BMC 1.5

All right, if you want me to be serious, all BMC 1.5 engines are like that (I have one myself). Before I lived on the boat I started the engine one January when it was -7 celsius and it hadn't been run for two months and a passing Soviet spy satellite reported that Warwickshire had disappeared.

Given that the engine hadn't run during the past weeks of damp soggy weather, and that yesterday was fairly cold as well, I wouldn't worry at all unless this reluctance to start and the white smoke turns into a regular performance at every start-up.

The BMC 1.5 is especially prone to doing exactly what yours did yesterday because of the combustion chamber design - the indirect injection Ricardo Comet Mk. V - which uses the CAV 'Pintaux' type Injector nozzles with an auxiliary spray hole which only operates at cranking rpm in order to assist cold starting. The great bugbear of that type of injector nozzle is that they only work as intended for a relatively short time (in terms of running hours in relation to frequency of hot or cold starts) before the auxiliary spray hole gets blocked up with carbon - which results in reluctant starting from cold and lots of white smoke immediately after it does finally light up !

There could have been other factors involved too - for instance, slightly sticky valves closing onto valve seats with specks of carbon on them that had been loosened from the insides of the exhaust ports in the head by damp air blowing into the exhaust system for several weeks. As said at thr beginning, . . don't worry, or undertake any remedial work on the engine, unless and until it becomes a consistent problem when the engine's in regular use.