HowTo: Identify Your Cooper's Tune
 

So yesterday I purchased a 2003 Mini Cooper S. I discovered it had a tune while I was "enjoying" the car and I noticed that I didn't hit the rev limiter until 7200 RPM.

So, that left me with the question of what Tune do I have? I figured this might be important for future upgrades, so I went to work trying to figure it out. I thought it might be helpful to share what I did, in case if any of you are facing the same challenge.

What you need to do this is an inexpensive Galletto 1260 OBD2 cable. These are available on eBay for next to nothing.

With your cable installed start the flashing software that came with the cable. It should have an option similar to:

Once plugged into your OBD2 port, ignition on, and the software running with the correct car selected, click "ECU DATA". This should return specific version information about your ECU. It should all be normal letters and numbers. If you see strange characters, something probably isn't working right.

Once you can communicate, click "Read ECU". You will be prompted to save a file. This will be the dump from your ECU.

The read can take 20 minutes or so. You might want to connect a 10AMP battery charger to keep everything healthy. While you are downloading, don't start the car or power anything on or off.

Once you have finished saving the file, you will need a HEX editor. I use HexEdit from www.hexedit.com.

Now comes the boring part--searching the file. Look through the entire HEX file to find anything that is human readable. Most tuners put some sort of signature in their tunes. This is what I found near the end of my file:

http://www.clownshoemotorsports.com/...g/HEX_read.jpg

The interesting bit:
I recognized this right away as German. The loose translation is:
Now I was getting somewhere. After a little google searching, I discovered a tuner named MTH out of Germany: http://www.mth-minipower.de/

So now I know what tune is on my car! I hope this helps someone else.

-bj