jlutherva

Well, I should have done a much better job of tracking engine time and I certainly will on this new engine. Going back and counting events, mostly two day events, I did 41. The four 2013 events were very easy on the engine. I was just learning about driving a race car. That fall, I crashed at Road Atlanta. After repairs, the two 2014 events in the race car were also very gentle just due to the pucker factor and trying to get the car sorted out again. I did 22 events in 2015 but many were completely rained out and I had a lot of failures that caused me to park the car. In 2013, the first ten events, I was finally comfortable with the car and turned some good times, then the starter broke, then the cam wiped, then the engine blew.
Now even when I was comfortable in the car, I was still fairly easy on the engine. I generally shift in the 5-5800 RPM range. Only at the Glen did I rev the engine to 6-6200 RPM.

This was Arron Pfadt's race car and test mule for his products. It was designed to run in the desert outside of Salt Lake City. Before the Road Atlanta crash, the front end was pretty much OEM except for twin oil coolers behind the fog light openings that vented into the wheel wells and a large custom splitter. Water temps never exceeded 210*F and oil temps never exceeded 240 even running Road Atlanta in July and August.

The rebuild after the crash was done with a Black Dog Racing fascia and splitter with a custom air box to route air to the radiator. That part totally failed at the Pitt Race track just due to the roughness of the track. That caused the water temps to increase dramatically and I had a number of instances where the water temps were over 240*F.

The engine was tuned by ZIP and was a fairly conservative tune.

I think the LS376/525 is a great engine. I believe it has a problem with the valve springs getting weak and allowing the valves to float. That possibly allowed the lifter to rotate ad wipe the cam. Valve float can also allow the valves to impact the pistons and that may have been why the piston failed.

Just my 2 cents.


Jim