Hugh Barber writes:
> Randall Young wrote;
>
> ....the tailpipe emissions were pretty bad and apparently no one at Lucas or
> Triumph could figure out how to clean them up.
>
>
> Randall,
>
> I had always heard that the camshaft and compression ratio were the primary
> reasons that the TR5 was "dirty" and that North American customers didn't
> get PI because the dealers disn't want to spend the money to train their
> mechanics (who already knew how to tune Strombergs). I wonder what the
> "true" story was?
Maybe this just adds to the mythology, but my understanding was that fuel
injection was entertained by the factory as a means of doing two
things--keeping the power up (which was an issue for the factory)--and
meeting the initial requirements of the upcoming 1968 US emissions laws. All
the manufacturers knew they were coming well ahead of time. It was thought
that more uniform cylinder-to-cylinder mixture control would be much better
for emissions. By the time that all the prototyping and testing was done,
however, Zenith-Stromberg had come up with an emission-ready carburetor
which with some other lower-cost tweaking met the standards, and was much
lower cost than PI and far less twitchy--but with much less power--for the
US market. Since the volume for domestic use and Europe would be smaller
than the US, and since the factory perceived the power-to-weight ratio to be
a much bigger issue in Europe, and that the prototyping costs had already
been made, PI was the standard in Europe. In essence, the lower cost
installation in the US subsidized the non-pollution controlled Europe market
engine.
Cheers.
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