I have picked up a VR 5 litre V8 Calais project car. She’s a little rough around the edges and not currently running – but has plenty of good bits and lots of potential. I’m keen to rescue this one and bring her back to life. The previous owner passed away suddenly (this was their pride and joy), so all the history of upgrades has been lost but I’m slowly piecing things back together.
It’s currently a dual-fuel car, but I think I’ll remove the LPG gear and put it back to straight petrol.
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So to start with - I need some advice to sort out the fuel system. It seems the previous owner had opted to do away with the factory stuff and move to an adjustable reg, custom rails, braided lines etc.
Here’s what I’m looking at - the car came with 2 sets of fuel rails, 2 sets of different injectors and multiple regulators:
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Part 1 - Fuel Rails:
Set 1 - What I believe are the stock standard rails, with square bosses.
Set 2 - Modified & polished with A/N fittings. Circular bosses. They actually look pretty schmick.
I can see no functional differences between the 2 (other than square versus circular bosses, but each has appropriate clips), so should be fine to run with either set.
Pros and cons;
Standard rails means I can use the factory fuel pressure reg & damper and put everything back to factory (nice and neat). Amongst the spare parts I found 2 factory Bosch regs and a factory Bosch damper. Condition is unknown!
Modified rails means I can use much nicer A/N fittings/hoses (no more dirty old hose clamps). Plus they look fantastic. But then I’d need to run an aftermarket fuel pressure reg, gauge and custom plumbing. On the note of reg's: I found 2 aftermarket regs in the spare parts, both look used – and why are there 2? Did one die? They don’t look high-end, so are possibly cheap and nasty. Don’t think I’d trust using either of them.
First 3 photos - custom setup:
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Next up - back to factory setup?
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The difference between the 2 rails:
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