If you are going all out with a track weapon (sounds like it!), you'd be better off with an Autronic/Motec etc, as it will allow you to retune for other mods later, and throw out annoying heavy items like the air flow meter (allowing for a bigger diameter intake pipe
). The performance from such a setup would translate to enough seconds on the track to justify the extra cost, as the stock ecu is still a 15+ year old design which was created with that annoying E-word in mind as well as performance - economy. Assuming that you can in fact get a chip for it, you are still quite limited with what you can do inside the constraints of the original ECU.
If you were to run a fully programmable ECU, you should be able to take control of your spark advance curve, remove various annoying emissions items (not sure what they are on a TS), and generally set up a much better intake system (ie. make up custom manifolds at a later date, bigger/different injectors, wild cams....) Then again, regulations for your target class may not allow this.
However, if you can do it within your class, I'd go straight for the fully programmable ECU right off the bat, even if you don't intend to make any more mods at the current time - the ability to fiddle with just the fueling alone should see you able to dial in a faster car than a chip can give.
