Nitrous is a pain in the ass on a bike. It would be much easier on the C14 than most bikes, but it's hardly worth the trouble once the initial grin factor wears off. The grin factor from the turbo never goes away. Plus nirtous won't lower your ET at the strip unless you get it on out of the hole. If you wait 'till second gear to spray you'll see almost no drop in ET; you'll just see a boost in MPH. It's really frustrating to run nitrous on a stock wheelbase/stock suspension bike. You'd need more than stock pistons could handle to be faster than a liter bike anyway....... not much call for it unless you just like the way it looks. But I'll install a set-up for anyone if they want to try it.
...and I had some pretty shitty luck after my piston swap. I'm not going to call out anybody yet, but I had a partial fuel pump/injector failure that caused some damage while I was out picking on Zx-10Rs. In the middle of fixing that I got laid off, so I just put it all back to stock so I would have something to ride around 'till I get a job again (can't pay rent AND do R&D with no job). In hindsight, stock injectors on a turbo C14 are questionable at best, and you need a -good- fuel pump to support high flow at
high pressures...... I won't be trusting anyone's work but my own from now on when it comes to fuel systems. [/rant] Expensive lesson to learn (cost was 2 very nice new forged pistons), but at least I still had good stock ones and an extra header to put it back together.
Back on topic: cruising AFR's can be in the 14's with no issue. Mid to low14's will yield good mileage and usually leave you with enough room to keep it smooth. Anything higher than 14's and you get into diminishing returns with economy... and the driveability starts getting ugly. WOT AFR's for N/A should be in the 12.9-13.2 range for starters. I don't believe in a "economy map" AND a "performance map": If you spend the time tuning you can have both. It only needs to be richer than normal at 75% or so more throttle for performance, and it can be much leaner elsewhere so long as your driveability is acceptable (no lean stumbles or backfires, good on/off throttle transitions). You don't gain a lot making it fat at partial throttles, and most importantly, you're not trying to go fast using partial throttle, right?
For reference, I ran my zx10 with a good base map at WOT (the stock PC3 map was really close), and tuned just the 100% throttle column to 13.0. Worked well. Then for the nitrous we tuned just the 100% column above 9K rpm (my spray point... it would be lower on a C14 obviously) for 12.5 , and spraying it went back up to a flat 13.0 all the way across. Made +38hp on a .032 dry system jet (and about 5-7 more MPH at the strip back-to-back). The really interesting part? The bike ran better consistently OFF the bottle on the rich nitrous map than it did on the flat 13.0 map (about .7-1.5 mph). Food for thought.
