Kansas- Blown Engine Update

It’s been an incredibly busy off season here at the Shadow Racing Team Shop. We managed to get 8 races completed in 2012 and have high hopes with the potential sponsors we are seeking that 2013 will be our strongest season yet. Please keep our efforts in prayer as we are seeking many large corporate companies and we want to be a leading candidate in the efforts to better their brands and services throughout the United States. 

We just realized that we never blogged about our Kansas weekend at the end of August. Thankfully we had a great group of people helping us that weekend including Gary who flew in from Canada and also a fellow racer… Steve Lacy.

It was an incredibly hot weekend but we were excited and had high hopes after all the planning and preparation for this 3-day show. We pulled into Hays, KS, set up shop and were ready to contend with the Lucus Oil Tour. The car felt great in hot laps and we only made a few changes to set up for the heat race. I pulled first heat…third row…outside and the engine sounded good. The car was hooked up but three laps in to a 8 lap heat race…the engine couldn't hang...boom! We were done for the night!

Check out the explosion….

The next day we found a secluded lot and decided to pull the spare engine out of the backup car…bad idea! It took all day which caused us to miss the Park City race. But we learned a lot about what not to do when changing out an engine. 

After finally getting the car to run again with the engine, we decided to head to Dodge City the next day to race with the big dogs. It was an incredible opportunity to gain wisdom from the pro teams and run with them on the track. We also go to meet and pit next to Emmett Hahn, the creator of the ASCS Tour and share our story with him.

I was super impressed with the new USA Performance engine and enjoyed the power and fast throttle response. We finished 13 out of 17.

When we finally were able to tear down the engine and get a good look at what happened that night. It appears that cylinder number one over heated which caused stress on the piston hardware. The end result was one bolt breaking and then flying about in the engine. It did a lot less damage than we expected but we now have an expensive coffee table.

Here is the bolt that broke on the bottom of the piston rod; this little bolt did a lot of damage. Hopefully our luck with engines will be much better in 2013.