This Trumpet made its way to us all the way from London. Originally, the owner was talking about getting his engine tuned, but after we’d gone through the expense of pistons, cams etc he wisely chose not to pursue that option. He still wanted to know what we could do for him, and tidying up the fuelling map was our first choice.
He’d tried many different maps in his Sagem ECU over the years; these older (car) based systems aren’t the best and communicating with it is slow and tedious, at best. We had a word with our local Triumph dealer once, about ‘talking’ to these ECUs, and apparently they’d always had trouble, too. Anyway, we strapped it on the Dyno and got on with trimming the fuel tables. We rode it after, and it felt good. We also left it overnight and rode it again from cold just to make sure it was good. The power gains were appreciable, as the generic Triumph map wasn’t really working that well; the mid-range hole had also gone.
The only downside? Fuel economy might well suffer, as we dialled in quite a lot of fuel. In reality, the inputs from the bike to the ECU aren’t fast, or ‘clever’ enough (like a more modern system) so adding fuel is really working around the limitations of the bike’s set-up.
Older ECUs simply haven't got the computing power - or inputs - of modern systems.
