AmSnow.com is now SnoWest.com
The Age of high tech EFI
The 4-stroke turbo sleds came in under the radar for many people but it was very exciting for folks like myself. Everything I studied in school was for EFI and by now I knew how to get deep into the binary code allowing us to push 4-strokes into the 400, then 500 and 600hp range, and finally to the 700hp monsters running 60 PSI at over 10,000 rpm. It wasn’t long before drag racing was filled with big 4-stroke turbos. In my opinion, the 4-strokes will continue to dominate the drag and top speed divisions of racing, but for other areas like mountain and aggressive trail riding, I believe the smaller more nimble 2-strokes will hang on.
Soon after the 4-stroke binary was cracked, we were able to get into the 2-stroke binary EFI code. This is the biggest improvement I have ever seen in the 2-stroke performance world. The conditions vary so much day-to-day that the only way to make a snowmobile run consistent is to have access to all of the tables the machine runs on, which we do have for the Polaris CFI and Axys models.
There are over 120 different maps, algorithms and tables that affect what the EFI system does. With a standard piggyback fuel controller you can get the tune right for a given condition but as conditions change you will not be tuned perfect. With our access to the full operating system we can adjust things to make a cold pipe act hot, virtually eliminating cold pipe bogs. This allows us to design our pipes differently to make the EFI system compensate for almost anything. In the last few years we feel we can truly make a modified sled run better and more reliably than a stock sled.
At Bikeman, we sell performance packages with the proper tuning designed for all the components installed. A lot of people ask about an open EFI tuning platform for the sleds to allow consumers to make changes. This is not something I would recommend for our customers because of the amount of time it takes to write a tune. We do it in a controlled environment at a high-tech facility, and the odds of the average consumer making positive changes to a tune is unlikely. Since we have had a closed tune platform our engine failures are no more likely than a stock machine and tech calls are extremely low. The age of high-tech EFI is here to stay and that’s ok with us!
- Joey Strub, Bikeman R&D