Here it is, halfway through 2010, and I have yet to complete a single race lap this season.
It’s not for lack of trying. I only made it 35 miles away from home for the season opener weekend at Thunderhill before I had engine trouble (no oil pressure) with the tow vehicle, or at least, so it appeared. Turns out that it was just a gauge issue. Oh well.
Then at the 2nd weekend, rounds 3 & 4 at Laguna Seca, I had a return of the cooling system woes that plagued me for most of last season, ever since the wreck at the same weekend in 2009. I attempted the Friday practice and qualifying sessions, but it became clear that the car was still not healthy and it was time to pack up. Didn’t even stick around for the weekend.
So before the 3rd weekend, rounds 5 & 6 again at Laguna Seca, I finally decided to throw some money at the problem. Back at the 2nd weekend of 2009, at Thunderhill, I had an engine failure on the 2nd-to-last lap while leading the race. It turns out that a valve spring retainer had broken and caused a bent intake valve. When that failure happened, there was very little time before the next race. I had been sitting on a junkyard motor that I had bought a couple of years earlier just because the price was right, so rather than fix the busted engine, or build the spare, I just threw the spare in the car. The original engine had about 102K miles on it at that point, and the spare had 80K or so.
So the original engine had been in storage, in pieces, since then. It was the following weekend when the big wreck happened and I’ve basically been having cooling problems since then. So after that Laguna weekend I’d had enough, and decided to rebuild the head with the busted valve spring retainer. That head got swapped onto the block that’s in the car. The head that came off was noticeably curvy on the mounting surface, and there were clear signs of combustion escaping over to the cooling passages, which explains everything — the loss of coolant, the down-on-power feeling, and the blowing up of brand-new stock radiators with plastic side tanks.
So, the new head went onto the junkyard-motor block. Dragged it back down to Laguna Seca for rounds 5 & 6. Before the Friday practice session, I checked the oil, and it looked just a little funny. Not as dark as it should be, and a little opaque. That made me nervous. Same sort of look on the inside of the filler cap. Now, since the head was installed, this engine had been warmed up once, then driven onto the trailer, then driven off the trailer. That’s it. I called my mechanic who had done the head installation for me to check to see if he’d put some sort of funky race oil in there with a weird look to it, and … no. Now he was nervous too.
Anyway, I went out for practice. On the outlap everything seemed okay although maybe not quite as peppy as I’d hoped, now that I had the head problem licked. But then on the next lap, the first at-speed lap, going up the hill before T7, it let go. It started with a smell of smoke. I looked to my right and saw wispy smoke in the passenger side footwell. This was totally reminiscent of the Runoffs at Mid-Ohio in 2005, when the same thing happened to me in my SSC Mazda3. In that case, the wiring harness in the engine compartment had caught fire somehow. Anyway, I looked up at the mirror to make sure no one was right there before I pulled off to a worker with a fire extinguisher, and was shocked to see a wall of thick smoke so thick that I couldn’t see ANYTHING. At this point the smoke was filling up the cockpit and it smelled bad, so I just ducked over to the corner station at the upper apex of the corkscrew and got ready to bail.
He obviously saw the smoke coming, since he was standing there at the wall, extinguisher on the wall, pointing me over to him. I dove over there but the gravel trap actually stopped the car short of his position, that stuff is pretty amazing. As soon as I shut down (hit both the ignition and the electrical master switch) the wind blew the smoke away and it was clear that I wasn’t on fire. Still, my adrenaline was really going and I bailed out of the car.
So, that ended race weekend #3 after only 1.5 laps. I dropped the car back off at the shop that afternoon. Hooked up a pressure tester and it surpringly held pressure all weekend until Monday morning. But off came the head anyway, with no evidence of anything wrong other than a lot of oil in all 6 exhaust ports. It must have been coming through the breather or something? Head looks good, block seems perfect, and the head gasket looks okay too.
It’s getting put back together with a new head gasket and new reusable head studs instead of the one-time-use stock stretch bolts, and next week I’ll try to get it on a load-bearing dyno and just let it run at high revs for 15 minutes to see if it holds up to that. If it doesn’t, well, I’m not sure what the next plan is. I have enough parts to piece together another engine but it might be easier and cheaper to just get yet another junkyard engine for $1500 bucks. If it passes the test, I’ll take it to a test day somewhere before going to another race weekend.
So, it’s been one frustrating season so far. If the car needs another engine, I’m going to have to do some soul-searching. It’s getting really old pouring money into this car when I’m racing pretty much unopposed. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, for all I know, the car will be back to 100% this weekend and this nightmare will be behind me. Let’s hope!
Entries (RSS)