[Jeff Higgins]

I have driven way too many MFI inducted cars that are an embarrassment to the breed. Way too many. I've tuned every one of them (that's why I was driving them) to bring out that "snap" for which they are known.

Now, I'm still a rank amateur on all of this, but I have noticed a trend that has repeated itself in every MFI car that I ever tuned that had been running like a dog. I believe it is attributable to one step, and just one step that is documented in the CMA manual - the idle CO2 adjustment. Setting it to the factory spec appears to result in a very, very lean running condition. And they run like crap.

IMHO, this was a period effort to meet ever tightening emissions. Set per the numbers found in CMA, they pass emissions. And run like crap. Back then, of course, wide band O2 sensors were still just a dream, so CO2 was all we had. Today, with readily available wide band O2 sensors, we can merely drive on down the road and get A/F ratios real time, under a broad variety of operating conditions. When tested this way, it becomes painfully obvious that, when the CO2 is set per CMA, the poor things are just too lean.

Correcting that changes everything. Unfortunately, "everything" includes significantly increased emissions and, with it, that infamous MFI stink. They like to run on the rich side, even richer than carbs. When made to do so, they become an entirely different animal.

This is, in a large part, why I'm rooting so enthusiastically for the electric car market. The more folks I see driving those things, the less guilty I feel. I figure for every couple hundred of those I see, I can sneak in one old school MFI car...