1985 Rover SD1 Vanden Plas EFI - Now running Speeduino EFI

It’s been a bit of a rough weekend, so what better cure than to take the Rover out for a spin and an Italian Tune-up.

The sun was out, so off came the car cover, and out came the Rover.

I had been meaning to check out the new Kapiti Expressway that has just been built, but hadn’t had a chance to make it up that way, and every time I wanted to drive the Rover recently the weather has turned to mud, and what fun is it cruising in the pouring down rain? Not to mention not being able to button her back up again after the drive due to the car being wet, and then getting covered in pine needles.


So yeah, this was an adventurous trip. In my whole time with the Rover, I have never driven it this far from home. The furthest is usually to either Upper Hutt or the CBD, roughly 20-30km away. The Rover has been running well recently, and after the water pump failure it’s been holding its fluids and been mechanically sound. A pleasure to drive.

Firing the car up for the first time in a couple of weeks, it didn’t start quite as sweetly as usual, and was running a bit lumpy and spluttering when given gas. Obviously not happy with the tweaks I did last time (in an effort to make warm starting easier), so I tapped a few keys on the laptop and reverted back to a previous tune. Started and idled much better this time.

The first test was the new Haywards Interchange, which is an utter clusterfark, no matter which way you try to go through there the road markings are a mess and everything is guided by some messy cones. It will be good once it’s done, but blegh.


Once the temporary 50kph zone changes to 100kph though, it was time to unleash all 190hp, and the sound of my people. Pedal to the floor, trans kicks down and off we go in a roar of V8 anger. She may not be fast, but it hardly matters with a sound like that.

It was a fairly slow drive around SH58 thanks to a typical Prius driver which couldn’t hold more speed than a 30 year old Rover through the corners. Oh well, more time to enjoy the cruise and the scenery.

The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, other than seeing a sweet steam train choo chooing its way to Pram. Lots of railfans hanging around taking photos of it. Probably got some with a Rover photobombing them, lol.

The Kapiti Expressway is a new 18km long grade separated four lane expressway built to bypass a rubbish bit of roading that used to go through a couple of towns and slow everything down.


This is only one section in a bigger project, which will include the Transmission Gully Expressway that will take traffic off the two lane coastal route between Porirua and Paraparaumu (Kapiti), but the Kapiti Expressway is the first section to be completed and drivable. Gives an idea of what the rest of the project will be like.

Four lanes good.


Heading to Paraparaumu for lunch, we took the exit that said “Paraparaumu”, as expected, and strangely got shunted straight off the new expressway and back onto the old State Highway. Not the glamorous expressway I expected!

Stopped at BurgerFuel for lunch, snapped a sneaky bum shot


After lunch we found a proper on ramp to the expressway and decided to head North. Not knowing how far the expressway went, we just cruised along until the new road ran out, and we were on the old one again. Turning around and heading South again allowed us to sample the whole 18km expressway.

Impressions? Its nice. Very smooth, very flowing and very fast. That said there are already some surface repairs in places, and something about the road surface and my high-end SuperCat tires meant that I had an annoying rattle whilst driving on the new road. A strange resonance or something.

I do hope to see the speed limit increased on the expressway at some point; its very easy to speed as its so open and wide, and its a prime candidate for a trial of 110kph.

It’s nice to see the work they put into the area surrounding the expressway too. Lots of green; new plantings and what will eventually be mounds of grass and bush. You can catch glimpses of the wetlands they build in various spots as well; just little ponds of water here and there.

Anyway, back to what is important here. The Rover ran faultlessly the whole time, and was great to drive. It’s equally at home puttering around town, as it is at passing cars up hills and cruising the motorways.

We made a quick stop for a rest, and take a couple of photos. Shes filthy, but in a well-loved kind of way.





Unfortunately though, it doesn’t run on hopes and dreams, so a stop at the local Dino station was on the cards.

What a surprise that was though!


Yup, a drop of 2.2l/100km down to 15.9l/100km. Not bad for an old beast tuned by me. I have clocked just under 1200km since getting her, most of those done with the Speeduino setup. It’s good to see the economy finally working out, and becoming somewhat reasonable.

I love driving this car, so will be using it as much as possible, as long as the weather holds out. Oh what I would do to have a carport or garage, instead of a car cover.

More to come. Might FINALLY get around to doing the front speakers at some point, and it’ll need another warrant next month, so there is that to look forward to. Yay.

Enjoyed the read, was looking forward to page 3 but every time I click for page 3 it crashes the whole website on my phone and it reverts to my phones home page.

Happening to anyone else?

I could see from the little scroll bar indicator that there were alot of photos, first time my phone has ever been defeated on loading anything!
Thanks for the link, ill read it on there. Page 3 seemed like where all the action happened

Haha yes sorry there is a auto blocking for IP addresses that try to access to many pages in a short period of time. I think youre the first actual person it has blocked. The block lasts 48 hours, but i have manually unblocked you. I have bumped up the required pages before block so it wont happen again.

The Rover passed its Warrant of Fitness check today, only a couple of minor verbal notes to look into, but nothing major. Unfortunately when i got home the hand brake decided to celebrate the new warrant by snapping the rear cable. There is always something, thankfully its an easy fix.

Sorry, found the bug! Should be fixed now.

Another six months down, so last weekend it was time for another Warrant of Fitness on the Rover.

No matter what car it is, but especially old cars, Warrant time is a bit of a pain. After doing lots of pre-emptive work for the last warrant, and having only covered about 1200km since, I was hoping for another easy pass.

Here she is ready for the inspection


After a thorough poking and prodding, she came away with another clean sheet. One of the rear seat belts had to be untwisted, and the front wheel bearings might need tightening or replacing before next WOF, but otherwise she is a solid old beast.

So that’s another six months of motoring to do, and coming into summer, I’m intending to put far more than 1200km on it by the next WOF. In saying that though, the car was off the road for a couple of months recently due to various reasons (Speeduino install, waterpump failure, my wedding….).

To celebrate its new warrant, the car decided to surprise me when I got home, buy snapping the hand brake cable as I parked up. *sigh*


Off to Rimmers to buy a replacement. Thankfully the parking pawl on the trans works, so the car wont roll away.

Since the Rover has been uncovered the past couple of days I finally took the chance to grab the camera and grab a quick video of the exhaust.



It’s a good sound. I like it, but I do wish it was a smidgen louder, and more grumbly. At some point I’ll unbolt the rear section (which has a muffler in it) and see what it sounds like without it (so then it will only be a single muffler, and a resonator in the system). If I like it, I’ll get a pipe made up to replace the muffler.

The next job is to change the auto trans oil and filter. It’s a messy job, and a pain to do, but it should be done.

July B firmware for my ECU turned out to be a bag of man sausages, made the car run rough and idle like rubbish, yet when i revert back to June firmware with the same tune, it runs and idles mint. Guess ill live with the hard starting for now.

I had some spare time this evening, so decided to finally unpack the replacement sunroof panel I purchased a couple of weeks ago.

My old sunroof is stuffed, rust is bubbling through the top of it, where it has previously been touched up, and when the panel is opened you get covered in chunks of rust. Its pretty bad, thankfully its not leaking. Yet.

It looked like this when I got the car, back in November


And its got worse since.

I put the call out a while back for a good rust free sunroof panel, and heard back from Gareth at SD1 Spares. He had sourced a decent one, and would I like it? Heck yes!

It arrived a couple of weeks ago and I just haven’t had the time to do anything with it. Tonight I unwrapped it from its packaging and had a good look over it.

Gareth had mentioned there were a couple of little crusty surface rust spots, and he had treated them, so it was no surprise when I spotted a couple of sections on the underside that were coated in rust converter. Nothing too serious, but left untreated it would have ended up the same as my old one. Good to catch and stop it now.

I noted a couple of other small little spots of surface rust in various places, and wanted to make sure that rust converter got into all the little gaps and creases, so with wire brush and my can of CRC Rust Converter in hand, away I went.

I wire brushed all the patches that I could see, including the areas that had already been treated, and then hosed on the converter. I made sure to rotate the panel, and spray into the holes in the rails to try to get the liquid into all the gaps.


I’m not worried at all about the paint as its Oporto red, and the wrong color, so will need a paint anyway.

This is a little spot at the back where you can see the rust converter changing some rust into a black coating


And these two spots are the sections Gareth treated for me. I made sure to go over them again, and get into all the gaps nearby.



The sunroof panel isn’t a great design, so many places for moisture to get into and get trapped, causing rust. There are some places you couldn’t get to without hacking the panel to bits. But its all I can get, so it will have to do.

Looking at this panel also shows there was no way to save my old panel once the rust got that bad. The rust that is coming through is between the outer skin, and that rail on the RH side of the above photo.

I’ll give the converter a couple of days to cure, and then I’ll hose all the gaps and seams with cavity wax. I don’t have the money to get it painted yet, and I still need to source a good condition front seal retainer, so I need to keep it in good shape in the mean time.

You would need to replace the whole assembly on the roof in order to do a swap like that. The sunroof panel in the photo above is just the outer panel, which attaches to an inner panel, which has the runners, interior cloth etc on it. Probably easier to get a panel made up to replace the rust prone metal ones, made from fibreglass or carbon.

I've been thinking of the Speeduino for my car, but see they only seem to have 4 injector and ignition chanels, my engine is 5 cylinder, how did you set yours up for 8 cylinders?