My Elise and my Alfa Romeo 4C both had methanol injection and even before purchasing my Emira the plan was always to run it with alcohol injection. You get exceptional anti-knock and intake cooling, both meaning you can tune more aggressively to get more power. You also (usually, more later on this) get constant engine valve cleaning since the methanol and water effectively steam clean the chamber. These benefits are equally great on both turbo and supercharger applications. My Elise when it was running the 2ZZ had a supercharger and I used methanol injection as my intercooler. On the 4C I had a dual nozzle setup spraying after the air to air intercooler.
The strategy was to use the JB4 WMI controller as the brains as this plugs directly into the main JB4 module. The benefit here is that now the app on my phone can control the methanol system and besides having it fully integrated into the JB4, I can also select which maps the methanol sprays in or I can turn it completely off and run a stock map. This is super nice as now I can just do a long road trip and not worry about bringing extra methanol with me, I can just turn the system off. In reality you can always grab windshield wiper fluid at a gas station and use that, but it's nice to be able to run the car 100% stock with map 0 on the JB4.
DRS in La Habra did the installation (as they also took care of my Elise and 4C) and as always did an amazing job. The goal is always for the system to be as invisible as possible. Besides the in progress photos there are only two things you can see. The tank which sits in the right corner of the trunk and the single injection nozzle. Everything else is not visible since it's all underneath the bodywork and out view, all done with easy to service connections. The methanol tank is a 2.5 gallon Snow Performance tank, Burger Motorsports also makes a really nice one too. The floor of the trunk is refinforced and the tank is securely bolted down, with the lines and wires going through the trunk wall to underneath the body panels.
That note about cleaning the engine head, on this particular application there isn't a lot of room on the cool side of our air2water intercooler to place the nozzle which is where it usually would go. You can get some aftermarket pieces from Boomgear and the like that replaces the plastic stock parts with titanium, but I didn't want to wait. I am using a Weistec charge pipe that is bigger in diameter - so hot air is coming out of the turbocharger, gets immediately cooled by the methanol spray, this atomized spray now goes through the intercooler and then into the engine. When I called Weistec about the bung location they simply said there is no room on the other side of the intercooler and that this application will still work great.
Note: the Weistec charge pipe alone gave me overboost codes on the stock map, these resolved later after tuning with methanol.
The pump is installed near the passenger side rear suspension with everything heat shielded and the lines protected.
The JB4 uses map 7 as the default methanol injection map but you can also spray in all maps (except 0 stock) if you want. DRS tuned on the their dyno, sent logs to Terry who then sent maps and settings. They did this a few rounds, and then I continued to street log and fine tune - Terry has been great with very quick responses.
Spray is set to activate at ~15 psi, when boost passes that threshold, the JB4 commands flow. Flow is monitored live in the JB4 app; if the system fails to trigger, the JB4 automatically reduces boost for safety. In practice, flow hits 100% at WOT, cooling IATs and effectively raising octane.
In sport mode I am at ~30–31 psi, and ~32–33 psi in track mode. My logs show IAT's usually drop from ~95-115°F down to ~76–83°F once meth kicks in (depending on ambient) and I don't get any heat soak at the top of a pull or over time. Timing is stable, averaging 12–18° advance with no knock correction when meth is flowing.
Adjusted for their typical 20% loss on their Superflow dyno we are ~508 chp / 462 ctq corrected - to be conservative we can say 490hp is what the engine is making in Track mode Map 7 + methanol. Think of it as just an easy way to have on tap race gas and additional intake cooling. I am using about half a gallon of methanol mixture on a typical canyon day - and that corresponds to about half a tank of gas used.
The JB4 combination is working really well...and it will be interesting to see results with a true ECU tune that has been mapped with methanol injection. For now this is working really well and I can't overstate the luxury of having your phone be able to log all this data, come home, dump your log file into ChatGPT and have a full detailed analysis of how the system is performing with all the timing, IAT, throttle, boost, etc. data right there. Really cool. If I had a V6 I would be doing the same thing and figuring out where to inject after the supercharger (is there room in the intake path post-supercharger?). Lastly I just order Speed Sauce from VP Racing it's premixed methanol/water 50/50 and like $9/gallon - gets shipped to my place and I just top off the methanol tank every once in a while.
When I everntually get a flashed ECU I'll be moving the controller to Snow Performance - hopefully eventually someone will enable different maps so I can choose to turn it off. In the meantime everything is working well and the car is a screamer -
The strategy was to use the JB4 WMI controller as the brains as this plugs directly into the main JB4 module. The benefit here is that now the app on my phone can control the methanol system and besides having it fully integrated into the JB4, I can also select which maps the methanol sprays in or I can turn it completely off and run a stock map. This is super nice as now I can just do a long road trip and not worry about bringing extra methanol with me, I can just turn the system off. In reality you can always grab windshield wiper fluid at a gas station and use that, but it's nice to be able to run the car 100% stock with map 0 on the JB4.
DRS in La Habra did the installation (as they also took care of my Elise and 4C) and as always did an amazing job. The goal is always for the system to be as invisible as possible. Besides the in progress photos there are only two things you can see. The tank which sits in the right corner of the trunk and the single injection nozzle. Everything else is not visible since it's all underneath the bodywork and out view, all done with easy to service connections. The methanol tank is a 2.5 gallon Snow Performance tank, Burger Motorsports also makes a really nice one too. The floor of the trunk is refinforced and the tank is securely bolted down, with the lines and wires going through the trunk wall to underneath the body panels.
That note about cleaning the engine head, on this particular application there isn't a lot of room on the cool side of our air2water intercooler to place the nozzle which is where it usually would go. You can get some aftermarket pieces from Boomgear and the like that replaces the plastic stock parts with titanium, but I didn't want to wait. I am using a Weistec charge pipe that is bigger in diameter - so hot air is coming out of the turbocharger, gets immediately cooled by the methanol spray, this atomized spray now goes through the intercooler and then into the engine. When I called Weistec about the bung location they simply said there is no room on the other side of the intercooler and that this application will still work great.
Note: the Weistec charge pipe alone gave me overboost codes on the stock map, these resolved later after tuning with methanol.
The pump is installed near the passenger side rear suspension with everything heat shielded and the lines protected.
The JB4 uses map 7 as the default methanol injection map but you can also spray in all maps (except 0 stock) if you want. DRS tuned on the their dyno, sent logs to Terry who then sent maps and settings. They did this a few rounds, and then I continued to street log and fine tune - Terry has been great with very quick responses.
Spray is set to activate at ~15 psi, when boost passes that threshold, the JB4 commands flow. Flow is monitored live in the JB4 app; if the system fails to trigger, the JB4 automatically reduces boost for safety. In practice, flow hits 100% at WOT, cooling IATs and effectively raising octane.
In sport mode I am at ~30–31 psi, and ~32–33 psi in track mode. My logs show IAT's usually drop from ~95-115°F down to ~76–83°F once meth kicks in (depending on ambient) and I don't get any heat soak at the top of a pull or over time. Timing is stable, averaging 12–18° advance with no knock correction when meth is flowing.
Adjusted for their typical 20% loss on their Superflow dyno we are ~508 chp / 462 ctq corrected - to be conservative we can say 490hp is what the engine is making in Track mode Map 7 + methanol. Think of it as just an easy way to have on tap race gas and additional intake cooling. I am using about half a gallon of methanol mixture on a typical canyon day - and that corresponds to about half a tank of gas used.
The JB4 combination is working really well...and it will be interesting to see results with a true ECU tune that has been mapped with methanol injection. For now this is working really well and I can't overstate the luxury of having your phone be able to log all this data, come home, dump your log file into ChatGPT and have a full detailed analysis of how the system is performing with all the timing, IAT, throttle, boost, etc. data right there. Really cool. If I had a V6 I would be doing the same thing and figuring out where to inject after the supercharger (is there room in the intake path post-supercharger?). Lastly I just order Speed Sauce from VP Racing it's premixed methanol/water 50/50 and like $9/gallon - gets shipped to my place and I just top off the methanol tank every once in a while.
When I everntually get a flashed ECU I'll be moving the controller to Snow Performance - hopefully eventually someone will enable different maps so I can choose to turn it off. In the meantime everything is working well and the car is a screamer -
With that said, this a very informative post. It is thus, much appreciated that you are sharing this information for the forum. I have not typically modified my prior sports cars. My Emira is a V6 manual. I did take advantage of living in the same town as GRP, and did a cold air intake, 3rd cat delete, Miltek valve controller, and wheel spacers. I am watching the ecu flash threads, but do not have the b#lls at this point to do it to my car at this point.
