Italian Tune-up. How "does" it work.

The theory is that revving at the redline cleans out carbon deposits on the valves. The heat from this helps keep the crud off. People who have a 7000+ RPM redline and are afraid to to over 5000 really need to do this. Of course, you want to be sure the engine is well warmed up, and you don't want to do this in top gear in a school zone.

Ken

 

The Italian Tune up is historically 3rd gear at 90mph, or whatever speed third gear at near redline for 3-5 minutes comes out to on your car.

The idea is to get everything good and hot, achieve maximum air flow through the engine, and optimum combustion to get rid of carbon deposits/fouling on valves, plugs, etc.

 

Ken and Erik are correct.

Unlike regular cars, high performance engines are set up so that optimal combustion chamber temperatures are achieved at high speed and high load. If the car is used on the street, these conditions are rarely achieved in regular driving. The result is that the combustion chamber does not reach a sufficiently high temperature to cause the carbon to burn off. On a smaller scale, this is similar to using too cold plugs and getting carbon fouling.

Regards,

Art S.

 

Check the tire PSI in your 275GTB. Start it up. Limp to the highway bucking and belching black smoke. Foul at least 2 plugs. Cruise along for about 30 minutes or until the oil moves off the peg. (Summer 15 minutes-winter an hour help by blocking off rad with card board). Drop down to 2. Slowly in stages bring on the gas. Car will buck. Car will send huge clouds of black smoke billowing backwards. Press down on the throttle until the revs come up to about 5500. Stay there for a while. The plugs will unfoul. When they do press down until motor reaches 7000. Upshift. Press down and bring revs up to 7000. Hang out. Bucking will become less pronounced. Smoke will begin to turn from black to grey. Flames will shoot out as the unburned gas explodes in the exhaust. Don't worry but do keep a grip on steering wheel as these explosions will be quite violent. After about 5 minutes the flames will stop and you will have ejected another portion of the incinerated steel wool that was clogging up your mufflers. Up shift. Press down to 7000.
Unshift again and bring it up to 7000 again. Note that you will be now traveling at about 170 and these puppys get a little light in the nose.
Enjoy.

 

I've heard of different versions of the "Italian tune-up", but the theory is basically the same for all -- get the engine up to high rpms, near redline. The version I've used and that I've heard many times is to have the car in 3rd gear, accellerate at full throttle from 60 to near redline, hold it for 15 to 30 seconds, let off, slow to 60, then repeat several times. I've done it, and it works.

I just had the Mondial out at Pocono Raceway earlier this week, and effectively did this, going to near redline in 3rd and 4th over and over. All shifts were over 7,000 rpm. On the ride home, the car absolutely hummed and felt much peppier than it had on the ride out. Interesting side effect of driving at speed.

 

Will this work for other models, or just the 275GTB?

Great post to read to start my day.

Cheers
Kevin

 

LOL...! That's classic stuff...


The Italian Tune-up is NOT a myth...

 

I can tell you that my car drives better/smoother on the way HOME from a lively track day, than on the drive TO the track. The Italian Tune-Up *is* a functional reality in my opinion and experience!

 

From Pat Bradens Alfa Owner's Bible:

The Italian Tune-Up is No Myth

You’ve sunk your next five years’ paychecks into this sweet Italian beauty and you’re not going to abuse it, by golly. You shift at 2500 rpm and never go over 70 mph. To prove your point, the car needs tuning so often now that if you really put your foot into it you’re sure something would explode. That’s Italian cars for you.

Somewhere, right now in Italy, someone’s driving exactly the same car as yours. His right foot is pressed firmly to the floor, where it has been for the last three hours. The rubber on the brake pedal shows no perceptible wear. The speedometer and tachometer are both trying to bury themselves offscale. His arms are weary from cranking the wheel back and forth as he negotiates the mountain roads. His eyes gleam and his heart is glad for he has never once had cause to do more than regular maintenance to his thoroughbred of a car that has uncounted kilometers on its engine. He’s right and you’re wrong!"

 

If you want to see what an Italian tune-up does, go here:

http://www.99gt.com/videos/mpg/

Click on the "Tubi328.001..mpg" file (it's toward the bottom).

All the soot and crap blowing out of the exhaust when he hits high RPM's was stuck in the system somewhere. Cleaning it out certainly helps the engine work like it was intended to.

 

Yep, everytime our local club does a "Ferrari Dyno Day" event, there's always several cars that belch out lots of carbon soot/smoke at around 5K rpm+.

After a couple of passes on the dyno they don't smoke anymore and the horsepower figures climb up the chart, after each run.

Some owners seem very scared to take their cars up to anywhere near redline and they get pretty carboned up, because of that.

 

I gotta think that the term Itialian Tune-Up is just not PC!

 

Where are you located ? Lets get together and give me the keys to your f-car and I will show you how to do a Italian Tune-up, free of charge.

I might even spring for the gas depending on how nice a day it is for a drive in a 328

 

I did it in my tr just now.
Definitely notice a difference between the drive to the highway where I did it and the drive back from the highway.
I held it at about 5000 in 3rd for about 3 km.

any idea how often this should be done?

thanks for the tips

myhorse

 

As often as you can? (To maintain mental health. )

I can also testify that the Italian Tune-Up works.

 

I never heard of this but have to give it a try!

 

100% fact. It works. Drive the living daylights out of your car (after it's properly warmed up) for a few hours. It'll shift smoother and rev better than you ever imagined.


-Daniel

 

I agree. I call it the Zero Carbon Policy.

After a 150 mile run in the company of an F40, numerous 360's and 355's. It will definately clean the engine out.
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Right from the horses mouth so to speak. Originally written by Satch Carlson and published in Autoweek many years ago. Although he refers to Alfas in this article, it also applies to our Fcars.

Jeff

The following article first appeared in AutoWeek (and later in the Alfa Owner) more years ago than I care to remember. This is probably one of the (if not the funniest) things that I have ever read. Ever wonder what the term 'Italian Tune Up' means? Read on to find out. I have posted this with the permission of the Author.

Satch Carlson

Life in the Fast Lane

Thanks to the fine folks at AUTO WEEK we are able to reprint this most interesting of Mr. Carlson’s weekly columns. P.S. the names have not been changed to protect the innocent. ED

So my friend Frank Bebey calls me up and says, "How come you never write about Alfas?" I know immediately this is a put-up job, because Frank Bebey Is what you call your basic exile, your sports-car junkie faced with Deep Withdrawal, having moved to Alaska some time ago in a roached-out Ford van, his Sunbeam Alpine left to rot In the flatlands.

"What's with you and Alfas?" I ask. "I didn't know you were a Alfa freak." For all I know Frank Bebey may be an Alfa freak; mostly he mourns generically an entire race of sports cars.

"Well," says Frank, "It Isn't just me. It's Black Bart. I've been getting these letters from Black Bart, and he knows you're a friend of mine, and so he has assigned me to use a little muscle if you don't write something about Alfas."

Since I work for Bebey now and then as a theater techie - well, you can't play with cars ALL the time - and occasionally pick up the tab for a sixer of Heineken so he won't fire me just because I dropped an ellipsoidal reflector spotlight off the second pipe one time and nearly crushed a minor actress, I take his suggestions very seriously. I decide to tell you everything I know about Alfas.

Besides, there's Black Bart.

Black Bart is the guy who lives in Fort Wayne, Ind., and although his real name is Bob Bartel, he owns something called Black Bart's Auto Emporium, and what he does is collect Alfa Romeos. He Is a Alfa junkie the way I am a hopeless Lotus addict, so I can understand his frustration at never having me say anything about Alfas, especially when I have even written entire columns devoted to Fiats, for heaven's sake. Therefore I will tell you the one and only thing I truly know about Alfas:

Every Alfa ever built is a race car.

I got this bit of wisdom when I was but a wee tad, serving my apprenticeship in some surly garage or other. You know the place: A two-staIl wooden garage, some crusty hombre who's decided to chuck it all and become a foreign-car mechanic.

My job, as I recall, was to change the oil In the drip pans, sweep the dirt floor and hold the flashlight so Marcel (he called himself Marcel, but he had a semi-Oklahoma accent that led me to believe he'd taken his name from a French-sounding hair tonic) could see into the innards of some exotic engine bay. Anyway, I did learn a lot from working with Marcel, who inexplicably seemed really to know stuff about foreign cars. And one day a lady brought in an Alfa roadster.

Nice enough lady, as I recall. I wasn't into such things at that time, of course, being held in the thrall of motorcycles. She was blond and willowy, sort of an early Joni Mitchell type, and she had brought in the Alfa for a tune-up because, as she put it, "It simply Isn't running as It ought."

Marcel didn't say much until she left, then he pulled the spark plugs, laid them in a row on the greasy flannel fender cover.

"Dumb broad," he muttered.

"Dudden know the first THENG about drivin' a Nalfa." That's what it sounded like, anyway. "Gotta DRIVE them cars." He squinted at the engine again. "Y'baby a Alfa, the damn thing's liable t'DIE. She'll jes' go BELLY UP ownya."

"An Alfa’s DIFFern't," he said. "Looka them Webers. Looka that head. You got yer hemispherekle comBUStion chambers, boy; that car's designed to be flat-out RUN,

And he showed me what he meant, after he had changed the plugs and tweaked the Webers and muttered incantations over the timing. It was my first ride in an Alfa, and I don't think he ever let the revs drop under 5,000, and when we returned from maybe half an hour of driving like we were carrying the typhoid serum to the desperate villagers, he parked the red Alfa in front of Marcel's Motor Massage, where It made little pinging noises as it cooled down and I tried to get my body back into Its pre-paralysis mode so I could open the passenger door. It had been some ride.

"Car like that," muttered Marcel, "y'spose to DRIVE It."

And then there was Sammy's roadster.

Samuel Baron Stevens Ill was Sammy's moniker, and he was one of my heroes because he had Indeed owned a '32 Ford roadster with 30 coats of '56 Cadillac Eldorado green paint on It and a loaded-up flathead engine to push It down the road. Sammy had also owned a Corvair Spyder, a nifty white shingle with red Interior that he took through a fence backward off the Crow Canyon road one night, and then he bought the Alfa.

It was a white roadster, and I think was called a Julia, or a Julietta, or something. Marcel would have approved of Sammy, I think, because he never drove the car in such a way as to foul the plugs or lug the engine. He drove like he was at LeMans about half a lap down, is how he drove.

And I suppose that's why I always hold a special awe for Alfas; you might say they were an important part of my education, although I never got to drive one.

 

spent about 20 minutes on that audio site listening to all the tube F-cars, nobody else was home so I cranked the volume, great sounds that get your blood going.

 

Tried the Italian Tune Up last afternoon on a 30 minute highway drive. Was scared to keep the revs at redline for that long, but held a consistent 6,000-7,000 for several minutes at a time. On the drive home I noticed a big difference in acceleration and sound. Had no idea before reading these posts that the carbon buildup was that bad, as I routinely take a 20 minute run where I redline it a couple of times. I am totally a believer now! Thanks Ferrarichat!

 

Just redid the tuning on my testarossa
Once again, I am amazed at how the thing runs after the tune.

For all of you that haven't done it ...do it now!!!

Unfortunately, for me it looks like this will be the last time my horse comes out of the stable until spring.

Do it now!!

 

To all,

The car seems so much more responsive when it's all cleaned out.

A casual acquaintance who has worked on Corvettes for 22 years took the 308 out for a ride. He was shifting soooo "short". I said that isn't necessary and is not good for the car. He then ran it up and is still shaking his head in amazment.

A Ferrari really IS different and has to be treated the way you guys recommend...besides...it's a special fun only a few get to enjoy!!!