We examine an elegant approach to updating the original injection on Jaguar’s V12 engines.
DRIVE ENOUGH genuinely old cars – by which I mean drum brakes, carburettors and crossplies rather than an outdated sat nav – and it soon becomes apparent that one of the greatest advantages of technology in the automotive world has been the application of electronic engine control.
Even at its best, a carburettor is a relatively primitive device, mixing air and fuel outside the manifold and sending the atomised mixture on a journey down the pipes before it reaches the combustion chamber.
Injecting the fuel directly into the manifold achieves a higher level of control and therefore efficiency, with the first production fuel injection systems appearing as early as the 1950s. These were mechanical, analogue systems though and relied on very accurate machining tolerances and precise calibration to operate correctly. Impressive when operating as designed, they soon became troublesome when incorrectly maintained – a perfect example being the Lucas Petrol Injection employed by Triumph in the 1960s. This explains why Bosch’s simple analogue K-Jetronic system – once memorably described as operating like a toilet cistern – became the world’s most-produced fuel injection system thanks to its use in everything from Golf GTI to Rolls-Royces.
The chief modification was the addition of an amplifier to drive 12 injectors
The application of electronic control to fuel injection was also first productionised for European cars by Bosch with its D-Jetronic system and it’s here that we encounter a link with Jaguar.
The newly-developed V12 engine was all set to make its production debut wearing a fuel injection system developed specially for the engine by UK firm Brico, but it’s been suggested that the system they came up with bore an unfortunately close similarity to the Bosch product. Fearful of litigation by th
