OUR CLASSICS
It’s a case of one step forward and two steps back for Richard’s Aston…
1973 ASTON MARTIN V8
Fellow contributor – and Aston Martin V8 owner – John Lakey told me that I’d never be happy with the Aston’s original mechanical fuel injection no matter how much time and money was thrown at it, because ‘it was never right in the first place’.
The past few months with the big Aston have been a lot of fun after getting it back on the road at last following a 14-month recommission with me as its custodian. A comprehensive three-yearr restoration had stalled upon the sad death of the previous famous owner.
It’s been remarkably temperament- and trouble-free for a 50-year-old high-performance car; an occasional reluctance to fire up when the engine is really hot has been the only real fly in the ointment. All is well if I shut it down and re-start it after 15 minutes or so but trying to re-start it five minutes after switching off the hot engine could be a bit hit-and-miss.
I knew that any heat-soak issues into the Opus ignition module had been eliminated now that the new modern system has replaced all the old technology, and the helpfully transparent fuel pipes feeding the fuel rail above the big 5.3-litre V8 were showing the bubbles that are a dead giveaway of fuel vaporisation.
My philosophy has always been that restoring to original engineering rather than throwing it away or replacing it is all part of the fun of classics but this pre-supposes that the original system worked properly when it was new. And having dropped several thousand pounds on getting the injection system restored to ‘as new’ specification, I’ve reluctantly had to conclude that it was flawed from the start. There’s no doubt about it – the car runs extremely well when everything is working. After all, variations of the Bosch mechanical fuel injection have been used successfully in numerous Porsches and Mercedes of the era and there are people out there who do understand them. The problem seems to stem from the fact that Aston wanted this car to grab the headlines as the fastest car in the world, which led them to incorporating experimental Formula One technology into their own bespoke version of Bosch injection. And it was a success, insofar as motoring media around the world lauded the car as (I believe) the fastest four-seater car, but the system was under-developed and the factory needed to grab quick, fuss-free sales so they understandably switched back to less efficient but better understood Weber carburettors.
But with everything now running so well, surely overcoming a ‘simple’ hot start issue wouldn’t take long… would it? All is well while the viscous fan is helping to push cooling air through the big aluminium radiator an
