It may have taken 6 months of Yahoo Auctions searching and some panicked last-minute bidding, but it was worth it – an N1 ECU never disappoints!

Having felt the gains attributed to the N1 ECU in the Cappuccino I was keen to replicate them in the Jimny with it’s own plug-and-play upgrade. It took a lot of Googling to find the correct part number for my particular model and transmission and, because of the age of the car, even longer for one to appear on Yahoo Auctions Japan. When it arrived the warning stickers were as promising as I remembered…

… though the installation was a little more tricky than removing the glovebox in the Cappuccino. In the Jimny’s case the ECU sits underneath the windscreen washer fluid bottle(!) inside a cowl which I assume helps to direct some air over the ECU (and no doubt protects it from careless windscreen washer fluid splashes too). Plug it in, switch over to cooler spark plugs at the same time – in my case from Denso IXU22 to IXU24 – and you’re good to go!

The improvement is marked, perhaps even more than with the Cappuccino. It’s a fascinating comparison – whether the Jimny is pegged back a little more as standard, whether the “style” of the tune is different (a bias towards torque over top end power for the Jimny, for example) or whether the Capp’s F6A and Jimny’s K6A respond differently, who knows. One thing’s for sure – the Cappuccino got more boost after it’s N1 installation and it’d be rude not to do the same with the Jimny!