Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Plus 4 GDI rough running after Clubsport upgrade

John,

Your symptoms appear identical to mine and I find myself in the same place regarding engine/water temperatures. I have thus far lived with it but find it extremely frustrating at having to wait a short while before driving off.

Like you I feel it’s the factory mapping that’s the culprit with a lack of optimisation particularly the cold start cycle. Strange thing is that one of friends with a similar GDI has no issues and his car runs smoothly from startup with little to no pops and bangs.

I was grasping at straws hoping that someone on TM has had the issue resolved. Fingers crossed that someone has been successful and will
Reveal the secret.

Cheers
Ken

John,
Wonder if this is one of those, all cars are different things. My 2019 P4 had the full exhaust and manifold as part of the build. I was expecting the air trigger that Dave W described post upgrade but it was as smooth as silk and with no sign of sootiness even running from BHM to France. It doesn't help you in this instance but I bet there are lots of owners with no problems at all and others.....Ther does however have to be an answer in your case and TM is as good a place as any to find it.

David,
Now that is a leading question. For the before and after upgrade tests on my GDI I used Motorscope in Northallerton. They are fine for this as I just wanted to compare the shape of the torque curves, although their dyno reads some what fast IMHO. Over 200 brake from a GDI is just not a true figure.
They did try to get into the MBE ecu but could not.
On my Elan I have an Emerald and they did the main mapping and it’s perfect. I did the cold start adjustments as obviously they have to be done after the main map. If you have a Lambda sensor feeding into the ECU and some sort of logging it’s not difficult but does take time.

Ken,
Yes it’s very annoying particularly as once it’s warm it’s such an improvement on the previous map.
Over the winter I am going to look at what temp is the ECU actually seeing and possibly change out both the Lambda sensors.

David, you have a PM.
Cheers
John

Cain at Wolf Performance has access to a very good rolling road and I believe he has excellent maps for GDI too.

That's interesting, but I bought my CS kit through Cain and the ECU went to the factory for the re-map.
It might be worth a call though.
Cheers
John.

I would be very surprised if he has a map for the GDi as no one apart from the factory can get in to the map.

Cain does the GDI map now

Cain is an authorised MMC agent so he will have access to the GDI map.

You would expect all GDI's to start out the same, but they didn't. The throttle on mine was so hair trigger that it was difficult setting off without excess revs. But not all GDI's were like that.

It was also said that there were two GDI ECU upgrades. The Clubsport for cars with the full AR manifold and exhaust, and a second ECU upgrade for those with manifolds and exhausts not of AR origin. I don't know if this is the truth though.

It also appears from TM that upgraded GDI's with the ECU flash don't all respond the same way. I suppose that's typical Morgan but it makes no sense.

I drove Hawki's +4 gdi with the ecu upgrade and the sports exhaust regularly. I found it very responsive but above 3k it really flew. There wasn't a flat spot but it did need revs

John,

Like you I was suspicious of the Lambda sensors, my post Cat Lambda sensor was replaced not that long ago which had me contemplating changing the 5 wire pre-cat one. When the car was back at MMC shortly after the ecu remap issues they mentioned that there was no air leaks which I assume was on the intake side, however not sure if the issue could be associated with a dirty throttle body or if the car has a throttle position sensor that is iffy??

FYI, the factory also increased the spark plug gap from 30 thou to 50 thou which I found odd and subsequently put new plugs in with the smaller pre-set gap