Welcome to the street!

Ever wonder what it would be like to put a Lucas fuel injection set-up from a F-5000 race car, on a street driven car? Well, stay tuned as we do just that! We share all the details from getting the metering unit and drive to fit in the car without resorting to firewall modifications to fuel cam design and tuning using modern tools like wide band 02 sensors, in a real street driven 1970  RS Camaro!

The first obvious problem, how the heck do I fit a right angle distributor drive under the hood without major firewall surgery? This is not a problem on a F-5000 race car, because the ignition distributor can point straight back. If you try to turn it sideways, the distributor hits the manifold, and won't clear the firewall of our R+D Camaro. Our answer, make a new distributor that will clear!

You can use any small V-8 cap and rotor, we picked a vintage Mallory cap from a dual point distributor because it is small, and of correct era for this setup. You could use just the cap and rotor with a crank trigger, but there is enough room to squeeze in a magnetic pickup. We chose to use the magnetic pickup out of a HEI distributor, without any mechanical advance or transistor module in a custom mini distributor. 

The advance will be handled by a MSD timing computer,  a MSD 6AL box with rev control replaces the transistor module. This keeps the under hood area neat and tidy, no firewall modifications!

Click on the thumbnails to see how we made this!

The cap was cut open to double check rotor to post clearance. The last step will be to pin the rotor shaft in the correct "locked" advance position using a crankshaft degree wheel. Just like "degreeing" a cam, you want the timing events correct. It is also very important to "time" the metering unit with valve timing so number one fuel port is just cracking open at or near the beginning of the intake stroke. Some people try timing the metering unit to inject at different timing points, and track test to see what the engine likes. This initial  timing setup is worth doing on a mock up engine first, and marked! Saves a lot of time later. The Lucas manual "Notes on Installation and Calibration - Racing Cars" has very good instructions for setting up
injection timing.

The inside of the distributor will be marked for number one plug, and number one fuel port. That
way, rebuilding and assembly of the right angle drive, and installing it on an engine will be easy.