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My B5234t5's Last Miles


JCviggen

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After 151K miles of quite heavy usage my engine has finally thrown in the towel. The exact cause is as of yet unknown, but after 12 miles of Nürburgring there was a loss of boost and power along with some nasty sounding rattles. Bent rods, or ruined bearings, or a combination of both. We'll find out soon enough. It went in a strange place where there wasn't a particularly high load on the engine but the initial damage could have happened earlier in the lap.

Anyway as I was taping it, I'll dedicate the video to the engine :lol:

http://www.greenringer.net/ring/16may09/lastlap.avi

Because some oldtimers had rented the 'ring for an hour in the morning before we went on, there were apparently some spilt fluids on track which aided me in nearly outbraking myself once or twice even though I take it 10-15% easier the first lap of the day. The expected grip just wasn't there. That said, the Quaife was absolutely huge in combination with the R888's.

As is often the case before a failure, the engine ran stronger than ever on the track (where it usually suffered from climbing IAT's after a while) on 100 RON fuel. It was really, really quick. Touched 155+ mph on the quickest bit (~6400rpm 5th gear) which is considerably quicker than what the car usually did in that place.

About 8:05 into the video the power loss gets noticed and a couple secs later you can hear something isn't right.

A couple miles later after parking it the sound was considerably louder, drowning out anything else. I decided not to record that sound because it would be too much for some people to handle. I personally don't need to hear it again either. At first it would occasionally go away idling, but after driving it a short distance to the cottage where we were staying, it had grown quite a bit louder. When approaching 2500rpm it goes from 1 loud knocking/rattling to several of those sounds at the same time. It sounds like many things but not an engine running. Engine braking the sounds were a little softer but even larger in number, as if all 5 cyls were rattling. At idle it's back to a single source of loud knocking, if I had to guess cyl. 3

I called a tow truck who took it 100 miles to my mechanic where my daily driver was waiting for me to get me home. Next engine will have stronger rods, I'm not betting on my block being in any shape to be rebuilt at this point. But it'll be interesting to see if the rods are still straight or not.

At least I got some nice passenger laps in with some of my English friends, Elliot's car is awesome. Similar to my car but just a little bit better on all fronts really.

Pyaap (not sure if he's on here) was kind enough to trust me with his RHD S60R for a lap which was fun too, though quite difficult to handle a manual 6-spd with your left hand while on a track. Very thankful that he offered me to have a go, the R's are really quite easy to drive at a good pace, and capable as well.

Elliot with me waving to the camera bloke :lol:

elliot1.jpg

The R

s60rrr.jpg

To be continued..

(if video not work d/l and install http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/ )

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took me long enough!

If it turns out it was oil starved i'll still kick myself though lol

Oil starvation is one, another can be fuel starvation. I have had this happen at Pflanzgarten with the SD2 and although the engine survived it sounded like metal going through the exhaust.

But in all fairness I think the engine did extremely well. Of course you want it to last forever but given the amount of abuse that engine has seen and the mileage it has done.. <img src="http://volvospeed.com/vs_forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=" :o " border="0" alt="ohmy.gif" />

2 years ago it was a disaster waiting to happen but it never did up until now. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=" ;) " border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

Finding or speculating the cause is near useless at this point. I tried to pinpoint the problem with my engine and eventually sort of concluded it was due to oil starvation after cornering Aremberg with a very high speed, yes those semi tires are grippy, but a couple of weeks later I was told that GLT engine's sometimes drop a bearing for no apparent reason and you are back to square one.

Take the hit, pull the wallet and move on.. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=" :) " border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

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Jan, your car is simply wonderful, I've always enjoyed watching vids of it "am Ring," nevertheless, hopefully it all gets sorted out and you're back up and running, I'll be at the Ring mid-June, hopefully we all can organize a get-together!

-Jon

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