Knocking is an unwanted behavior that is affected by the intake manifold temperature. This paper demonstrates through simulation how nonlinear Model Predictive Control design could be used as a reference governor for the control of the throttle position, with a soft constraint on intake manifold temperature. The implementation is able to suppress the peak temperature during an acceleration by slowing down the pressure build-up. Because of the usually slow dynamics of the temperature sensors, the paper proposes an Extended Kalman Filter implementation that uses a transient detection to decide whether to rely on the sensor feedback or the model.