Tag: Porsche

The Mechanical Fuel Injection set up on early Porsches was allegedly derived from the need to fly upside down. In the Second World War aerial combat developed into serious forms of aerobatics and there was an advantage to be had by those pilots who could manage their throttle and therefore acceleration, irrespective of the position of the plane. Traditional carburetion was inadequate as carburettors rely on gravity to keep the float chambers filled. Trust the German engineering cadre to come up with a solution. Their Messerschmidt aircraft could pull negative G’s thanks to this technology and the British Spitfires could not follow their trail without stalling their carburetted engines.

The constant fuel pressure combined with excellent fuel atomization, leading to a maximum fuel burn ratio in gasoline engines, had Mercedes, Porsche and later BMW, apply this expensive and complex technology on their race and production cars. MFI was overtaken by Electronic Fuel Injection only 20 [...]

Joost Cohen, my co-driver, and I collected Silverado from the Blankemeijer Brothers today, who had niggled the final details on the car. The rattling sunroof now behaves nicely and has gone quiet and the spare Messerschmitt fuel pump went into the smuggler’s box. Frans found a blister on the inside of one of the rear tires, both got replaced by SnowTrac 3 Vredensteins. We had two outside mirrors RS style fitted and what a difference in visibility!

At scrutineering one of the officials thought we were running modern bulbs in our headlights and driving lights, but once they warmed up the blue glow disappeared. That was all they could find…

As a snowstorm was arriving we left Veenendaal with all our goodies and I drove Silverado to its birth. On a quiet strip of highway I could dip into the power of the 2.7 RS engine and managed to shoot a few seconds of [...]

Here’s a little sneak preview of the kind of material you can expect from the Winter Trial 2010 coverage on this blog in the last week of January. This test had a very sharp bogey time and was run on a half wet, half frozen driver education layout somewhere in Czechia. I remember that the parking lot was next to a factory and the fence was lined with spectators during their lunch brake, as we tore up their adjacent driving center.

Mind the hands moving on the steering wheel and you’ll get an idea of how slippery the back part of the little track was. The dip in the middle of the track was very treacherous. If we would have applied more speed we would have understeered over a layer of snow, straight into a wall. The nose of the car became light as we dropped down and I thanked the rally gods for having [...]