Not very happy right now… my engine has begun to ‘ping’, (detonate) and I can hear the rings rattling under loaded acceleration in 3rd, 4th and 5th at low ish RPM.
Cannot understand why!
I have an Emerald ECU (Does this not ‘sense’ detonation and retard the timing a tad to avoid it?) and all has been great since I had it fitted and RR set up by Dave Walker in Feb.
The only thing I have done is filled the car up with a fulll tank Shell ‘V Power’… I normally run it on BP ‘Ultimate’… is it possible it was a bad batch?
Now just driving gently to empty… and thats at least another 150 miles!!!
Hopefully, just a bad batch of fuel, Pete. Don’t labour/thrash the engine until you refill. Also, if I were you, I’d top it up after it’s half empty, to get some decent stuff in asap. Have you tried aviation fuel?
For the past year, I’ve been using Tesco 99 octane in my cars (whenever possible), as there’s a store just a couple of miles from my home.
I’m with Pesky, I would go with a bad batch of fuel. Buy a bottle of octane booster and pour that in the existing tank if you want to run it dry quickly.
No the Emerald can’t detect “knock” as it doesn’t have a knock sensor. However Dave’s maps are pretty safe when it comes to over advancing the ignition, so it definitely wont be that.
The only other options are really bad news (broken piston ring), so lets not talk about those until we have ruled out the bad fuel.
Dave W agrees… also thinks it is the fuel at this time of year.
Will try the octane booster and go for as long gentle boring drive… trouble with that is the Emerald gives me over 30mpg!!!
Re-fill with Ultimate from my usual place and will report back… dont think it would be a broken piston ring as engine has only done 13K miles and produces good power with hardly any oil burn…
In the meantime I will ‘thrash’ somethinge else!!!
I guess some garages don’t sell as much of the high octane juice, so it sits in the tanks for a long time. For my race car I always use a really busy garage where you have a better chance of the fuel being replenished on a regular basis.
I guess some garages don’t sell as much of the high octane juice, so it sits in the tanks for a long time. For my race car I always use a really busy garage where you have a better chance of the fuel being replenished on a regular basis.