Too much Torque Costs Lives

My TVR 400 has a 3.9 Electronic Fuel Injected (EFI) Range Rover engine fitted. Allegedly TVR do not do much tuning to them. In effect the engine is designed for low end pulling power, which is why it makes the 1066Kg TVR so "tail happy" and difficult to control in the wet or on poor surfaces. I live in Norfolk England and the roads are rubbish and it rains a fair bit - Dooh!

I purchased the book by Des Hammill "How to power tune Rover V8 Engines", which is an excellent reference for this engine. I also search the internet daily to gather TVR related information.

The Marc Adams "Tornado chip" seemed to be the solution to the above problem. This was not a fried potato that caused excessive posterior erruptions, but rather an expensive little electronic Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory(EPROM) component "Chip" that re-maps the Electronic Control Unit(ECU) of the cars EFI system so that the power is delivered in a more progressive manner and further up the rev range. Unlike other Chips it does not simply add more fuel at the very top end. The Chip will not make more the engine deliver more power but it should make the car faster by enabling the driver to reliably use the power available.

Fortunately I live in the same county as RPI who were suppliers of said Chip and after some consultation regarding supercharging, which they thought was the wrong approach I decided to take their advice and have the chip fitted with Magnecor plug wires. The concensus of opinion seems to be that these leads are expensive but necessary.

The fitting took about 90 minutes as RPI also found the rotor arm was of poor quality and the vacuum advance unit wasn't advancing. All in all £635 was spent. The Tornado chip really did make a difference and now the TVR felt like a real super car with predictable super-car performance on tap. As it happens Chris Crane of RPI and I are of the same vintage and studied at college on the same engineering course. He also likes bikes.

RPI kindly showed me round their impressive workshop facility and explained in great detail the reasons for doing the tuning work they undertake and some of the pitfalls to avoid. All in all very informative and food for much thought and future Credit-Card torment. If you are thinking of modifying your Rover V8 I would reccomend you at least speak with RPI first.

I think the Cosworth 4.6L short engine upgrade would be most amusing, but can the TVR chassis handle it, with Nankang tyres? Chris took me out in his 5.2L Rover engined Morgan in the wet , which was a real hoot and mostly sideways in the wet. The noise was totally amazing, a real hooligan of a car.

When you change anything on an engine it affects other things. Not suprisingly the one down side of fitting the chip was that the upgrade now highlighted the stuttering at low RPM. It wasn't that bad, just enough to be annoying around town. Another problem was that the engine was not reaching its proper operating temperature and was running very rich because the EFI will provide too much fuel when the engine is under 80 degrees celcius.

I booked the TVR back into RPI for them to investigate. Likewise replacing the battery seemed like a good idea and so one was ordered from Fast Fit costing £88.

I am now looking forward to see how these changes improve the car ,whilst quietly dreaming of a cosworth manufactured 4.6L long engine conversion.