Well all of my efforts came to fruition last Sunday, at my car club's Economy Run event. This was a 118.7 mile loop through the southern Adirondack mountains of New York. First allow me to update you all on the completion of the engine and tuning it before the event.

Engine:

To recap, I am using an original 23,000 mile '76 A14 shortblock that had been sitting for many years. The bores looked OK so I decided not not to remove the pistons and hone the cylinders because that just adds drag to the recprocating assembly and being two days before the event, I didn't have any time for break in miles. You can grab the crank pulley [with the plugs out] and easily spin the long block over by hand. I even chose to leave in the original 32 year old crankshaft oil seals because they looked ok, and are certainly "looser" than new ones. I purposely set the oil level one quart low and added a hotter 195 degree thermostat.

Tuning:

Upon road testing, I quickly found that the engine ran very lean at about 16.4 to 1 on my wide band A/F ratio meter. The combination of the Pacesetter header and 2" mandrel bent exhaust system, [plus the removal of the egr system] were surely causing this. I replaced the standard 105 primary jet with a richer 109 and tried it again. Bingo. It was pretty much spot on then, with a 14.6 to 15.0 A/F range at cruise.

The last issue was the pinging. Boy does this thing pre-ignite under even light loads. I was running with the standard 10 degrees of timing and this was on 93 octane premium! Obviously the high compression end of this combination was showing itself. The lack of an egr system was not helping either. I didn't have time to add a water injection system or anything else, so at this point I simply added two gallons of 110 octane race gas to the tank. That quieted it right up.




On to the testing. I topped up the tank to the rim and then carefully drove a 64 mile loop the afternoon before the event. I refilled the tank [right to the rim again] and it took 1.1 gallons of gas. I was very happy with this 56 mpg test! As you can see, the car is far too high off of the ground and this brings very poor drag coefiicient. This was not a full-on attempt at the best possible mileage. I need much more time to prepare. There are many other things I can and will try in the future, but this was the way it had to be last weekend.




So I went home that night and tried to help the poor aerodynamics at least a little. I added a makeshift front chin spoiler, clear plexiglass headlight covers, and blocked off half of the grill to reduce wind drag.

The next I morning I completed the event and carefully drove the 118.7 mile distance. During the post event refill it took only 1.91 gallons of fuel. This equates to 61.53 miles per [US] gallon!

Might this be a new record for the A-series?