Happy new year and Merry Christmas. 2016 was our busiest year yet, and I’m really thankful to be able to do what I love every day, so thanks to all of you awesome customers that help make this possible. 2016 was finally a bit of a redemption year for Kels, after her horrible gearbox issues the year before, it was a strong year for our Motec sales – we can now confidently say we are Canada’s largest Motec dealer.
It was a great year for Subaru’s, and our relationship with Touge Tuning has been fantastic. We had a great year working with the guys from Pfaff Motorsports running two 991 GT3 cup cars and a Cayman GT4, and our customers did an awesome job of kicking ass and taking names at various different levels of Motorsport. The Speed Academy guys kept us laughing all year, and finally, we have embarked on a wild journey to build an electric sports car!
Dyno highlights:
We re-connected with Shereef’s E30, a supercharged car controled by a Vipec V88 we did many years ago in the SG days. The electrical system and tuning went great!
We made adapters for a 991 GT3 cup car to allow us to dyno test these single lug Porsches, to check on power output throughout the year and to ensure the cars stay healthy.
We became a COBB Porsche tuner, allowing us to tune the GT4 and 991 Porsche vehicles:
The ECUTek market has been blowing up, and we have been doing just about everything with a VQ37VHR with an ECUTek these days. I’m proud to announce that we are now an ECUTek master dealer, meaning that we can now supply ECUTek cables for those that want them, and even more exciting – we can supply ECUTek’s new bluetooth interface dongle. ECUTek’s bluetooth interface allows the user to datalog, switch maps, read and clear DTC’s, switch maps and even adjust boost control targets – all through your mobile. For GT-R there are even more adjustable parameters, such as clutch learning and TPMS registration. You can download the fact sheet on ECU Connect here:
The guys at Cyrious Garageworks kept busy all year and we did some tuning on some absolutely beautiful AE86 restorations.
The SCCA asked us to ship out and dyno a whole pile of MX-5 racecars. That was a long day!
And, Touge Tuning built up some wild Subaru street cars, and started stocking E85 as well. Using E85 and Cobb’s flex fuel kit we were able to get fantastic results and give the customer something that is not ethanol content sensitive. Just add in some E85 when you want to go racing, and pump the tank with 94 at any time. The ECU will take care of the rest, no matter what the ethanol content.
Motorsport Electrical Systems And Motec Highlights:
We did a good bit of harnessing in 2016. I am proud to say that our electrical designs are efficient and very cost effective, and we have an exciting announcement to make soon about our motorsport electronics division. Using existing designs, we can modify them and get a complete car chassis or engine harness design done quickly and efficiently. That will give you the plans to either build your own harness, or allow us to build it for you in-house. All of the harnesses we build in house use professional materials and construction techniques.
We also developed a VQ35HR plug and play M130 ECU solution for racecars. We are currently looking at if there is a demand to make a custom M1 package to work with the OEM systems in the car. More on that later.
Motec was kind enough to work with us on our 350z racecar (you all know her as Kels), so we got rid of the old heavy switches and breakers and installed a PDM15 with a 15 position keypad. We can now automate all kinds of functions and even log the current draw and voltage of all of the circuits in the car, and open that data synchronised with the rest of the car’s logging channels.
OPD Motorsport Parts:
2016 saw the start of some products we have available. Most significantly being the VQ35HR ITB kit, that uses CNC’d base plates, runners and air horns, and Jenvey throttle bodies. The kit is not for the average bolt-on guy, but those that want it will see the value in the kit. The runners literally come within 1 mm of touching each other as they cross over, and we had to done revision after revision 3d printing these things to get the shape just right. I’m happy to say we have sold a number of kits, and everyone that has a kit loves it so far.
We also developed a fancy bracket to mount a logger display for the Porsche 991 and Cayman. It allows the display to be removed with just two allen bolts for street driving, if desired. And it clearly fills in the cutout in the dash panel when the display is not mounted. We love them, do you?
Professional Racing:
This year we worked with Pfaff Motorsports season long, managing the setups of the cars, coaching the drivers and helping to build the team. Orey did an incredible job developing this year and continues to surprise us, sometimes being less than a second per lap off of the pros! Chris Green did a fantastic job all season and shows a ton of speed. We took home some hardware and won against the best American’s out there in World Challenge.
It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with the guys from Pfaff, and I’m excited to be back with them again for 2017. Look forward to some big things here!
Customer Racing:
Our customers really kicked ass and took some names as well. We started tuning the 8 Legs CTCC BMW mid-way through the season as their primary tuner Karim was not available, and while we can’t take full credit for the tuning, I will take a small bit of it. The car ran fantastically and helped the guys win their first championship. Super huge congrats to Eric and Arek on the great job and incredible driving this year!
Also in CTCC was my good friend and our machinist Philippe, who has done a wild job building his Genesis. The car has ridiculous potential and I am proud to have been a small part of the electrical design, testing and doing the ECU tuning for them. I can’t wait to see the car out in 2017. It keeps getting better.
The guys at Mantella Autosport has a ton of success with their new KTM X-Bow’s, with Anthony and Martin each scoring a W in some ridiculously close competition. It’s been a few years in the making and I’m super happy that these guys were not only able to pull off a win this year, but for each of them to get one makes it that much more special in my opinion.
And then there is Will. The madman. The nearly 800whp Unlimited FWD car that has totally transformed over the last two years. Just like Philippe, these guys hand craft every part for their cars and then drive them. I couldn’t be more proud to support dudes like this and am pumped that they went all the way down to California and destroyed the existing record, and were able to come out against some extremely stiff competition. It just makes me a little bit sad to now realise that Kels is slow!
Pat Cyr’s car had a ton of potential, but unfortunately some fueling issues took Pat away from some really impressive results this year. However, that’s racing. He drove incredibly and the electronics never missed a beat. Sadly, some of the hardware did. And it seemed to only occur when the engine was really heat-soaked – during a competition (never practice!!!). 2017 will be redemption year for Pat, I have no doubts.
Kels, The 350z Racecar
Ah Kels. 2016 was a redemption year for you. To some degree. We wrapped you all pretty (thanks to the guys at C17 Media), gave you some new shows (thanks to Volk Racing and Mackin Industries), flared your hips, and installed a sequential gearbox with all of the bells and whistles for seamless flat shifting (thanks to Quaife engineering and Texense). We even had your fuel cell entirely re-built with a new liner, to stop all of the fuel system madness you’ve been giving us.
It was a tough year, with us literally buying a $150 fuel tank from Kijiji after the bladder in our cell completely failed and made a mess. The car had a run in with a tire wall, destroying most of the front of the car, and multiple run-ins with a Porsche, destroying 3 brand new Volk ZE40’s.
But if you put the tough parts aside, you see that Kels had her redemption. She is now back to being a reliable racing car, happy to get out there and sing to 9000 rpm and slide around as commanded. The car works again. No more fuel system problems, or gearboxes that are trying to vibrate themselves to pieces. And it seems like you guys have enjoyed watching Kels, as she amassed almost half a million views on YouTube between our channel and Speed Academy. Or maybe more now.
The engine is still down on power, but we did find some power back by having the injectors cleaned – it turns out some fuel we were running was making a mess of the fuel system and the injectors. We also found some power by adjusting the fuel timing at high RPM, but we are still down due to the fact that we are using our 57mm throttles rather than the 53.5. Our airbox design is also not quite there yet, so I am hoping we will find a bit more power before 2017, although that are other higher priority projects (see below). Here are some highlight pictures from the season, and be sure to checkout the YouTube channels if you haven’t already.
Sandra the Drift Car:
Stittle and I made great progress with the drift car this year. She got some fresh paint, a hydro e-brake, and nitrous!! We were able to get the fairly large turbo to spool significantly earlier than without the nitrous, and using a few firmware modifications to the Motec M130 ECU, have the nitrous shut off as soon as the turbo spools. We attended a few drift days and had a blast. Taking pros like Pat Cyr and Brad Carlton for rides affirmed our suspicion, Sandra is a good girl, and she really, really likes to party.
Blue Lightning:
To be honest, I am disappointed that the news of our Lotus electric car project has taken so long to reach the website. I will make more of an effort in 2017 to keep this site updated. But here it is – a 2014 Lotus Evora, that we have hacked apart and are in the process of installing the drive unit from a Tesla Model S 85. Why? Well, we like electric cars. We know most of you don’t. We are going to show you just how badass electric cars can be, using technology that is already in common electric cars. No super fancy $40,000 motors here or crazy battery packs. Just an incredible sports car that is powered by electricity.
Most people have said I am crazy for taking on this project, but I am pretty confident that electric cars will be the future, and the sooner I diversify and start to learn them the better. You can follow the entire Blue Lightning build here. We are going to be using a complete suite of Motec electronics for this build as well, going to show just how versatile and capable M1 build is. We are using a 12″ Motec C1212 display which we will customise with Display Creator. The result being a modern, aesthetically pleasing display that is also the best available logger and lap timer. Different modes will allow the driver to focus on lap times, efficiency, or system monitoring. Hell, maybe we will even put in a fish mode like the old HKS Camp units had, just for fun.
I am extremely excited about this project, and I can say I’ve already increased my knowledge in this area exponentially (it’s not hard when you don’t know much). I can’t wait to learn more, maybe electric motor tuning will be a new division for OnPoint!
So, that was 2016. Going over those photos and I’m getting tired just looking at them. And that was only just a snapshot of what we did in the year. I hope you all set your sights high for 2017 and achieve everything you aim for. I’m going to go have a nap.