Final shootout dyno certification

Friday/ Sat we dyno tested the  last sleds,  I had a great
deal of help from Jim Intimidator Gonyea, Fast Eddy, Dan Tripod Cross,
and Nick and Alex  to get these done.
We had a huge problem with the SkiDoos. Our Shootout Group (Tim
Erikson, John Prusak, George Taylor, Me, and the Shootout dealers) had
agreed earlier to allow SkiDoo to send us ECUs for the MachZ and 600SDI
that had breakin mode removed. Replacement ECUs for the MachZ and
600SDI came from the Valcourt race shop. This year since the sleds came
to me early, prior to the studding party at Big Moose Yam/AC this
Sunday (thanks to SW/SG editor Tim Erikson who spent three days here on
the road  swapping Shootout dealers’ sleds with random 
Northeast dealers’ sleds, then handing off the truck to Dave Wells who
finished the job) I had plenty of time to hook up fuel flow/ airflow
meters and see what we really have. Unfortunately the MachZ made way
too much HP–the stock ECU delivered a crisp 106 lb/hr fuel flow at HP
peak. The SkiDoo supplied replacement ECU was supposed to only
eliminate breakin timing retard but also mysteriously lost 16 lb/ hr
fuel flow, 90 lb/ hr created way too much HP, .510 lb/hr BSFC. So
computer-savvy Jimmy Cooper of Cooper’s Sales and SERVICE in Waterport
NY overrode the ECU map with an actual 06 fuel and timing map, 
back to 106 lb/hr and that is how the  MachZ will be run at the
shootout. The actual dyno results of the SkiDoo-supplied MachZ ECU vs
the truly stock MachZ ECU will appear first (our agreement) in SnowWeek
magazine, then on DTR website (with more technical details).
Expecting the worst, we first dyno’d the 600SDI with the stock ECU,
Jimmy Cooper installed the “non breakin” ECU from the SkiDoo race shop,
and halfway through the first “non breakin” dyno run I had to abort the
test–it was so lean HP was much lower than the original ECU dyno run
(we watch closely real-time graph of current dyno run vs previous dyno
run). The much leaner A/F ratio of the “non breakin” box was possibly
causing deto in the 600 or was leaner than max HP A/F ratio. Either
way, we aborted at about 7000 RPM, reinstalled the original ECU and
that’s the way it will run at the Shootout. Once again, test results
first in SnowWeek then here in greater detail.