Cadwell Park September 7th

For this event at Cadwell, the guys at Montana Motorsport put a new gearbox and a newer, reconditioned engine in the MR2 as both of these things pretty much packed up at the previous meeting at Mallory. As we’d always suffered from straight line speed a bit, we hoped with this new, lower mileage engine, we’d have a much better chance of winning some races. Cadwell was the first place we could try it, so we had very high hopes.

It was a slightly moist morning, most of the track was dry except for a few areas such as Hall Bends and The Hairpin which were covered by trees and remained damp. I went out into qualifying a bit cautiously and the first thing I noticed was that the engine wasn’t as keen to rev as the old one. As I did a lap or two more, the performance seemed to be getting much, much worse and there was a very loud rattle coming for the engine bay. On about lap  3 it became really bad, it wouldn’t accelerate in any gear and the rattle was incredibly loud. As I was heading for the pits, the engine cut out and I couldn’t get it going again so I pulled off onto the grass by the side of the track. As I was doing so, I noticed quite a lot of smoke coming from the engine  bay which was filling the cabin. As it didn’t seem to be getting any worse, I decided not to pull the fire extinguisher. So I left the car by the side of the track and sat and watched the rest of qualifying from the banking.

After being towed back to the pits, the mechanics promptly started to strip the engine down to try and source the problem. After a couple of hours of frantic dismantling, they found the culprit. One of the big end bearings was completely shot, its respective con rod was bent and this had damaged the head. The smoke for the engine turned out to be a bad connection on an earth wire which was easily fixed. The engine itself, however, was terminally damaged and could no way be fixed there and then, so that was event over, I didn’t get to race at all. I was quite annoyed as I love Cadwell, it’s such a great track and was hoping to do well having done a track day there not too long before.

Both Dad and I would like to thank the Montana Motorsport guys for stripping the engine down in the paddock whilst trying to diagnose and fix the problem, we really appreciate the effort you made.

Update: There’s another new engine in the MR2 now and this ones seems a lot better, so fingers crossed for the next event.
 

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