2008 25 Hours of Thunderhill: Three engine swaps and counting
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"Come to Evil Genius – engine swap!!" That's the text message we received at 3:30 PM from the esteemed Dr. Lieberman, telling us about the catastrophic engine failure that took out Evil Genius Racing's 1994 Miata. By the time we caught up with John (the Evil Genius himself) the team had pulled out the grenaded mill, replaced it and had #65 back on track... in just over an hour and a half. And they started putting together another engine, just in case. As of this writing, #65 is 57th overall and 15th in class.
Two other engine mishaps have temporarily taken out the #9 Mustang and #94 RX-7. Work is underway on both, and we're hoping to get more information from the teams soon.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Stuka 9:04PM (12/06/2008)
#94 blew up a rotary? Either they are running insane amounts of boost, or the seals had a few races on them.
Liking the coverage so far!
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Tad 9:48PM (12/06/2008)
Those rortary engines are notorious for grenading! The Wanker motor is a good concept but far from perfected.
Stuka 9:58PM (12/06/2008)
Tad: Hardly. A 13B engine only has 3 moving parts. The old 80's ones were known for flooding due to having carbs instead of EFI, and the old ones had apex seal issues. This has not been the case for nearly two decades.
AHK 3:31AM (12/07/2008)
Tad: Just so you know, it's Wankel, not Wanker ;)
Rotaries are made to race
jrm1493 9:24AM (12/07/2008)
If the rotaries are so great why are there tons of RX-7's with LS1 swaps?
alex 9:42AM (12/07/2008)
"If the rotaries are so great why are there tons of RX-7's with LS1 swaps?"
Low end torque.
J. Shirley 9:44PM (12/06/2008)
The race just shut down for fog, too.
My internet connection is spotty, but I'm trying to tweet the coverage as well at http://twitter.com/jshirley
(Disclaimer: I work for NASA, but I've plugged autoblog on the nasa25hour site ;)
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Stuka 12:52PM (12/07/2008)
@jrm: The only people that do V8 swaps are those that drag race. Anybody that road races isnt going to destroy their handling by replacing the stock 180lb engine with a 500lb engine.
Steven 6:14PM (12/17/2008)
Actually, we are just starting construction on our 2nd gen rx7 featuring a 5.7L from a GTO for next years 25hrs.
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