Focus EcoBoost 1.6 - Bluefin and K&N filter tests results

[misterb]

Hi all

I live in Israel, and I own a 2012 Ford Focus EcoBoost 1.6 182PS for ~6 months now.

This model is very rare here, only 20 pieces were sold all together, so I"m happy to find a community with some more owners of this model.

I wanted to share with you my experience with bluefin software upgrade and K&N 57s-4000 open filter.

When I first got the car I ordered the SW and filter, and went to a local tunning shop with a dyno to install them while measuring the results before and after.

The filter that was already installed was the stock filter which was the original one, had ~23K miles on it (didn't know that at the time).

We did a run of stock condition as baseline, then a run with only K&N filter, and then filter + SW :

K&N filter (https://www.amazon.co.uk/57S-4000-Performance-Intake-Kit/dp/B00ARCO30Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467752283&sr=8-1&keywords=k%26n+57s-4000)

Bluefin SW (http://www.superchips.co.uk/search?make=9&fueltype=3&model=2&variant=2544)

The results were a bit surprising, the filter showed a major improvement of ~15hp, and ~30nm in torque (ignore the torque scale on the graphs, it's a bug).

Adding the Bluefin SW yielded another ~7hp (total)

I was surprised to see how much impact the K&N filter had.

After few months I discovered that the stock filter was never changed, so I decided to run some road tests to see if the big change was simply there because the
stock filter was clogged already.

I purchased a fresh stock filter (original OEM), and cleaned the K&N filter with the dedicated cleaning kit.

The measurements I made was done using the following method :

- OBD WIFI adapter connected to iPhone DashCommand app. The app can measure real speed from the car OBD.

- chosen a specific road section of ~1 mile length.

- set the app to measure acceleration time from 60KM/h to 160KM/h at 4th gear. That covers RPM from 2000 to 5400 with no gear shifts, to eliminate
driver shift time variation.

- each setup measure 3 times one after the other.

- all measurements done on the same evening, within 1 hour.

- A/C was turned off.

I measured 4 combinations, the results are in the table.

Seems the measurement is reliable as the error for same setup is smaller than the difference between setups.

You can see that again the filter had a bigger impact than the Bluefin SW on it's own, but the Bluefin combined with the K&N filter gave the best results.

I have found out that the same stock filter is used in all Ford Focus engines (1.6/2.0 non-turbo, and 1.6/2.0 turbo). So it could be possible that the stock filter
is not providing enough airflow for the turbocharged engines, thus the K&N filter have such an impact.

Hope you find this info useful, any comments are welcome..

 

 

[misterb]

 

some more data, I did some analysis on the app log files, this is a graph showing speed vs time, of all measurements, colored by setup type.

 

[drsdriver]

Very interesting read. Was surprised how much the K&N on its own made a noticeable difference. 

Would that K&N fit mk3 1.6 tdci? Do you think it would have similar effect ? 

 

[madmole]

On my mk3 1.6tdci, the K&N re[placement filter (not open) gave +3 HP

I then added a Spider Archnid tuning chip that took me to 153 HP and 330 Torque  (from 115/240)

Surprised how little the Bluefin added above, but then the ecoboosts are already turbo'd pretty hard by ford