Cheers to you guys for being the original pioneers! All that money and effort to blow up a few motors and learn from it. Our understanding of these motors and tuning has come a long ways since NGM shut its doors. The DIY sector is still struggling but I think there's some hope in the near future for us. That 319WHP would have been very safe with the IAT relocated to the lower intake even with pump 93 and without alcohol injection. E85 would be preferred of course, but pump 93 is still do-able with the right tune and charge air temp safeguards. That IAT location before the blower was really unsafe and still blows my mind that both Alpine and NGM recommended that as the location back then. It's still so wild to me that you guys were tuning with piggybacks and 3rd party devices back then. The J&S safeguard does a decent job and all but not being able to set your base ignition table first is relying heavily on the reaction time of that device. The one time it doesn't react in time is when you detonate especially at stage 3. The alcohol injection was definitely your life saver in that case.
It just so happens that I can reflash our ECUs and have a pretty good grasp of the major map structures. I've seen some interesting data on some of the common reflashes in circulation from those days. The thing that really killed you guys tuning on the piggybacks was the transition point between closed loop and open loop. The OEM ECU would enter open loop full load at around 75% throttle so your fuel enrichment on the SAFCII couldn't start before that threshold or your LTFTs would go crazy. The NGM stage 2 tune would enter open loop full load enrichment at about 35% throttle and pulls ignition timing as much as 8 degrees depending on the location of the map you're in.
For example this is what our OEM ignition table and open loop full load TPS trigger point looks like:
This is what the NGM stage 2 ignition table and open loop full load TPS trigger point looks like for comparison:
I think that if you guys had access to this information early on the platform could have gone down as one of the best DIY platforms of the 2000s and could have had way more aftermarket support that lasted much longer than it did. Our Siemens V6 ECU had already existed in one form or another since the mid 90s. I believe the South Koreans already had a lock on this data by 1998-1999 when the 2.5L Sonatas with a simpler version of our 2003 2mbit ECU came into play. That's probably why they were light years ahead of us on this platform.
