Remap and engine damage long term

[rabbit1986]

Hello,

Yesterday I went to the pub with a friend of mine.

There we met some guy who works as a mechanic in an Audi dealership.
Had a little chat, and at some point we talked about the Clio.

He said that I was very foolish about remapping the Clio. He said the only thing tuners do when remapping N/A engines is retiming the injection, where the engine is totally not made for this. Tuning with turbo engines was no problem for him.

His explanation: the tuner retimes the injection, and the engine is expecting gasoline on the time it should have been provided by the stock software. He recons my Clio won't run without problems. He even recons that it will break down at 50.000 miles or less.

What do you guys think?
The whole chat has got me thinking. I love the clio with the remap, and I do not have a lot more power, but it feels so much beefier low down in the revs.

 

[Willis]

Well there's a lot of people on here who've had Remaps and seem to be going strong.

My old 106 Rallye was messed about with and can't say I had any issues with that. I think that if your engine is made to run too lean, which is what I think the lad was getting at, then that can cause problems and generally you won't know it's running lean until it goes BANG! Like wise if it's made to run too rich, although generally you'll smell that before it goes BANG!... I would expect that any decent RR operator would be taking the relevant measurments to ensure that they didn't trim the mixture too much either way though, although it isn't unheard of for people to go to another RR and be told that they're engine Map is a bit dangerous.

 

[GrumpyTwig]

He thinks tuning turbo'd cars is safer? would of thought they always end up running higher boost pressures that the engine really won't be designed for and increasing the chance of turbo failure that could take the engine with it.

Imo I don't think such sweeping statements apply for NA or FI tuning, he's maybe spent to much time around FI engines.

 

[sideways danny]

he knows nothing about it very clearly, there's a lot more than the fueling that's changed. Infact most gains come from ignition timing changes, and alterations to torque limiter tables