This past weekend, I was the guest of the Redline Time Attack folks at Willow Springs. I was there to drive a tuned BR-Z. On my third lap in the car, it threw a rod at about 5000rpm in fourth gear and then proceeded to, in the words of the car’s owner, “saw through the block.”
When the car’s owner put the pictures up, noting that he had been in the car when the motor blew and that nothing unusual was happening at the time, he started hearing from other Toyobaru owners and tuners that they’d seen similar issues, often starting with a valvetrain failure. In the case of this particular car, the piston was “in a thousand pieces”, so it’s hard to tell if a valve dropped into it or not.
The engine’s being dissected as we speak for root-cause analysis, but I wasn’t cheered by the number of people who immediately stepped forward to talk about similar issues. As we stood by the smoking car after the failure, the owner started running down all the different ways in which these cars are known to blow up on-track. Apparently, the injector seals wear out, at which point the cylinder “leans” and the motor blows. Or they can have oil pressure issues. And so on.
This is a big deal because much of the GT86’s appeal is based on the idea that you can enjoy it on-track for a long time with low to no running cost. If I wanted a car that might blow its engine at any time on-track, I could take my Boxster there and enjoy on-track pace that is considerably better than anything the Toyobaru can offer.
I’m going to start looking into Subaru engine failures in these cars. Once I know enough to have an informed opinion, I’ll put something up on TTAC.
Looking forward to it. High-revving engines have their downsides.
is this going to be anything like when Subaru gave WRX buyers an SCCA membership but immediately voided the car’s warranty if the owner actually took it on a track?
This is interesting. Would be nice to know what kind of power levels you are dealing with here. Subaru tends not to leave a lot of headroom for improvement without risk of breaking stuff.
carrya1911, I don’t think it is the high revs, this motor is not much of a screamer blowing a rod at 5k. I think the basic issue is that the flat four just isn’t a tuner motor, never as strong as a lump of inline 4 like and Evo if one is comparing motors. The FA/FB supposedly fixed all the flaws that Subaru never fixed in the EJ but it might be the same story all over again with this new boxer.
Maybe a year ago Jalop had an article about surprisingly good and bad LeMons cars. Most of the surprisingly bad ones were Japanese vehicles with stellar reputations for reliability in non-racing environments.
Yeah, with the bulletproof Toyota 22R being one of the worst offenders.
It’s easy to see how an engine might last a million miles at 3000rpm and ten minutes at 7k.
My old ’75 Celica GT with the 20R ran 200k over a twenty-year period, with maybe two hours in aggregate over 5000 rpm, perhaps because it was perfectly obvious that at that speed the engine was, in someone’s (Pat Bedard’s?) immortal phrase, merely processing gasoline into noise. Then again, I expended no effort to fortify it.
the old Unlimited Hydroplane teams used to regularly blow up Allison and Rolls Merlin V12s by pushing them to 4000 rpm even though they were maybe meant to go as fast as 2300.
I’d be curious to know what the factory spec oil is for this car…and how long it was out on track? Though the driving savior that is JB does happen to know what he’s doing..!
I blew up a motor on track before, but it was certainly not a new car.
I still subscribe to the opinion that the proper motor for this car should have been a Honda K20 from the very start 🙂
Here’s a start for your research, although you’ve probably found it already:
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=72
This is the problems page(s). Worrying.
Thanks for the heads-up!