As you may have read on the Avon Park meeting thread - my new race engine has not lasted as long as I would have liked.
Before I could line up for the 3rd run against Jimbo - I started her up in the fire up lane and basically threw out enough smoke/steam to cloud the entire queue behind me & bring over a fire marshall. First time I have ever gone out the back door by the tower. Thanks to Stu for following me the 3 miles back to Stratford. I basically emptied the header tank in that short distance and knew that it was necessary to get recovered.
AA confirmed on the recovery (Old Tramway pub - again) that they believed that H/G had blown. A fair number of post Avon Park meetings and number of recoveries have been done from that location. Lazlo the hungarian recovery agent - was such a nice guy. Went out of his way to make it nice and easy for me & as a VW fan was sympathetic to my modification hobby. He'd put a VR6 engine, in a Mk 1 Golf and supercharged it!
I had the SSB dropped over to HLM - where Hamish had kindly gone out of his way to drop the Astra diesel out of the unit, so at least I had transport. Top bloke.
Hamish had a chance yesterday to triage the damage and confirmed further - there is combustion gasses in the coolant, a plugs out compression test shows consistent but substantive decrease across the board and the boroscope showed evidence of coolant in all 5 cylinders - but no cracks seen as of yet. I think I will pick up the rest of the issues on my project thread.
Right so what now. I have no time to repair it. My wife was surprisingly sympathetic but reckons I should break the bits and use it in another project car. I've been mulling it over.
Cons
There are still cosmetic issues with a serious rust bubble in the ns rear quarter. SBS light is on still even though I've swapped the Drivers seat.
Question over being able to run 1.7 bar through that gasket/engine - desperately poor reliability (even for a race road car).
Pro's
I still love the car. I still need to beat Dean, do track days & hill climbs. Even though I said this was the last roll of the dice. Still want my BBK and coilovers and another remap and to get the best out of the current setup.
Just wonder if I wouldn't be better throwing money into a slightly younger car - possibly a 2002 late model & no I don't want an S60 - or track down a V70 as the practicality would be useful now.
As ever time and money is even more limited. The Scottish referendum did nothing to improve my Euro salary and the triplets are a handful.
I do think I will need to rationalise my wheel & tyre collection & generate funds from other spares to help pay for it.
FYI - Colin - Yes the compression is lowered - 7.9:1
Bookmarks