I am wiring up a 93 Camaro for a race car, so I have cut and shortened many wires and removed many unnecessary wires.

I can get the car to crank and run great, but to do so I have to manually ground the yellow/black wire on the theft deterrent relay.

This wire goes to the vats box and as I understand it is supposed to be grounded by the vats module.

I do have the Baker Electronic vats bypass module in place.

Any ideas about the yellow/black ground?

 

I am assuming your bypass module is one that supplies the modulated ground to the computer to allow the injectors to fire. Since it sounds like you have no VATS module, the TDR is not getting any signal to operate to allow the starter to crank.

You have a few choices, depending on how you want to approach it. The easiest would be just to permantly ground that yellow/black wire. The relay won't operate anyway, until it also gets 12v when you turn the key to START so leaving it grounded should not be a problem. As soon as you release the key from START, the relay will go to a non-operated state.

Something else you might consider is putting a hidden switch to feed the ground to the yellow/black wire. That would act as a manual theft deterrent for cranking the car. A "manual" VATS, if you will.

You could always completely remove the TDR by directly wiring the big yellow wire to the big purple wire.

 

I had considered just grounding the yellow/black wire and not worrying about it.

The vats module is still there, but not sure if I could completely remove it or not. ??

Is there any real advantage to having the relay?

 

Keeping the TDR would still allow the clutch pedal starter lock-out to function, but if you don't care about that, then you could just remove the TDR.

 

What about completely removing the vats module?

I have the bypass module.

 

From what you have posted, it sounds like you are already bypassing the VATS anyway, so I would think you could remove it.

 

You were correct. I thought I would try the car without the vats box and it ran the same, so I cut out all those wires too.

Thanks for all your help and the help your site has provided,

James