When I read Roland's claim that the car's orientation relative to the Earth's
magnetic field was causing the miss, I was at first skeptical. Actually, the
coil-low-on-oil thing made so much sense I guess I didn't think about the
other possibilities enough. But then I thought back to the first autocross I
ever did in my Midget. It took place in the parking lot of a nuclear power
plant (what a hell of a DNF someone could have accomplished if only the lot
was a little closer to the main reactor :) ) and about 50yds. after the start
gate, the course passed under a whole load of high-tension lines coming from
the plant. Before the event started, a friend and I joked that if the RPM's
of the engine were just wrong, an adverse electrical resonance could take place
in the ignition circuit. Well, as I took off on my first run, I got the car
under the power lines and all of a sudden it started sputtering and misfiring
in horrible ways. Once the engine sped up just a bit, the miss stopped. It
happened on the next couple runs, then I pushed a little harder, got up past
the missing speed before I got to the lines, and it ran fine. My friends re-
fused to believe it could be the electrical thing, insisting it had to be
fuel starvation. In 5,000 miles since (including 2 more autocrosses) it has
never recurred.
So maybe the Earth's magnetic fields did have something to do with the sput-
tering Jag. You never know.....
Michael T. Chaffee
mchaffee@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu
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