A five-star problem

Sir,

A problem has now just arisen in my area, regarding top grade petrol, now Shell are dropping their live-star. It’s true my Marina ‘IC would be classed as average amongst performance cars and should be able to run on tour-star fuel (badly though). I tried tor several weeks when the car was first obtained: a good class garage and a main area dealer couldn’t tune the car to stop pinking and running-on to a dangerous degree on tour-star. So before changing the car because of disappointment with its behaviour, I went over to five-star fuel. “Eureka!” The car hasn’t pinked since, even

when taking a lew liberties, running-on has been cut down by 75% app. and through gear performance has seemed a lot sharper 10,000 extremely happy miles of motoring later Shell do this to me. One tank (till and I’m back where I started. I would naturally think there was something amiss with my particular motor, but alas 1 ant not alone over here.

As high grade fuel has been hard to get when touring, other readers must surely have faced this problem before now.

So please, I would welcome any constructive ideas or advice on this subject, as it does seem to me to be the coup-de-grace of performance motoring in this country unless manufacturers go back to big, long-stroke engines.

Dunmow CHRISTOPHER G. CLARKE