Every time I bumped the boost up on Lucy in stock form, I had one of my good customers call me up right after to turn up his 08 with a rcc stage 2 kit on X98.
Here was its last time on the dyno:
After two weekends of racing 60-220mph she finally gave up the ghost after running the bike hard in to the rev limiter in 6th gear. He reported that it never skipped a beat until tagging the limiter hard. Then it started missing on the next pull.
Any time he came back for more power I always warned him that pushing a stock engine to these limits is uncharted territory and will likely self destruct. I did not suggest we push over 320hp. His response was always “Its alright, I want to see how far we can take it too. If it breaks it breaks. We’ll build it better if it does.”
So here’s the destruction.
The outer pistons and plugs are fine other then the top rings sticking a little like they were on Lucy. I expected broken rings because of the type of racing the owner does. The ring gaps were both positioned towards the intake valves. You can see that’s where most the damage is. Usually if it’s fueling related and runs lean that side of the piston is where you see it start to melt. To me it looks like most of the damage on the pistons is from metal breaking off and acting as sand paper against the cylinders.
The head scratcher for me is the missing material between the exhaust valves. The strap on the plugs from those cylinders were partially melted. That leads me to think EGT’s were getting out there. But with all the timing maps unified, all the cylinders should have had the same timing.
On both intake runners they had marks in them like fuel was dripping due to an injector not closing all the way. Perhaps if that’s true, it may have auto ignited the little bit of fuel in the limiter causing a lean condition.
I remember back on turbo gen 1s with secondaries, if you didn’t set the limiter on the secondaries and they would stay on causing a lean condition and burning pistons that are shut off in the limiter. However I believe that was on cylinders 1 & 4, not 2 and 3.
If it wasn’t for the missing metal on the exhaust side, I’d of said it’s a clear case of butting the rings together. Interesting results.
Here was its last time on the dyno:
After two weekends of racing 60-220mph she finally gave up the ghost after running the bike hard in to the rev limiter in 6th gear. He reported that it never skipped a beat until tagging the limiter hard. Then it started missing on the next pull.
Any time he came back for more power I always warned him that pushing a stock engine to these limits is uncharted territory and will likely self destruct. I did not suggest we push over 320hp. His response was always “Its alright, I want to see how far we can take it too. If it breaks it breaks. We’ll build it better if it does.”
So here’s the destruction.
The outer pistons and plugs are fine other then the top rings sticking a little like they were on Lucy. I expected broken rings because of the type of racing the owner does. The ring gaps were both positioned towards the intake valves. You can see that’s where most the damage is. Usually if it’s fueling related and runs lean that side of the piston is where you see it start to melt. To me it looks like most of the damage on the pistons is from metal breaking off and acting as sand paper against the cylinders.
The head scratcher for me is the missing material between the exhaust valves. The strap on the plugs from those cylinders were partially melted. That leads me to think EGT’s were getting out there. But with all the timing maps unified, all the cylinders should have had the same timing.
On both intake runners they had marks in them like fuel was dripping due to an injector not closing all the way. Perhaps if that’s true, it may have auto ignited the little bit of fuel in the limiter causing a lean condition.
I remember back on turbo gen 1s with secondaries, if you didn’t set the limiter on the secondaries and they would stay on causing a lean condition and burning pistons that are shut off in the limiter. However I believe that was on cylinders 1 & 4, not 2 and 3.
If it wasn’t for the missing metal on the exhaust side, I’d of said it’s a clear case of butting the rings together. Interesting results.
