Why you should not take a *SLIGHTLY* bent valve to Road Atlanta

*** This car was almost BONE stock. Stock Paper Air-Filter, stock engine management. The ONLY power mods were a header and a muffler.

Okay,
I think most people know the initial story about my GC. The previous owner had the timing belt break on him. He brought it to another dealership to have them fix it. The dealership put a new timing belt on it, and THEN realized it had bent valves when the belt broke initially.
The previous owner did not want to pay the bill to the dealership so he put the car up for sale at a good price. I bought the car, paid the dealership and had the car towed to SoG on a Tuesday.
We knew it had bent all the valves on the driver's side head, so Wednesday we put a good head on that side. We put the motor back in only to realize that it had just one, SLIGHTLY bent valve on the other head. We didn't think it would hurt it so we took it to the track Thursday.
That's where we got my favorite picture:



The slight miss from the slight valve got better, to the point that it didn't even have a CEL. We thought it might be fine to leave until we found an STi driveline to put in it.

A few weeks ago, Bob (one of our Master Technician's) suggested that running with a bent valve was okay for a little while, but not suggested indefinitely. These will turn out to be words of wisdom.

Other people thought that the rediculously low redline of 6250 and the lack of a turbo would allow a long life on the slightly bent valve. I thought so too... It had been getting steadily better...

So I took it to instruct at Road Atlanta with NASA. Which BTW was a FANTASTIC event. AMAZINGLY well organized and enjoyable to run with NASA.

I had 2 very enjoyable sessions driving the RS in the instructor group. It's very quiet, comfortable, and with the camber plates thrown in, quite tossable on track, albeit VERY slow in a straight line.

For the 3rd instructor session I thought it would be good for my student to ride with me.

On lap 4 or so we made a number of passes between T5 and T6. We exited 7 onto the back straight and were just chatting on the intercom about passing rules and track etiquette.

I made the 3-4 upshift not far after 7, and then we're normally in 4th gear for 12+ seconds.

At 5k in 4th the engine "died." No noise, just no power. The student thought I had lifted, pushed the clutch in, or maybe hit the revlimiter.

I scanned the gauges, Oil Pressure was good, Temp was at it's normal 8 o'clock on the gauge, I had gas, and I wasn't near redline. I lifted, and went back to WOT as I looked in the mirror to see if anybody was about to punt me.

* I COULD BARELY SEE THE WING ON MY CAR!!!! * Here's a video from in-car behind me.

please right-click and save-as

http://www.siegelracing.com/toy/Scotts RS.mov

This is one of our SRDEC instructors, Arno, in his Civic. As he turns through T7, onto the back straight, I'm the second white car at the top of the screen.

Thus expired my RS engine. Please note again that the car was almost STOCK. STOCK EM, not tuned.







Note that the piston in Cyl 1 EXPLODED sufficiently to send chunks-o-piston back through the intake manifold, across to the other head, damaging ALL THREE combustion chambers to the point of non-reusability.

I definitely win the biggest boom for a NA motor award

 

We knew it was bent before Tally. We didn't think it would get any worse

SS