Our project for today is dealing with the drive ability issue on a MINI Cooper with CVT Transmission. If you have one of these cars, most likely your biggest complaint is poor drive ability from the standing start up to about 30-40 miles an hour.
What's happening with this vehicle is, you don't get full throttle although you're pushing the gas all the way to the floor, and you don't get full throttle till you hit actually 50 miles an hour. So full throttle meaning full throttle plate opening doesn't happen. You get about half to three-quarters at most.
What the Sprint Booster does which is a small module that goes inline between the gas pedal and the ECU, it gives you full throttle regardless of your engine speed or your road speed. So what you're going to do with this is it's a small installation, it goes behind the pedal assembly. It goes inline with the wiring harness that goes to ECU. And now what we're going to do is show you how it's done.
Installing the Sprint Booster on your MINI Cooper is about the easiest and simplest performance upgrade you'll ever do on your car. What you're going to need to do is remove the pedal assembly to install the Sprint Booster unit. And to do that you're going to take a small sharp object and remove this little protective hidden plug here right at the base of the pedal assembly. Once you're there, you're going to take a 5 mm Allen Wrench and you'll remove the 6 mm bolt that's located right in that opening.
Once you've got the bolt out, what you're going to do is lift the pedal straight up, and still locate it underneath at the floor board and once it moves up about an inch to an inch-and-a-half, it will dislocate itself from the vehicle. There is enough wire on the drive by wire system to allow you to roll the pedal assembly over. You'll notice that there is a plug connector right here and that plug connector will have the factory wire attached to it.
What you're going to do is you're going to disconnect the factory wire, and then what you're going to do is plug the factory wire directly into the back side of the Sprint Booster. Then what you're going to do is to take the Sprint Booster wire and plug it directly into the pedal assembly. You'll then roll the unit over again, make sure your wire is tucked out of the way, reinstall your bolt and your plastic plug and you're ready to go.
Better understand how the Sprint Booster works. It's important that you understand how the vehicle itself works. All vehicles up to about 2001 were basically a cable operated acceleration system and the pedal basically had a cable or linkage assembly, that went over to the throttle body and when you depressed the pedal assembly, it pulled on the cable and opened the throttle plate.
The way the new vehicles operate is -- it's an electronic pedal assembly which has a rheostat build inside of it, and then the factory wire harness plugs into it. It goes to your ECU, the ECU conditions that information and then sends it over to an electronic solenoid that operates your throttle plate at that point. The advantage is to that is, they can operate the cruise control, the traction control can all operate through the system via the control unit.
The disadvantages are the control unit actually controls the speed that the throttle plate would open. When you depress the accelerator on an electronic control system, the speed that you accelerate is not proportionate to the speed this throttle plate opened, that's the throttle position angle.
Some vehicles even have a system where you don't open the throttle to the full wide open position until the vehicle reaches approximately 20 miles an hour. This means that if you depress the gas to the floor, if the car is only at about 10 miles an hour or so, it does not open the throttle plate away.
What the Sprint Booster does is it conditions the signal that comes from the pedal and amplifies it. So you get full throttle even at zero speed or at slow speed and it makes the throttle response much crisper, much faster that's more instantaneous, when you depress the gas on the floor, you're getting a full open of the actual throttle plate, and that's how the Sprint Booster works.
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