Revised R56 Unichip kit

Hello all,

Unichip has been absent from the R56 market for several years, as lots of you know.

When the R56 was first released, we enthusiastically purchased one of the first in our area. The tuning was straight forward and the power sweet. Our harness manufacturer designed the harness which worked well in our car so we pulled the trigger. Big smiles all around…

Unfortunately, quickly after the kits reached the field, some experienced a problem – limp mode with a loss of power and CEL. The problem, however made no sense because it occurred off boost as well as on... but it happened too frequently to be nothing. No local cars had the issue, but when we finally got a problem kit back to install on our car… we saw the issue quickly.

Our harness supplier custom made the female ECU pins because the OE pins were unavailable… and the material used was insufficient and some of the female pins stretched open and stayed stretched. You couldn’t see the stretch – it was well under 0.1 mm – but we could see the continuity break on an oscilloscope. As small as it was, it was sufficient to cause short duration open circuits and drive the ECU into backup mode.

With a known cause, we looked for a solution but found nothing viable for the way we then designed harnesses. The only option was to pull the kit and not participate in the R56 market… which we reluctantly did.

Several years later, pending plug unavailability for our 5.7L Toyota harness (our bestselling kit) took us in a new design direction. Instead of connecting at the ECU as we had always done, we looked at the individual sensors… which aren’t restricted. We created our first STS kit… it became even more popular than the best seller it replaced. That was two years ago and they’re still selling strong.

We followed up the 5.7L kit with a Jeep JK kit… same results. We followed those two up with a FR-S, BRZ, and Toyota 86 kit… now our number two seller.

That brought us back to the R56. Tuning, power, and drivability weren’t the issue, and now we had a potential harness solution. With a little digging, we found the necessary connectors and made some prototype kits. Initial and follow on testing went seamlessly and after some successful Beta testing, we started production… in house… where we control everything… not outsourced like the previous kit… with OE parts/pins… again not like the original design.

The redesigned kit keeps all of the Unichip’s upside… no footprint, PC reprogrammable, custom tunable, easy installation, etc… and incorporates a bullet-proof harness.

Here’s a link to the installation instructions for a feel for what it looks like and how it goes into the car… http://www.unichip.us/system/uploads/assets/R56%20StS%20instructions.pdf

Here’s a link to the dyno results with a bone stock R56… http://www.unichip.us/system/uploads/assets/R56%20Dyno.jpg

I’m sure some won’t consider the kit based on the fault with the first R56 kit, and we certainly understand trust is hard won and easily lost. We’ve been selling performance kits for hundreds of applications around the world for better than 20 years, and we’re confident this one will be a great performer. We hope we can build back the trust.

If anyone has any questions or comments, I’ll be more than happy to answer them… please shoot me a PM, put up a post, or give us a call.

Cheers