UK Top Alcohol Championship (Round 2) - Avon Park 2001
Bad Day at Avon Park
Well I had a bit of a bad feeling about this rebuild - nothing I could put my finger on - but so much had gone wrong in the build up with sub standard/wrong parts that I was apprehensive..............
As we turned the motor over for the first time on the starter - Roy noticed that the mag was wobbling about - the drive shaft was bent (this must have been a result of the Big Bang in May) fortunately Wendy Baker's "Krypton" crew had a spare that got us over that one.............. The motor then fired with no problem - plenty of oil pressure - sounded good but a small fuel leak from one of the aluminium fittings - Martyn Hannis to the rescue on that one.
With everything apparently on song we headed for the first qualifying session - our intention was to go through first gear into second then click off and check everything over before really attempting to qualify - well that was the plan but as quite often happens things did not pan out that way...................
Everything
was ok until just after the shift into second gear when I heard a muffled
bang and a strange smell (no it wasn't in my underpants!) - when I got
the car stopped I turned around only to see the engine covered in oil
and the head gasket poking out of #1 cylinder - things did not look
good.......
On returning to the pits and stripping the heads off our worst fears were confirmed - both heads and the block were "torched" - although I have a spare set of heads - the block was too badly damaged to continue...........
At the time of writing we have no explanation for damage - all the usual reasons for this type of damage have been discounted but, there was a reason - so we had better find it!
We packed everything up on Sunday and headed off back home - stripped the motor down completely on Monday morning...... set the van to Warp 8 and returned to the track just in time to see the final rounds and give Huup all our stuff for repair - so hopefully, our next outing will be at Santa Pod for the "Cannonball" where we hope to get a bit further than we did this time - incidentally (for what it's worth) - that 60' time was our second best ever............
Click on image to see more photos from the race ..................
Links to “Old News”:-
Main Event 2000 - Santa Pod - Our Best Ever -Then…...
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