- If you've been following
this show for a while you may remember that once upon a time I was tasked with making
the Miata shoot fire. Oh, shit. But the problem then is that we didn't have
the necessary fixings for shooting fire the right way, which led to me dumping a bunch
of propane out the tailpipe. - [Cameraman] Yo, that's gonna be huge. - So today we're gonna shoot
some fire with the Miata. We're gonna get three steps set up, which means we're gonna get launch control and flatfoot shifting, and through those controls I should be able to make some
fire shoot out the tailpipe, which is very exciting. I'm Zach, and this is "Moneypit". Let's shoot some fire the real way, baby. - Big thanks to Helix for
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got different rev limits for different things. Like launch control is a step. (car engine revving) So at launch control, we want our rev limit
to be set a lot lower than our ultimate rev limit. This car's ultimate rev limit
is currently set at 7,200 RPM. That's way too high for launching. For launching, we want
something like 3,500 RPMs, (car engine revving) but if I have to hold the pedal to keep the RPMs at 3,500
RPMs that's difficult and I'm not that good at it. So it would be great if there
was a way to tell the car to just hold the thing at 3,500 RPMs while I'm trying to launch. Well, perfect, there is a way to do that and that is built into this step system. So we've got launch control
as one of our steps. That'll be one of our rev limits. Then we can move on to our other step or our other rev limit and that is flatfoot shifting. What is that? Well, that's our other step or rev limit that we're going to set up today and that's a rev limit
for while we're shifting. Now, let's talk a little
bit about the theory behind why you would flat foot shift. Now in a naturally aspirated
car you really wouldn't, unless you were trying
to make a bunch of noise, but in a turbo car, flatfoot shifting can help us combat turbo lag. One of the biggest enemies of turbo cars. Obviously to get a turbo, to make boost it takes some time to spool up and actually sling all
that power into the engine. And even when you're shifting gears, when you go from two to three, when you get back on power in third gear, it takes a second for the
turbo to get back up to speed and make power. But if you never take
your foot off the gas and you never close your throttle body well then your blow-off
valve never blows off and releases all that pressure and boost just keeps cruising
through your throttle body through the engine, and you don't have any of
that lag, which is great. But if you just do that
in a car like this, well, you keep your foot
to the floor during shifts and you're just banging off
your ultimate rev limiter or 7,200 RPMs in this, which is noisy and obnoxious
and kind of hard on some stuff. So it would be really nice
if I could tell the car to lower that rev limit
while I'm flat foot shifting to say like 5,500 RPMs, which
wouldn't be so dang loud and wouldn't be that hard on stuff but it would still keep
boosts very close at hand for when we get into the next
gear and let the clutch out. Well, that's great because we can do that. That's what our third step is gonna be. We're gonna set a flatfoot
shifting rev limit at about 5,500 RPMs. So that boost comes on quicker
as we move through the gears which will make our overall
acceleration happen quicker. So the car should actually
get a lot quicker today without changing any of
the power that it's making. That's pretty cool. Now, whenever we talk
about this kind of stuff we obviously got to talk about anti-lag. Now launch control will
help us have boost on demand and through the settings we
should be able to tweak it so that we have the best boost
on demand at launch possible, which is very cool. That helps us battle turbo lag. And with flatfoot shifting,
like we just talked about, keeping our foot on the
gas through shifting keeps turbo lag from really
being that terrible to us. So you might think, well,
that's anti-lag, right? Kind of, I mean it is anti lag, right? It's helping us battle lag, but it's not quite anti-lag. You see anti-lag pretty much invariably will have a method for delivering
extra air to the exhaust. So if you're getting that
extra air through the engine often that means you have a throttle body that you can tell to hang open when you have anti-lag engaged. Or you can bypass the engine altogether with a series of bypass pipes that deliver fresh air
right into the exhaust in front of the turbo to help combustion happen
in your exhaust manifold and help keep your turbo spooled, thusly anti lagging the turbo, but to add a system to
allow that extra air to get to the turbo even
when you're off throttle is a bit of extra work and it's really not something that I need. So we're not going to do a true like rally style anti-lag style system, but I am going to combat lag in two spots, which are pretty important. Off the line and through shifts. So while this isn't quite anti-lag, it is against lag. If that makes sense. I hope it does. Yeah, cool. All right, so anyway let's get into it. Okay, so let's talk about
what it's actually gonna take to get these things set up on the Miata. Now you already know that
we have a standalone ECU, our Megasquirt. So that really gives us
the majority of the tools that we need, it is able to do launch control, flatfoot shifting. So the only thing that we need to do is wire a switch to allow
us to engage launch control and flatfoot shifting
and things like that. What we're going to do
is use an existing switch on the Miata. The Miata has two clutch switches, one at the bottom of the travel that lets you start the car
once it's pushed all the way in. And there's one switch
at the top of the pedal that disengages as soon as
you touch the clutch pedal and that'll shut off cruise control as soon as it sees you
going for the clutch. So that's the switch we're gonna use. So the first thing I'm going
to do as you might expect, is to take out the passenger seat. This will give us access
to our aftermarket ECU and all of our wiring
and our options plug, check them to make sure that
the brown and white wire that comes out of this clutch switch is the same one that goes over to the ECU. And it is, that's great news. So now we just need to do
the actual wiring over there which should be pretty simple. We're just going to splice
from one wire to another. Okay, so I've got my little jumper cable that's gonna go from the options plug on the back of the Megasquirt, and then we're gonna splice this end into our clutch signal wire that comes from our clutch switch. But this is going to go here. I'm just gonna feed our clutch wire into this little channel. (upbeat music) Okay, so that is our clutch switch spliced into our Megasquirt ECU. So we can use that to
activate our launch control and our flatfoot shifting. Spectacular. Now what we have to do
is get in the computer and do a little hacking. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is go into the Megasquirt. I'll go to advanced engine, and come down to launch, two-step, three-step, trans brake. So I've got it turned on to launch, clutch in, (car engine revving) 2000 RPMs of fury. Well, I was just gonna see
if we could maybe shoot just a little bit of fire. I mean, I know we're inside
and my car is right there but you know, 3000 RPMs, negative five degrees of timing, that might make a little fire, right? (car engine revving) - [Cameraman] Jesus (beep). You scared the (beep) out of me. - Fire? - [Cameraman] No, hang on. - I wish they made, those Airwick plugins or the Glade plugins. I wish they made ones
that smell like this. Right, the Miata actually shoots fire and not the ghetto way. So that's cool. I'm sure the neighbors aren't too happy. So I'm probably going to
stop doing that for a minute, but that's awesome. Right? So it's also not for no reason, it's to help us get off the line quickly. So let's go do that. And we have made it to our super secret undisclosed testing facility to do some launch control
testing on the Miata. First off we have two cones set up 60 feet apart from each other, and Christina's down at the
finish line with a stopwatch. So she's going to be recording times. The goal is to see how quickly
I can cross these cones. First, I'm going to launch
the car just by myself with my brain and my feet, we'll see how quickly I
can get across the cones. And then we'll come back
and turn on launch control and we'll go through all the
settings and talk about them. And then we'll launch this
thing a few more times and see how much we can
improve our 60 foot times. Let's do it. - 2.25. That was pretty quick. - All right, not bad. Not that 2.2 seconds really
means much to me by itself but hopefully we can improve on that. So we'll do a couple more so we can kind of establish an average and then we'll turn on launch control. (upbeat music) Okay, so here's our current launch times, with just me operating the pedals. They're a little bit all over the place but that's because it's
tough to be consistent launching a car, you know. When I was just launching right there I was doing about 3,500 RPMs
and that felt pretty good. Now we're going to set
our launch rev limit. Let's do some launch control launches, 3000 RPMs, and see what we get, see
if our times improve. - Whoo, 2.12. I felt that was a really accurate click and a very good launch. So maybe this thing is worth it. We'll see. - Yeah, it is. I think I'm starting to
get things dialed in. I'm tweaking how much timing it pulls and for how long it
pulls it after I launch. And so there's definitely
some time to be gained there. I'm not gonna go too hard right now. It's in a good ballpark. So I think it's probably
time that we pull the timing and shoot some fire. Okay, so we are effectively shooting fire. Very cool. No, that's not for no reason. What I'm hoping is that burning
all that gas in the exhaust will help to get my turbo
closer to spooling up and making the boost for
when we launch off the line. So maybe those fireballs
will make me a little quicker through these cones. Well, I'm not convinced, but I'm ready to find out. 2.15. Well, so not much change,
but it did sound cooler. And you know what, since we've
turned on launch control. Sure, we didn't shave off a bunch of time but we have been incredibly consistent and that when you're
racing is really important. So we'll do one last one. See what kind of time I run there and maybe we'll see about
doing some flatfoot shifting. Hey, it felt quick, 2.09. Boy, that's fast. That's the fastest 60 feet I've ever seen. We're getting off the line quicker and we're gonna be getting
through shifts quicker. I think it's time to
go to a real drag strip with a real timing setup and
see what we actually can do. But now that I ran a 2.09, hell yeah. Let's do a little flatfoot shifting. This parking lot is a little bit small, so it's not like we're going
to get a full one two pull in here, but we've got enough distance to confirm that flatfoot
shifting is working and show you what it does. So I'm gonna turn it on real quick. It's very easy. It's in the same menu as a launch control. All right, so with flat shifting on, so then we can set our
flatfoot shifting rev limit. So when I go to shift and I've got my foot
hard on the gas pedal, we can choose what RPM it
goes to in between shifts. Instead of 4,500 right now, and honestly, I'm just going
to leave it right there. So all I gotta do is burn
those settings to the car and then we're ready to go. So let's get a little
one two pull across here and you'll see that my foot
is going to stay hard down on the gas even when I go
to shift to second gear and we should hang
immediately at 4,500 RPMs during that shift. So maybe I'll shift a little bit slowly so we can really see that. I'm just gonna turn my headlights on now. Pop up, up and down. All right, let's go. Launch control 'cause why not? Well, I didn't even
think I'd gotten second. I double clutched it there. Double clutching that granny
shifting and double tripping. Okay, well it worked. I didn't think I made second. So I hesitated and hit the clutch again to try to pull it in. I was already in second, but it seemed to work just great. It held at 4,500 between shifts and now I'm going to do
it again one more time where I actually do it decent. Okay. Pretty cool. That is gonna make shifts so much quicker when you're trying to
actually haul some ass. So I really think between launch control and our flatfoot shifting, this thing's going to be pretty quick in a straight line race type scenario. So I really think it's time to take this thing to the drag strip and see what it'll run in the quarter mile and like a legitimate 60 foot
and all that other stuff. Or maybe we'll go to an eighth mile. I don't know. But give us some guesses. What do you think our
eight mile time would be, our quarter mile time and we'll see who's right. I'm gonna guess, I'd love to be in the 12s. I'm going to guess a 13.2, total guess, but yeah I think we got to do that soon. We got to hit the drag strip use our launch control and
use our flatfoot shifting to put down some serious times. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned a thing or two. I hope you had fun watching
us shoot some fireballs. Don't forget to like this video
and subscribe to the channel and you can follow me
on Instagram @ZachJobe and follow Donut while
you're there @donutmedia. I'll see you guys next Wednesday. I'll do one more launch. Wow, that's great. That really is great.
