Fiat 132GL

It lives!

March 2001. The car is running again, this time with the Dellortos. These came from a Fiat 130 Abarth, along with the intake manifold. The cam mounted distributor is from a Honda.

Notice fuel system for N2O kit installed in foreground. Holly electric fuel pump with separate regulator provides fuel at around 8 lb/in^2 to the fuel solenoid.

The car with new carpet. Since this photo the original aluminium door sills have been reinstalled. The steering wheel has been recovered and beefed up in size a bit as it was too thin in my opinion. The gear stick has also changed. The metal shaft is now chrome, with a round black ball on top. This knob actually came from the original 4 speed installed in the car. After market gauges below heater show N2O fuel pressure, oil pressure (mech. gauge), and sump oil temp. The dash has been recovered, and the instrument glass (well plastic) has been renewed. The gauges look like new now! N2O arming switch beneath lockable panel in front of gear change.

Nitrous bottle in place, but not used in the last three years. Waiting to sort out some fueling issues before this is used again. The bottle used to be inside the car behind the passenger seat. New laws meant it had to be moved to the boot. This makes turning the nitrous on and off tricky. NOS have a remote bottle solenoid, but this is another NZ$500.

Silver bracket holding oil cooler in place is visible in this picture. It has since been painted black. Licenece place has also changed position. It now scoops air into the cooler as the oil temperature was still getting high. 120C and climbing on a warm day after fast driving. Notice after market wing mirrors replacing original single black plastic unit.

The front anti sway bar has been upgraded from 19mm to 25mm. The car feels better balanced now. In the old days there was loads of understeer.

The Dellortos come to life

I drove the car with the new Dellortos for a while, but there were a number of problems. The carbs would spit back a lot, and the car was difficult to start. Numerous things were tried to remedy the situation but nothing really worked. Since Harmon Motors had done a good job with the nitrous dyno testing I decided to take the car back there.

After many many hours of tuning, during which all jets were changed in size, distributor, cam & valve timing were all checked and set, the car was ready to go. It now drives like a completely different car. There is still some hesitation when cruising at 80-100 kph, but for now I can live with it. Performance under full throttle is very good!

The other week I took the car on the Twin rivers run. Here are some photos from the outing.

Presently I am working on building a programmable ignition system for the car. This will let me vary the advance as I'm driving and should prove a useful tuning tool. The kit also has an input that can be used to retard the timing when the nitrous system is activated. An engine running on nitrous requires less advance than a normally aspirated engine.