Ok stick with me here because I've got nearly 3 months of stuff to cover. It does culminate in Saturdays track day at Castle Combe though, which didn't exactly go as planned.
I can't remember if it was late in December or early in January, but somewhere along the line I bought a new engine. It was a known good engine that had already had head work so I bought it thinking it would be a good engine to start modifying for more power, while also being lower mileage so hopefully more reliable. Not that I'd had any problems with the old engine, but it was starting to smoke a little.
The engine came with a gearbox and everything ready to bolt it in, add some fluids and carry on making me competitive. Daz at Rare Import Parts did a great job fitting it for me and it fired up first time and ran beautifully.
The next thing that happened, was Tom at TGM swapped my super short 4.4 final drive into my old (and now spare) gearbox. This has reduced my top speed down to something like 125mph, but it gets there a lot quicker. Unfortunately Tom put the 5th gear synchro selector ring in upside down, so I ended up taking it apart and fixing that before getting the car running again.
Then I decided to really give the new engine a kick up the arse with some Crespo stage 4 cams that were going cheap. "Crespo? Who are they?" I hear you asking. Well they are a small American company which apparently (only now I realise this) don't have a great reputation for quality. That aside, they were cheap and should suit the head work on the engine perfectly. They are quite lairy though...
In my haste I hadn't researched exactly what was involved when fitting these particular cams. After Tom installed them, we struggled to get the car to idle at all. Fair enough I thought, they probably need dialing in. How hard can it be... Turns out, it's quite a technical process of measuring the lobes and valve lift and duration and a whole lot of stuff I neither know anything about, nor particularly want to get involved with (i.e. make worse). Even more worrying was the compression test after fitting the new cams - down about 120psi on what it should be.
Oh dear...
So, now we are about two weeks away from yesterdays track day and I have an engine that runs terribly and not a lot of money left to patch it up. I was fortunate enough to have Andy at Storm Developments in Aldermaston dial the cams in for me which made the car idle and run very nicely. The compression was still just 150psi though, not even close to the figures of a stock engine let alone one with 1mm skimmed from the head. In the end I decided to use some dyno time with Andy and make sure the fueling was ok, and do the track day and hope for the best. We barely managed to make 100hp at the wheels, which I've been told is actually pretty good for such low compression!
So with that done, I could relax a little. I now knew the bottom end was probably on its last legs, and wasn't 100% sure the cams were in the sweet spot, but at least the fueling was ok so it shouldn't blow up or do anything silly. I figured I'd find another block after the track day and have myself a completely fresh engine built to spec.
Finally I arrived at Combe yesterday morning and got the car ready. I stuck with the 'wet' tyres (Toyo T1Rs) for the first session while the track was still damp. I followed the course car for three laps while I learned where the road went, then pushed on and found some pace. Initially I was quite surprised; the car felt just as quick as with the old engine, and the gearbox was working a treat, the car just picked up speed so agressively, ripping through the gears. With the cams, power came in strong at about 6k and carried on to the 8k limiter which I forgot about a few times, simply because there was no let up in the power like normal. I have to say the tyres were useless (compared to my normal R888 cut slicks), the car moved around a lot and I was constantly locking the rears. It felt fast and apparently it looked fast, so it was probably better than can be expected. Nobody was keeping up, put it that way. However, all this high revving was beginning to take its strain and on the last lap I noticed a big drop in power. On the way into the pits, I could hear the engine making a loud knocking noise...
Some inspection and testing revealed no obvious problems, so I cautiously went out for the second session. I swapped on the R888s though to have a little more grip. I did a lap and a half of short shifting to about 5k and although there was less power, it seemed happy enough. So I opened it up a little more and all of a sudden...
BANG!
"Shit", I thought. I dipped the clutch and the oil light came on, and the engine was barely ticking over. I coasted into the pits where it promptly cut out and that, was most deffinitely that. Thank you Sara and Simon for the push all the way back into the paddock.
There were no holes in the block and there was no cloud of smoke, but a compression test revealed 0psi in cylinder four so something has deffinitely broken. It almost ruined the day, but I had some great passenger laps in other cars which made a nice change. I also managed to sell the fuel I brought which was a bonus.
View the complete photo album in the gallery
I feel that I'm at a bit of a cross roads with the car. I'm in two minds as to whether or not to keep going or change direction. I've been thinking a lot about building a Westfield over the next 12 months, but finishing the CRX would be a lot cheaper and probably just as much fun. Plans for a new engine are being drawn up, so it will probably be rejuvenated and return very soon.... well, maybe ;)