Time for another update, and boy has it been an interesting last few months
Drove the car to Wörthersee again with 20 or so friends. Had a wonderful time right up until the final day there, when catastrophic disaster struck whilst racing up a mountain road in Slovenia:
Long story short: I blew a fuel injector, which in turn flooded cylinder 4, which unfortunately popped the piston rings. Lots of white smoke, sump full of fuel, bad news. Had to get the car recovered back to the UK and get a rental car for the remainder of the trip.
Before we knew the full extent of the damage though, I had it recovered to my good friend Roy to have a look at... he had a look into the cylinders with a borescope to see if there was any damage to the walls, all looked good so we took the gamble and tried swapping the injectors, replaced the oil, and see if that would do the trick...
Supercharger out and new injectors in:
Supercharger back on:
Once everything was back together, fired up the car. Sadly, it was still smoking, and still misfiring in cylinder 4. Compression test for that cylinder came back at 6.5bar (should be closer to 12bar), which was bad news, and left me with a choice:
1) Pull out the engine, rebuild with new piston rings and big end bearings, then hope the cylinders themselves are fine.
2) Buy another engine and swap it out.
Went for option 2 because I had 2 shows I didn’t want to miss: Players Classic, which is about an hour from me, and the big one called Raceism in Poland which is arguably the most prestigious modified car show in the world.
I came to the conclusion that there was no hope in getting the car sorted before Players, but Raceism was still on the cards, and Roy was up for the task
So time to crack on!
New engine bought, luckily it came with everything... starter motor, full loom, throttle body, all the pipework, exhaust manifold, even the clutch & flywheel! I was assured that this engine had around 10k less mileage than my original one, and it ran perfectly. Fingers crossed!
Front end off (for the 2nd time):
Out with the old (supercharger to be transferred onto new engine):
Get the old clutch and flywheel swapped for new while everything is apart (look how worn the pads were):
Supercharger on, new engine in, just some plumbing to do:
All back together and purring like a kitten:
Needless to say, the car was done just in the nick of time, and what better running in test than a 2000 mile round trip to Poland for a long weekend?
Little stopover in Frankfurt on the way back to visit the famous Klassikstadt:
Had 2 back to back bachelor parties abroad immediately after getting home from this trip. But I’m so grateful to have the car running beautifully again (tested at 190mph on the Autobahn back home and it still had more to give) The new engine turned out to be everything I hoped for, no smoke, and burned hardly any oil compared to my original one
Next show: Fitted UK in Manchester, hope some of you come to visit!
