The majority of our day to day work at Superchips involves research and development for new remap products, and ongoing support for existing customers. The combined engineering expertise in the building for working with and modifying cars extends well beyond our 35 year history, and every now and again we’re requested for special projects. Recently, such a project took place after hours on a weekday night, when we were visited by this car – the Porsche 956 as used by Stefan Bellof and Jochen Mass in the 1983 season. This car visited us to perform a shakedown on a freshly rebuilt gearbox, and to prove out 3 seperate ECUs to run the car.

Our workshop is equipped with a Maha LPS3000 dyno, which is more than just a tool for measuring flat out horsepower. It can also be used for part-load testing and simulation of multiple types of simulation work to prove the running capabilities of an engine when fitted to a chassis. In this case, we used the dyno’s “constant speed” mode to dial in a given wheel speed in km/h, which the dyno would then not exceed – the harder the car tries to exceed 120km/h, the more load the dyno applies to the rotating wheels to stop this speed being exceeded. This allowed the gearbox to be safely shifted through the gears with little load, and then have load applied in each gear to ensure no transmission slip. The test ran very successfully, even though at the beginning the newly fitted rear brakes bound up solid, which explains why the car moves around quite a lot in the video below.

We also provided replacement EEPROM chips for the car’s Bosch Motorsport Motronic ECU. Multiple spare ECUs were tested and confirmed working. This gave the car’s owners confidence to run the car over the next few events, and we’ll see some more of the car in the future we’re sure.