Sorry to be so long winded here, but...

In the hunt for the old "PEP" my 86 2.3-16 used to have I attempted to check the ignition timing, but have been stymied by lack of visibility of the timing mark no matter what I do. Also my timing light seems to cause cylinder #1 to stop firing when I connect it up.

SO--looking at the Intro to Service Manual for the 16V I notice that the original cars had an adjustable timing for the europeans that would allow them to compensate for poor octane gas. There was an adjustable plug with 7 positions, each one being 2 degrees of additional retardation from the basic timing.

My US 16Valve only has a single "Reference Resistor" (R16/1) whose value is 750 ohms. This corresponds to the 6 degree retard position of the Euro plug. I believe that the base (no retard) position of the Euro plug was an open circuit (infinite ohms). Therefore it seems that if I add resistance I should get some additional ADVANCE. In fact, if I remove the resistor entirely, I should get about 6 degrees of additional advance.

Given this logic, I made an empirical test, changing the 750 ohm stock resistor to 2.2 K ohms (didn't want to be greedy). Took the car out for a test drive (sometimes called an Italian tune-up) to see what happened. Perhaps a little more performance but not significant. Then I removed the resistor entirely--and now I got a SIGNIFICANT difference. Car now pulls strongly to redline in gears 1-4. I chickened out in 5th.

Can anyone verify/comment on the above analysis? Any downside to what I have done? Anyone else play with this? I am aware of the concern about too much advance and what it might do--and I really need to figure out how to do the timing measurement anyway.

Thanks for any commentary.

Tom Elerding