The BHG Transplant FAIL!

This is definitely not how you want to be spending your Saturday night at the race track let me tell you. As you've read most likely from the previous post things didn't go well Saturday morning. I drove the car into the pits due to a drop in oil temperature and an increase in oil pressure. I can only imagine that this was caused due to water getting into the oil and it flowing more freely.

When we opened the engine lid we discovered that there was water and oil all over the engine compartment, a missing bolt out of the egr plug in the header had all but burned a hole through one of the shifter cables as well.

What happens now? Well I'll tell you in LeMons wonderful things happen. Mike Mosty provided us a couple weird gaskets and a head gasket, and Paul Bender (on loan from TARP Racing) stayed with us most of the night pulling the old head. He even showed us a trick to get the head off faster. We pulled it off with the intake still attached. Yes it was easier, yes it works well. LeMons are an interesting crowd, everyone wants to win (who doesn't) but they are very helpful and friendly and generally will bend over backwards just for the asking. At the minimum for a beer.

So Saturday night we removed the head, discovered that cylinder 1 has some pretty severe scoring on the piston wall, cylinder 4 actually had some swirling on the top of the piston which we were told by Paul that it is the beginning of a hole being burned into the piston. The missing EGR valve plug sits right above that piston, I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

We decided that the engine was done, and that this was it's last race regardless. What do you do at this point? Go out with LeMons style! Our intent was to put the head back on and race till the little 2 gave up the ghost completely. We stayed up most of the night Saturday night. I think I got to bed at 3 a.m., then got up at 6 a.m. to make the finishing touches putting the engine back together again.

During the test fire we discovered we had a serious air leak on the exhaust side of the head. The head had been warped. The little 2 that could was done for the weekend. So we packed it up and headed back to Dallas.

Next time a little something about the suspension on Black Betty