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We replaced our throttle body with one we bought from 2ndChanceRoadster for a very reasonable price. Since we didn't want to deal with this “common problem” again, we poked around and found that globbing JB Weld over the screw heads is apparently a commonly accepted preventative measure for accidental screw head ingestion. Worth a shot…
While we had the JB out, we went ahead and plugged the idle air bypass ports on the bottom of the throttle body. This removes some unnecessary clutter and simply forces you to manually adjust the idle with the manual idle adjust screw on the throttle body. We have to set it over 1000 rpm when warm to have enough throttle opening to idle cold.
Along with the catastrophic screw noises, and grumbly wheel bearing noises, there was also a nasty exhaust leak noise developing during this race. Turns out this solid downpipe-to-transmission brace was not the source of stress reduction we thought it was.
This truly bizarre looking fatigue failure turned out to be easy to fix.
This piece of steel was found on the floor, and the careful application of heat and hammers kept the noise in the pipe.
The stuck transmission was simply replaced with a spare we had laying around at MD Automotive for just such an occasion. The failure mode of our old transmission is incredibly common, it turns out, and John Pagel of Evil Genius Racing gave us a box of lightly-used transmission parts, a short list of new parts to buy, and some instructions that we'll use to fix the old box when we have a spare minute or two. I'll document that when we get around to it.
