Eureka!

[Bluewedge]

I've had to put up with the pinking problem on my 350i for the past 6 months with sluggish performance until I decided on a simple experiment.

On Saturday my car ran itself into the red zone temp wise and was happily pinking itself to 'pinkdom' as part of the bargain too. The fan never cut in until 100 which was way too high so after topping up the header tank I was on my way again with the chief suspect being the otter switch.

The next day I ran the car up to temp then I shorted out the fan so it ran continously by-passing the otter. I had been running on super unleaded instead of the usual optimax and before long, the car was running beautifully with the fan constantly on with minimal pinking.

Then today, I took the experiment a stage further. I filled up with Optimax and ran the car with the fan on continously right from cold as the car never pinked prior to the thermo opening up and it behaved perfectly...even whilst crawling along the north circ -but the best bit, was that the car never pinked once and its performance was blinding with the temp never getting above or below the midway point on the gauge.

The moral of this story? Don't worry about manual fane overides, twin fans etc. Run your car with the fan on continously from cold and forget the worries about the heat & the pinking. I'm not saying it will cure all pinking problems but I am saying that TVR must have got it wrong in letting their Rover V8s run too hot - even with otter switches that do work.

Try it and see.

Andy aka Schazz

[david beer]

You should try an adjustable replacememnt otter. That way at least the fan is not on all the time, just when its getting warmish. Set to where you like, then forget it.I quite agree about the pinking though, my Griff would pink when hot, now it doesnt.