Has anybody heard of ‘The Italian Tune Up’… apparently it’s a way of giving the inside of a V12 a spring clean. Once the engine is warm and the car has been moving for about 20 mins at around 50 mph, one moves the auto shift into 2nd gear hold and accelerates ‘reasonably’ sharply to just under 6000rpm. Then out of the exhaust pipe comes a whole load of black smoke accompanied with popping and slight missing as the engine expels all its accumulated rubbish!! This is then repeated a couple of times until the engine runs smooth. This is all with the proviso that the engine is I good working order!! Anyone had the courage to do this???f
If your traffic conditions allow you to “give 'er the boot” on a regular basis you probably won’t need an Italian tune-up.
I do a lot of short-hop driving so I consider it part of proper upkeep on my V12s…except I use first gear 
. I refuse to let carbon befoul my combustion chambers. Yuck.
Cheers
DD
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Thanks for that … It kinda backs up what ‘The Book’ says, but what rpm do you take your engine up,to??
What do you do for the car’s?
To redline. It needs to be held at WOT to redline to achieve the desired results. Some argue it can be done in 1st gear, but in 1st getting to redline happens pretty quickly so it doesn’t really get a chance to burn off deposits. Once you do it in 2nd you’ll see why it’s more effective, although it’s definitely sporting as redline in 2nd is somewhere north of 100 mph.
That’s why I use 1st gear.
I love Italian tune-ups but hate getting speeding tickets! In my neck o’ the woods I don’t have a convenient road for 90-100 mph driving
Cheers
DD
Thank you for your input - I will try it, and film it, and let everybody know the results!!!
The last fime I did it coincided with an idiot totally tailgating me for some distance so I acted like Bond in his Aston but instead of oil I doused him in carbon. It was a pretty busy two lanes each way so he couldn’t escape. He certainly dropped back though
It is only really needed on HE engines and the red line us not a magic number. Initiating the burn in first but then hold at 5000 in second works fine too
Hah! I used to do largely the same thing on my parent’s 1969 Volvo P1800! My dad had heard somewhere that you should shift from 1st to 2nd as soon as the car moves and from 2nd to 3rd as soon as you can hear the engine. He would routinely be in 3rd gear before he left the circular driveway of their house. And whenever I came to visit, they’d tell me how poorly the car was running. I’d take it out for a test drive, run it around the block running the $#%^ out of it, then come back and report “seems to be running fine to me!” And they’d tell me it always ran great for a while after I visited, then eventually go back to running lousy.
I agree anything can be made to coke up, but the factory only included the advice in the HE handbook after ten years of Heron head V12s
I hasten to point out that the Italian Tune-Up was also advised to Bill Cosby on his comedy album “200 MPH”.
“Just pour the gas all over: it’ll leak in somewhere!”
Word of caution- inspect the engine driven fan for cracks first. You do not want an fan blade damaging your hood or radiator. Although the fan clutch should limit the fan RPM…