Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Classic Morgans (pre-CX) Performance measurement e.g. 4/4

Not tried yet, but I doubt it, mind you the engine idles beautifully at stoich (14.7:1) so that's all fuel and oxygen burnt, any failure to pass an emissions test would therefore be down to cat performance. People worried about all this should simply ask their fabricator to repurpose their OEM cat when building the new exhaust, or simpler still, just find an MoT station with a sensible tester in residence




I believe I have covered this question before, but in truth it all really depends on how far you want to go?

The big jump in cost comes when you need to map the car to get enough fuel into the engine to match the air, the sensible man wanting best value performance should probably just fit a better exhaust and an air filter then stop there, this should cost roughly anything from £1,200 for just the manifold to £2,000 if you also want the remainder of the system making up as I did.

Just replacing the restrictive factory exhaust manifold should give a 20hp increase and take you to 165hp which the Visteon ECU and stock injectors will happily cope with. After that, and if you fit the Fusion Fabrications inlet manifold I used (around £1,000 fitted), you will now find the engine is shifting a lot more air, so much air in fact air it will also need more fuel to match or you 100% will run lean and the engine will feel very flat indeed. The standard injectors are actually perfectly up to the job of supporting the 185hp the engine is now capable of producing with both inlet and exhaust manifolds changed, all you need to do to hit that number is run a richer calibration in the Ford/Visteon ECU.

Unfortunately this is where things get awkward, I couldn't find anyone up for properly live mapping the Visteon with the car on a rolling road. This MK3 Mondeo/2009 Focus engine management system is old now, and because it didn't appear on any cars that were even vaguely performance focused (no pun intended), mappers never really hacked it back in the day. These days the situation is even worse, OK so there are people out there who will play with fueling remotely, but first you've got to invest in the kit to reflash the ECU and I would suggest a wideband gauge kit is also essential, how else can you really be sure you're hitting safe AFRs under load?

I'm not saying there's nobody out there who can live map the old Visteon, but even if you can find someone to do it, it'll likely be in the order of £600 for the session and if you then go on to add cams you'll be back with them again spending another £600 to get that setup mapped. You're now in the hole for £1,200 on mapping alone, this is where the plug and play EMU Black ECU at £1,150 starts to make a lot of sense.

I knew I wasn't going to stop at an exhaust, I wanted the FF inlet and have previous experience with aftermarket ECUs so fitting the EMU Black made sense to me, once I had complete control over the engine management a set of Newman Phase Two cams were sure to follow. If you replicate my full house approach you're going to be spending £5,000 but this package should all add up to a 50hp increase taking the engine from 145hp to 205hp at a cost of £100 for every horsepower added. Not cheap I grant you, but spending £5k to turn a stock Duratec Plus 4 into a Supersport is still a useful £3k saving over buying a Supersport, you also get to develop the car in stages to spread the cost.

But it's also why I started my response by saying the sensible man wanting the best value performance improvement from his Duratec should just fit a better exhaust manifold and stop there, if you can find someone to build you an Supersport replica exhaust manifold for £1,200 and you get them to keep the factory cat when they create it you'll have no emissions issues and achieve 165hp at a cost of £60 for every horsepower added.

As I said, it all really depends on how far you want to go?