Well, not really, my brother did though!
We got our rocker arms back from Jesel, they warranted the entire set for a nominal rebuild fee. After saving the better part of a grand we put them on Thursday and went testing.
First pass....5.168 (spinning)
Second.......5.107
Third..........5.108
Hmmm, looks like we are good to go racing, except the vacuum pump breather was putting out a lot of smoke. Excess blowby, it got worse the first and second passes which should have thrown up red flags. In our defense it did, we just didnt react in the proper fashion. The third pass of the day it smoked really bad after the finish line, my brother clicked it off at the far end. After pushing the dragster a half mile with a scooter we fire the car up to get a brief idea of what was going on. The exhaust was okay but was making a popping noise, the breather looked like a pest control truck. Not good! After pulling the plugs we find #3 is a no show on compression. We load the car into the trailer and pop the heads off, sure enough the ring land lifted. It sent a 1" pencil size piece of aluminum for a ride in that cylinder, damage was minor though. The seat looks okay, the valve is beaten up but intact, the cylinder wall has very slight grooves in it and no other cylinders were wounded.
Post mortem indicated the compression ring likely failed, slowly destroying the effectiveness of the oil rings. This explains the growing blowby and smoke issues seen in the previous few runs. Once the oil started to make its way into the chamber it began to detonate. Detonation began hammering the piston ringlands, eventually shattering a two inch section. Below where the missing bit would have been is a cracked compression ring. Once the land failed the oil and blowby became a serious enough issue to allow pinpointing the exact cause. Given that we use a vacuum pump on the crankcase our thoughts leading up to this was a vacuum leak. We were wrong, thankfully a cheap mistake all things considered, again!
This car is like the hills of California in a dry summer, just keep finding one fire after another. Put one out and another pops up in another area, frustrating too because the car will xerox timeslips!
It gets better though, we borrow a friends Vega (6.60s in the 1/8th) and win first round. Second round the car breaks the pinion gear, give me a freaking break!
Yeah I am venting!
I still love this sport though....
Strip
