The Cart Before the Horse: Spec 3 Build

[Senor_Taylor]

Long time update coming. I managed to order the last valve spring retainers from Bimmerworld and got them to the machine shop to install on the head I bought. I pulled some long hours in the garage and got the new head on the engine days before the November Summit event. When replacing the head I found that the junkyard block was not in great shape. Heavy pitting on the deck surface and a chip was knocked out of the cylinder edge from the valve hitting the piston and knocking the cylinder wall. I knew the block would need to be reworked or replaced, but I needed to get it back out there and there was no time for anything else.

Summit went well and the car felt decent, but a bit down on power. I asked a fellow Spec3 racer to take my car out himself to see how it felt because I was concerned how I wasn't able to even get close to 5th gear on the front straight. He said it felt fine (but this may have been a red herring seeing as he ended up finding his motor was bad too). I keep pushing, thinking I was just not driving well or something. I was also struggling MAJORLY with oil leaks. Crazy valve cover oil leaks that I could not get to stop. I think that distracted me from the from the real problem soon to rear its head.

I was rounding T10 and lost all power and starting SPEWING oil smoke out the exhaust. I dove in to the paddock at Pit-Out and limped back to my paddock spot. The engine was done. I packed up early and headed home. Thinking this was somehow my fault and that I had failed at the head gasket job, I decided to throw in the towel and have someone else work on my car for once. I contacted one shop and planned to drop my car off in January. This shop also happened to have an M50 they could sell me, so I paid them for that with the plan to swap it in when my car got there. However, this shop ended up having some family medical issues that did not allow them to work on my car so I ended up taking my car to GTPeace well behind schedule if I wanted to make March VIR.

I dropped the car and new engine off at GTPeace with a huge box of parts from FCP Euro and waited. It wasn't long before I got a call to explain that one of my pistons had melted. Yes, piston #1 melted. Seemingly from an injector failure or something else. This caused major blow by, which caused the pressurized crank case and crazy leaks from the valve cover. So I expected the block to be toast, so no worries there, but then comes the concern of the built head I had just purchased and installed.

Well, the bad news is that head is cracked. So there's no way I'm making March VIR and the machine shop will be swapping everything from the built head over to the other head from the new engine I bought, and hopefully I'll be ready for April at Summit Point.