Because most of the Saturday race session at the Campaign To Prevent Gingervitis took place in rainy and/or snowy conditions, drivers couldn’t flog their engines as mercilessly as they had at the rod-throw-a-palooza Real Hoopties of New Jersey the week before. The sun came out on Sunday, however, and that’s when the casualties started to mount.
A few of the Detroit entries suffered from non-spectacular engine failures, stuff like timing chains and oil pumps, but the engine-carnage party didn’t really get going until the Landshark MX-3 came limping off the track in a cloud of smoke, accompanied by terrible clattering noises. The timelapse camera on the Chicken and Waffles Quantum Syncro caught the Mazda’s final lap.
That engine-block hole with smoke and oil gushing out can’t be good.
This shard of the block was found lodged in the radiator.
Check out the radiator bulge created by the impact of that metal fragment! Given the violence of the connecting rod’s failure, we were all impressed that the Mazda managed to leave the track under its own power.
This Jetta managed to eat its engine bearings during practice on Friday, but the engine didn’t actually seize up until the kill-switch test portion of the inspections.
All those metal chunks in the oil pan can’t be a good sign.
The Team Euro Trash guys didn’t give up, however; a Craigslist-obtained replacement engine went in Friday night and the car ran most of the race… and then the bearings failed in the second engine, late on Sunday (this happens frequently with VW engines in LeMons). Euro Trash took home the Heroic Fix trophy their first time out, so it was a happy ending for them.
The BMW M20 engine is no stranger to the thrown rod, as most LeMons E30 racers can tell you, and that’s what put the Swiss Racing 325e on the trailer.
Most of the time, an M20 rod seeking escape goes out through the block. In this case, it went for the exit route preferred by Ford Windsor rods: through the oil pan.
The Soviet-themed Byte Marks Racing Ford Escort GT wasn’t very quick, but it held together pretty well Saturday and most of Sunday.
Unlike its MX-3 cousin, the Escort GT wasn’t able to limp off the track under its own power after the engine blew up. Plenty of oil on the track now!
The Wisconsin Crap Racing “Not An SE-R, Really” Nissan 200SX was another late-Sunday casualty.
When the track speeds go up at a LeMons race, you see this sort of thing every hour or so. Still, with only a few hours of pedal-to-metal dry weather for the weekend, the rate of engine failure was lower than usual. For the first time in, well, ever, not a single small-block Chevy or Ford Windsor puked its bottom end onto the track in a 24 Hours of LeMons race. USA! USA!
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Elwood: Oh no.
Jake: What the f**k was that?
Elwood: The motor. We’ve thrown a rod.
Jake: Is that serious?
Elwood: Yup.
Murilee,
What about the Vega that spilled its muffler bearings all over the track?
The Monza had either a cracked block or bad HG and spilled it’s coolant all over the track. Technicalities!
The Monza, if that’s what you mean, went through three GM V6 engines in as many hours.
why “not another se-r”? are sr20 engines informally banned?
No, we have plenty of real SE-Rs, but those with regular Sentras and 200SXs always go way out of their way to show that they aren’t running SE-Rs. Sort of an inside joke.
Ah, that makes sense. Thank you, Ms.
We were proud of our little GA16 nissan motor, lil thing lasted 3 races before it decided it didnt want to race any more, the hole on the backside is a little more dramatic, but the other nuked motors still bigger blows than ours, Congrats to all!!
I am curious about which engines stand by this kind of abuse. I was surprised when I read that Toyota’s A series blew up there.
How many auto engineers do you have in a normal race?
Ford modulars seem to last and if more people brought slant 6’s they should be pretty reliable.
I imagine its the engines with good oil control in the pan. Cornering loads must leave the oil-pickup sucking air for long enough to wipe the bearings out.
I was hoping there would be something about the MR2 with the radial engine. I read that they had to do a transmission swap, then it made one lap and ate its custom-made gearbox.
I chatted with the builder about it briefly. It was a sheared-off input shaft, I believe (gearing came off the end). I was a bit confused, but it looked rather severe.
If that part (which was super-high-quality) did not die in that way, then it would have eaten through the gears on there in a few more laps–they were not 100% aligned with one another in some way or another.
In other words, 600 ft lbs of torque is REALLY hard to handle on an improvised engine configuration! The engine was awesome, but the transmission could not handle the awesomeness.
What, no coverage of the diesel Chevette engine?
Let me do that now: The head gasket waited 27 years to instantly and completely dissolve into diesel exhaust. The radiator went through all of its water in about a lap. It was deader than dead.