ME7 was well ahead of it's time when it was released... but what people are doing now with stand alone ECU's ME7 could only dream of.
That is not the case at all.
The system was designed to be in a street car. If you are building a proper drag strip car, of course you need an ECU that has time based control of the engine.
You could use the ME7 hardware and run your own software inside if if you would desire, but it is pointless. It is much better to use the right tool for the job.
If you do any kind of motorsport, then it is very beneficial to have built-in logging to flash memory, real time tuning, perhaps even telemetry.
None of that was a target for the ME7 that was made for street cars.
Bosch has high end motorsport ECU's which can do all that and more. Used by top teams around the world.
Basically what it comes down to is, comparing a dedicated track car to a dedicated dragstrip car and complaining that the dragstrip car does not go around the circuit as well (at all) as the dedicated track car.
Seems ridiculous, but pretty much the same comparison is done every day. If you want motorsport and need specific features, buy an ECU that does the motorsport thing with specific features.
You don't need an ECU with a million different models for everything designed to operate at any altitude and any temperature on thousands of engines over 10+ years with different tolerances. You have your specific car, run in your specific condition. Putting a standard ECU on a motorsport car is usually just needlessly holding it back.
As for the yadda yadda in here. My experience in driving and on the dyno is - it is actually harder to get the same power and behaviour from a standalone. Mostly because you just don't have the ability to calibrate the standalone's knock control as close as the OEM ecu has it, and then you can't run the same timing, because it becomes dangerous. However, this is true mostly on street cars - on dragstrip cars the same fueltech for example can perform much better because you can calibrate by time from start/distance, which no stock ECU has functionality of. I'm not even going to go into the different modes with transbrake, the fact that the ECU also controls the trans and so on. Different world, different ECU's.
