Latest 16th April 2006:
Car was all ready to go at Aintree this coming weekend, suspension mods felt great etc, but was chasing a rough spot in the engine at approx. 7K, thought it was electical since the engine seemed mint before then but then just went harsh and didn't want to rev (very unusual for this engine). Had a RR session last week to try and sort out but then the worst phonecall arrived.....its blown.
Done lots of detective work since then and it seems whats happened is that sometime end of last year, probably broke a valve spring with an over-rev (seem to remember missing a gear at Aintree so this could have done it) so since then that valve has been running on one spring (they have 2 each, one inside the other). One spring will keep the cam follower on the cam till about 7K, after that the valve/follower starts to bounce (this will be the rough sound I was hearing, kind of like bouncing a marble on a stone floor). Well after a few times bouncing whilst trying to find out what was going on, the valve retainers will have jumped out and the valve dropped in the engine. Real easy to say this after the event....not so obvious whats wrong before hand.
Took the engine out Sun (thanks for
help Chris) and both inlet valves on Cyl 4 are broken and there is quite a bit of engine damage, exactly how much I dont know as my engine guy has asked if I would send him back the engine without stripping it so he can fully investigate whats happened. One of the pistons is scrap as it has a valve stuck in the top of it and a big hole in the crown, the cyl head is damaged as the sump was full of water, the block will likely be scored. Cams look fine as do other 3 cylinders. How bad all these things are remains to be seen as does whats involved in sorting them - I will know next week once he has the engine. Being a dry sump engine, all the oil lines are full of metal particles.....6 meters of them.....and the oil tank is also so lots of cleaning to be done. Going to investigate the lines today, might be cheaper/better for sanity just to get new ones. Not sure how dry sump tanks are cleaned since they are full of baffles and its hard to see if they are clean or not. Will investigate.
So the season has taken a serious hit before its even started. Pissed off isn't the word. Need to find out exactly what needs to be done / costs involved before making any further decisions.
This is to let folks know, dont come to the early races expecting to see me/car. I will post up here when its all sorted. And I dont really want to talk about it right now.
Cheers
Rob
