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What this meant was that we could not remove our O2 sensor housings with the thicker craftsman wrenches as there was not enough clearance. We also found that all of the other teams had packed away tool kits with cheaper, crappy tools and believe it or not, no one had tools that would work as everyone had left their pro tools at home and had come stocked with Husky, Craftsman and Harbor Freight stuff.
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| Our VQ used the older water flow path where coolant enters one end of the head from the block and flows end to end as pictured on the left. This is good for emissions but bad for cooling and the coolant progressively picks up heat as it flows through the head leaving the rearward cylinders hot and bothered. We changed our water flow patten to mimic the new HR and VHR as on the right. |
We tried grinding on tools we had to no avail and after 1.5 frustrating days, we had to call it quits and risk running the car as is. Although we had problems with the engine running too hot, everything went fine until the last practice before qualifying when the poor overstressed motor blew its head gasket and we were done. The stock engine had run at over 600 hp for a drift demo, a drag racing demo and three grueling Formula D practice sessions before packing it in. On the street it would have lasted a long time, the VQ engine is strong!
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| We switched our water flow to mimic the VQ HR model as pictured below. This flow pattern has each cylinder being fed from the block individually as pictured at the bottom. This keeps each cylinder cooler. To run this flow pattern you have to run an HR head gasket and grind the block’s water passage near the bore as shown in this picture in the bottom left corner. |
At home after a long and tiring flight, we had to come up with a game plan. Changing head gaskets in the field was going to be difficult and there was no knowing the condition of the engine besides the head gasket. For all we knew the engine could have been warped, damaged by the water or a valve burned or a ring land cracked. It would also be more of the same performance level as well. Clark Stepper of JWT had warned us to keep the revs down and our rev limter was set at 7000 rpm. This gave us a narrow powerband and Dai was having to shift a lot as well as always bounding off the rev limiter which was making the car harder to drive. Worrying about blowing up the engine was also giving Dai stress, he was not driving very well because he was trying not to hammer the engine too hard and was trying to keep it off the rev limiter.
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| This is the area that must be enlarged on the older blocks. |
So we decided that the best thing to do was to build another engine. We would assemble a properly built long block and air ship it to Qatar, Costa would fly to Qatar a week early and install the engine in time for the event. When figuring shipping, customs and other logistics, this would only give us three days to get the parts and assemble the engine.
