740 ignition timing

[Mr. V]

'86 740 Turbo

I did a lot of work recently on it as I am restoring it / trying to cherry it out; among other things I replaced the distributor (rear mounted to cam).

It ran poorly.

I checked the timing with a timing light and it was way off, so I loosened the distributor and moved it til I showed 12 degrees before TDC, and now it runs great.

I was surprised to see that moving the distributor affected timing on this car, as I thought on this car timing was controlled entirely by the computer and that it couldn't be adjusted via spinning the distributor.

Live and learn, as they say.