I used to have an 1800 4/4 and that used to sound as if it was pinking but in fact it was the gearbox rattling at low revs (about 1500_1800 I think). The factory told me it was within toleration limits! But it really did sound like pinking.
Nick
I originally had a lot of pinking issues with my 1.8 and it was so annoying. It was resolved with a later map so it wasn’t the old tranny box in my case. Now I occasionally get the odd pink for a fraction of a second until the knock sensor kills it if I labour it . That’s normal I understand and perfectly liveable compared to before. Interestingly that in the winters months I have nothing at all but as soon as the warmer weather comes and the engine is up to temp I can occasionally detect it again despite the ECU reporting the same engine temp throughout the year. Something is thermally boarder line so I have an experiment to try at some point to reduce my coolant ratio from 50 to 30%. That should improve the coolant’s specific heat capacity by around 10%. Hopefully that might get a little extra heat away from the plugs and eliminate it altogether but it’s not a big priority any longer.
