[Steam Driver]

I think bad-mouthing carburetors is a bit short-sighted. Porsches of all varieties ran beautifully for years with carburetors. A properly set-up set of Webers runs great.

The 914-6 I had for years (now departed and I miss it) had modified (larger venturii, and idle jets, main jets, emulsion tubes) set-up by someone who knew what he was doing and it ran great in all regimes. The key here the set up, that requires the knowledge, and experience, not to mention drawers full of little brass Weber parts to get it right. Unfortunately all that stuff is getting thin on the ground.

In the mid-seventies when emissions rules were getting hot and heavy a friend of mine had a portable exhaust gas analyzer that we used on one day, driving, to check my car’s mixture. Except when initially accelerating when it briefly went rich (as it should) it was amazing how steady and consistent the mixture was. We were amazed; didn’t expect that.

Once a Weber (and probably everything else) is properly done it should be fine until it gets dirty and needs disassembly and cleaning at some point. Yes multi-card set-ups occasionally get out of synch but that’s easily remedied, and maybe the idle mixture will need tweaking but other than that carbs are trouble-free. Practically no moving (wearing) parts, no sensors, and no computers needed.

As you can tell, I like carburetors. To me the only real advantage to EFI is that it’s more readily tunable, and generally gets better fuel economy because of overrun fuel cutoff.