ECU

It’s all well and good slapping a fat stack’s worth of power-making goodies onto your car and hoping for the best, but you’ll never really make use of their full potential on a factory ECU. You’re going to need something that can recognize those parts and be tweaked to suit your exact setup for proper increases in power.

These days, the most accepted way of doing this is to switch out the factory example for a plug-and-play unit, and one of those coming up in the world is from Australian-based manufacturer Haltech Engine Management Systems. We talked to Greg Lysien from Haltech to find out how it works: “If you’re getting serious about the performance of your Silvia, then you’ll quickly realize that the factory ECU just won’t cut it. All that additional horsepower and boost needs to be reigned in and kept under control — that’ll require some serious computing power.

“As most owners don’t want to go down the road of pulling out electrics and getting lost in a sea of confusion, we have developed the Platinum Series Pro Plugin ECU, so you can simply unplug your factory ECU and plug the Pro Plugin directly into the factory harness. There’s no additional wiring required, and all you have to do is load your base map and it’s ready to go. “They are capable of supporting all your OEM functionality, such as idle control, air-conditioning output, a thermo fan, a fuel-pump control module, MAF [mass airflow] sensors, boost control, vehicle speeds, etc. It also now supports the use of a flex fuel sensor directly wired on the auxiliary connector.

“This will allow your tuner to make the most of all additional components that aren’t supported by a factory ECU, such as upgraded turbochargers with bigger injectors, and will open up opportunities for additional systems like vital monitoring, anti-lag, and launch control.” Haltech Engine Management Systems +61 2 9729 0999 // haltech.com