2006-2007 Entries | 2005-2006 Entries
10 January 2008
Long time without updates, but I’ll try to start having blog entries on a more regular basis.
You can read about our 2007 One Lap adventures in the One Lap section.
The 07-08 season started pretty bad. Our rebuild 3.0 engine had blown another head gasket (third time) and the transmission was making a rather strange noise. We had to return the clutch and engine that we used for One Lap back to Andy Garcia and as we had to take the transaxle apart to see what’s wrong we basically took all the driving parts off the car. Upon opening the transaxle it turned out that a small piece of the reverse idler gear had broken off (special thanks to Dave) and had ended up between the ring and pinion causing sever damage and broken off teeth. With no transmission and a broken engine we were just hoping that there would be some serious interest from sponsors this year.
After taking the engine apart it turned out that the block is not flat and this was probably the reason it was blowing headgaskets even after had the heads rebuilt. It turned out that the machine shop cannot do much about it as they did not want to take the studs out of the block, so we had no option, but to look for another block, or rather a new engine. Andrew Garcia came to the rescue again and we got a 80k mile 3 liter 164 engine for a very reasonable amount of money. Of course, we wanted to rebuild it before putting it in the car as we did not want to take any chances this time. It turned out that the engine was in extremely good condition and even has piston oil squirters which should make the life of the pistons a bit easier once we have the supercharger blowing an extra 10psi in the combustion chambers. After having had the heads rebuilt, the bottom end rebalanced with our lightened flywheel and the modified supercharger crank pulley we started putting the engine together. Right now the heads are assembled and the block is mostly done. We are waiting on the headgaskets which should be better than the ones that come with the general gasket kit. Also, we should have a new transaxle by the end of January.
The Isuzu is slowly progressing as well. We are currently working on the front brakes. A boost control valve was installed and we are hoping to dial some more boost in. We will also install an Accusump and change some of the windows to polycarbonate. The car is already located at our new facility at the MSR Houston racetrack. We hope that we will be able to work on both cars there soon and have the opportunity to use the track to do some serious tuning.
-Nikolay Kostov