RE: Italian tuneup

["Nick Koleszar" <npk@domain.elided>]

Dave

An Italian tune is, basically, just driving the car the way it was intended
to be driven: flat out.

To do this as a "tune up", you have to find somewhere you can drive the car
fast. You accelerate hard to red line in all the gears (where possible)
several times. Ideally, you want to drive it at red line in 4th or 5th gear
for several minutes so  it gets nice and hot and burns up the crap and gunge
that build up in normal stop-start and short-run driving. I negate the need
to do Italian tune-ups by driving hard and fast as much as safely possible
but if you live and drive mostly in city centres this could be difficult to
do. I benefit from a few miles of fast, straight roads near my house that
rarely have any traffic on them and have no side roads. (You should hear the
bikers, especially the Italian V twins, doing their "tuneups" late at night)

The Italian tune up idea comes about from people either not exercising their
car enough because of the nature of their normal driving or because they're
scared to break something.

Any healthy Alfa Romeo should be able to drive for hours at high revs
without breaking anything. Obviously, if you're car isn't in good condition
and/or hasn't been maintained properly, you may have problems.

nk

Nick Koleszar   koleszar@domain.elided
outgoing mail scanned for viruses by Norton.
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1971 Alfa Romeo Giulia Super 2.0
1990 Alfa Romeo 75 3.0 QV
1993 Mini
1990-ish Rotax 125cc/Gbox kart
1926 Amilcar C6 (I wish....)
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> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 06:32:02 -0400
> From: "Dave Martin" <dwmartin@domain.elided>
> Subject: good Italian tuneup
>
> Brian Shorey sez "Just be sure to give it a good Italian
> tune up every once in a while."
>
> Brian, for the benefit of others, whazzat?
>
> Dave Martin
> Endwell, NY
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