High boost high power tuning

Hello,

What is the best way to approach tuning a high horsepower/ high boost car? For example 1200whp+ 320kpa+.

I tuned the car stay state to 200kpa up to 2/3 of the rev range and then performed ramp runs and then increased the boost 20kpa to 30 kpa at a time using ramp runs optimizing fuel and ignition at these points and interpolating in between. At this point im concerned with the amount of wot pulls and wear on the engine and drive train I am causing. What process would be suggested?

In Applications of high horsepower drag racing I would like to know what is the process and what considerations I should take while approaching this situation?

Thank you in advance.

My general process with the drag engines I tune is to focus almost exclusively on WOT operation simply because that is where the engine will spend its time running. I'd start at the wastegate spring level and get the fuel and ignition dialled in here until it's optimal. I'll assume you're on a quality fuel where knock really isn't a factor so you should be able to achieve MBT.

From here I'd extrapolate the fuel and ignition tables out into the higher boost areas. Your fuel map is likely to remain relatively flat since the MAP should be taken into account in the background fuel equation (there are a few ECUs where this may not be the case but this is the norm). I'd err on the side of caution and mildly increase the fuelling anyway as we would prefer to be a little rich when we first up the boost. With the ignition timing I'd suggest pulling something in the region of 2 degrees per 20-25 kpa initially which is probably on the conservative side but you can optimise from there.

At this point you can start raising the boost to your ultimate target. If you've got an engine that you really don't want to put a lot of dyno time on then I'd be pretty broad in my tuning up to the point where you've reached your target boost or power. What i mean by this is that I wouldn't be doing multiple runs at each boost target to get everything absolutely optimal. Instead I might tune at wastegate boost and a two other boost levels and then interpolate my results. There's no 'right' answer here as it depends on how good the tune is now and exactly what you want to achieve.

With the high power drag cars I tuned I would always start by laying down a wastegate boost run to establish the power was where it should be before we pushed on. I'd then go straight to our higher boost levels and if I was only doing a systems check we would be done in 3-4 pulls. With very powerful drag cars we often do some of the tuning at the track rather than trying to optimise the engine 100% on the dyno. With these cars however we usually had more power available than we could put to the track at any point so getting the last 1% out of the engine wasn't really essential.