tuning