[Diy_efi] Re: Gentlemen, Start Hacking Your Engines

[Phil Lamovie]

By CHRIS DIXON

ON a smoggy afternoon on a broad swath of farmland in Bakersfield,
Calif., Erick Aguilar is about to test years of work. He has brought a
black Honda Civic to the Famoso Dragstrip to race against a small
fleet of other souped-up imports, including tricked-out Mazda RX-7's
and scorchingly fast vintage VW bugs. In the bleachers, a diverse
crowd of young men and women have gathered to compare notes and watch
the races, called the Battle of the Imports.

Mr. Aguilar lines up with another Civic, and when the light goes
green, the 300 horsepower under his hood makes the car rocket off the
starting line. It reaches 60 miles per hour in about three seconds and
clears the quarter-mile in 10.28 seconds, with a top speed of 128
m.p.h.

The crowd roars, and the crew at the starting line stands slack-jawed.
Mr. Aguilar's little car has just become the fastest non-turbocharged,
gasoline-powered Honda Civic on the planet.

Back at the pits, Mr. Aguilar is humble. "We did a little work to
broaden the horsepower," he said. "I guess it paid off."

The work to which he refers includes plenty of old-fashioned greasy
mechanical tinkering of the kind practiced by hot rodders and
shade-tree mechanics for decades. But Mr. Aguilar is also a wizard at
a newer sort of garage alchemy: the reprogramming of automotive engine
control units, the small computers that regulate fuel, air and
ignition, for maximum horsepower.

Over the last decade or so, a generation of young, technologically
smart drivers came to realize that if an engine control unit were
simply a computer, then it could be hacked. They would not need a
wrench to make their cars run faster; a keyboard and some patience
would allow them to create customized high-performance engine-control
programs of their own.

The result has been a revolution in high-tech hot rodding that has
spread from Southern California to the East Coast and spawned a new
market for performance-boosting add-on parts, gadgets and software.
According to Jim Spoonhower, a spokesman for the Specialty Equipment
Market Association, an industry group, sales of such aftermarket
performance gear came to $2 billion in 2002, compared with $295
million in 1997.

As Grant Downing, 40, who works for Venom Performance, a seller of
high-tech car products in Stanton, Calif., said: "Kids these days,
they go to school and they've got computers they learn on. That their
car is also a computer is just no big deal to them."

Venom fields an import drag-racing team and runs a Honda Civic whose
800-horsepower four-cylinder engine boasts both nitrous oxide
injection and a turbocharger. The company produces various products
for imported and domestic hot rods. But Wes Lakey, the company's
director, says it is the sport import and compact market, cars that
include the Civic, the Mitsubishi Eclipse, the Hyundai Tiburon, the VW
Golf and even the surprisingly popular Ford Focus, that is growing
fastest.

"It's just exploded," Mr. Lakey said. "Small performance shops are
just popping up everywhere."

One of the computer products in which Venom takes most pride is a
nitrous oxide injection system controlled by a Palm organizer. Once a
mysterious gas known as much for blowing up engines as making them go
faster, the horsepower-enhancing ability of nitrous oxide, or laughing
gas, gained wide credibility in 2001 when the film "The Fast and the
Furious" shone a spotlight on high-tech (and highly illegal) street
racing.

"The Palm Pilot piggybacks off your E.C.U.," Mr. Lakey said, referring
to the engine control unit. "Instead of using your PC, now you can sit
in your car and change your whole system. The Palm Pilot has all your
engine configurations. You can set it to full race mode in seconds."

Mr. Lakey said that the company came up with the product not only for
convenience, but also because it is a great marketing tool. "A kid
wants to be able to say, 'I can program my car with a Palm Pilot.' "

Engine control units first appeared in cars in the late 1970's. By
regulating fuel injection, air and ignition far better than older
systems that relied on carburetors and distributors, the E.C.U.
resulted in better gas mileage and fewer emissions. These "black
boxes" are now so ubiquitous and advanced that if your car has an
engine problem, a mechanic can diagnose it by simply plugging the car
into a computer.

But for some, this technology came at a price. Until engine control
units came along, all the small-time hot rodder needed to soup up an
engine was a little knowledge, a few familiar tools and a well-tuned
ear. By making such inexact science impossible, the E.C.U. relegated a
proud band of do-it-yourself craftsmen to working only on older cars.
With newer cars, most home mechanics were limited to mundane tasks
like changing the oil or the spark plugs.

For young people comfortable with technology, however, the increasing
sophistication of engines has provided opportunities and challenges.

"I think young people have gotten back a love of cars," Mr. Spoonhower
said. "They've grown up with technology and have learned that in some
cases, they can work with the onboard computer systems to get a lot
more performance."

Mr. Downing said he was often amazed by how comfortable many younger
mechanics are with computers and other electronic technology. Today,
if a car halfway across the country is set up on a dynamometer - a
device for measuring engine performance - and the data is sent out
over the Internet, the engine can be analyzed and tuned remotely. "For
old hot rodders like us, that sort of thing took some getting used
to," he said, "but the young people just say, 'Of course you can do
that.' "

Mr. Aguilar, 31, is one of those younger mechanics with a lot of
technological expertise. He did much of the work on his Honda at
Church Automotive, a small performance garage in the blue-collar Los
Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, (the birthplace of those chroniclers of
an earlier hot-rodding age, the Beach Boys).

On a recent weekday, a couple of Mr. Aguilar's associates and racing
partners were at work at the garage. Shawn Church, the owner of Church
Automotive, and Matt Wilimizig of Hondata, a company in nearby
Torrance that designs high-performance replacement chips for Honda
engine control units, had plugged a laptop computer into a 1992 Honda
Civic hatchback owned by Alex Rascon, 24. The car was also hooked up
to a dynamometer wired to its own PC.

With its wide racing wheels, Mr. Rascon's Civic looked like a stock
model. That is, until he raised the hood to reveal a shiny new
custom-built 2-liter racing engine. He beheld his power plant as
proudly as the owner of a Pontiac GTO might have regarded his
400-horsepower, 6-liter V-8 in 1970. "My motor is just high
compression," he said, "no add-ons. I want to be able to take out the
guys running nitrous oxide and turbos."

Mr. Church and Mr. Wilimizig were there to help him by figuring out
what kind of alterations to the E.C.U. would yield more engine power.

"We can completely change this engine, optimizing the power over the
whole r.p.m. range," said Mr. Church. "Ten years ago, you couldn't
have done this."

Because Honda has no interest in seeing its chips altered, the
knowledge acquired by these E.C.U. hackers does not come easily. Most
regular computer hackers can easily obtain the code embedded in a chip
by using a common Windows or Unix interface. But the people at Hondata
and other companies that specialize in modifying E.C.U.'s have to
figure out how the millions of zeroes and ones in a chip actually
control the engine.

"You have to turn those numbers into human readable code and figure
out what that code does," said Doug Macmillan of Hondata.

That can involve a lot of trial and error. Mr. Aguilar, who runs his
own performance garage and has a background in electronics, spent
thousands of hours decoding the data to write a DOS-based program that
let him reprogram Honda chips. But working on their own and with Mr.
Aguilar, the people at Hondata went one step further and wrote a
graphically intense Windows program that created 3-D maps of how fuel,
air and timing interact.

These programs allow mechanics to test various settings while a car is
hooked up to the dynamometer. After the peak performance settings are
obtained, they can then produce a replacement chip for the car (using
programmable ROM chips) that will produce the same results
permanently.

With Mr. Rascon's Civic howling away on the dynamometer, Mr. Wilmizig
adjusted air and fuel mixtures on his laptop while Mr. Church read out
continually increasing horsepower numbers. Mr. Church figured that the
Civic would be good for 220 horsepower and would be able to run the
quarter-mile in just over 12 seconds, about as fast as a new $73,000
Dodge Viper or a $115,000 Porsche 911 Turbo would. Mr. Rascon paid
only $8,000 for his Honda.

"It's amazing," Mr. Rascon said. "With fuel pressure regulators and a
few other things you could get maybe 5 or 10 more horsepower, but with
this, it's maybe 30 just by making everything work together."

With the Honda tested and tuned, he disappeared from the garage in a
cloud of tire smoke. "These small cars appeal to a new generation of
kids who are very technologically savvy," Mr. Church said. Although he
sees many makes of cars in his shop, he said, Hondas are the most
popular among hot rodders today. "They've always built efficient,
high-tech cars,'' he said. "But I think the real genius was that they
designed things to be easy to replace, easy to modify, and they always
leave room in their engines for more power."

Back at Hondata, a clearly pleased Mr. Rascon went over the final
numbers on his car with Mr. Macmillan. "My mom says to me, 'Why are
you doing this?' " he said. " 'I'm sick and tired of it. Let's go buy
you a new 350Z or Lexus and I'll help you with payments.' "

But Mr. Rascon is sure he does not want a Lexus or a Nissan 350Z. "You
get a Lexus or 350Z, and, sure, people will look at you, but that's
now what this is about," he said. "This is about getting into
something I built and whipping a 350Z. That's the best feeling in the
world."




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