Oh what a shame, at 2:48pm this afternoon my 3rd cylinder bit the dust…
It was a wonderful engine and gave me tens of thousands of fun filled kilometers, many a headache and many many more moments of joy.
To be honest, it was a wonderful twilight for the little engine. This past weekend was truly the hardest it has ever been driven. And it did mighty well.
On Friday morning, Chris and my friend Adam packed up into my car and headed for buffalo. When we got there Chris climbed into a 350z and we made the 7 hour drive to Carlisle, PA.
A couple hours into it we began to get rowdy.
The now-deceased SR was known to be suffering from weak piston rings. The symptoms were clear, a little gas in the oil, lots of blow-by etc. Nonetheless, I didn’t take it easy on the pedal.
For its last hurrah the little SR with the help of a GT2871R made quick work of a lightly modified Lotus Elise on the highway and even on the twisting 15 South in central PA.
Shortly there after the SR made quite the fool of some heavily modified twin-turbo Z32’s. Two of them in fact, one right after the other, even S2000’s were no match… not that they should have been.
The humble little SR was happy to have the chance and honoured to bow down to an E55 AMG Mercedes and a T58 turbo charged 350Z that was faster than anyone could imagine.
On Saturday, on the trip back from PA, the little – SR – that – could trounced a modified Subaru WRX STI, much to the surprise of all involved. There are videos to support all battles.
Shortly after the victory over the Subaru the little SR teamed up with a Yamaha R1 to make a mockery of the 15 North in its twistiest portion. The Yamaha R1’s speedo reportedly eclipsed 160mph and was not gaining an inch on the the soon to be defunct SR.
Unfortunately, today, May 8, 2006 shortly before 3pm while on the way back to work from a lunch break the SR had had enough. On a mild pull around a sharp increasing apex curve on Stanley Avenue in Niagara Falls, Ontario the piston rings on cylinder 3 gave out. The SR was finished; and with its last gasp of gasoline it spewed a cloud of white smoke out the tail pipe.
We knew you well, your death will not be in vain.
So yeah, I knew this was going to happen sooner or later and to be honest its amazing that this thing took that kind of beating this weekend. Chris was betting it would blow up during the rip home last night… fortunately it got me across the border safely.
Lucky for me I have an extra SR long block and an entire other running and driving redtop in another chassis sitting outside our shop. The only question now is when we do the swap and what gets done right off the bat.
The blown SR has the cams / RAS / ARP studs in it which should all be transferable, the cometic HG of course is useless now but I have a few others hanging around anyways.
I was planning on building up the blacktop but now everything is being forced upon me a little faster.
After about 4 minutes of thought it would likely be better for me to order the rebuild kit and build the blacktop rather than putting the other red top in then swapping for the blacktop later after its built.
I would have to crack open the other red top anyways to do the cams / hg / studs so might as well do it to the blacktop since its sitting on the floor right now anyways.
Gotta get back up an running mighty soon though… good thing I still have the beater battle hatch to putt around in.