It was definitely a hell of a day out there. We were seeing track temps get up to 120F and could barely do 2 laps in any of our cars before water and oil temps started rising extremely rapidly. One of our own cars hit 285F oil temps for a brief period of time but managed to survive. I believe if it was running a 30 or 40 weight oil, it wouldn't have faired so well either. Under these kinds of conditions, its all about the right parts (oil cooler, radiator), the right fluids (heavier oil, proper coolant mixture), proper engine tolerances, a good safe tune, and of course driver vigilance to keep an eye on everything and cool down when necessary. Even the bone stock rental Corvette was seeing some extremely high oil temps and required periodic cool down laps. There was also a 2.5RS (non-turbo) that let go half way through the day with what appears to be a head gasket failure.

JHammer's car has seen 15 track days since we tuned it with no issues until now. This time, however, the extreme conditions and use caused a serious, atypical failure that no tune could have caused or prevented. Knowing that the car would see a lot of track time, he tune was left quite conservative. He also took the necessary precautions running 100 octane to prevent knock and cool things down a bit, but the car lacked an oil cooler and definitely saw some high temps. I've never personally seen a subie motor blow a hole in the block before, so it'll be interesting to see exactly what happened. Most likely a bearing or side clearance was set on the tight side of the stock spec from the factory and the expansion from the extreme heat caused it to seize, sending a rod through the block case. This is of course a guess at this point, but its the most likely explanation for this type of failure.

04caliwrx's car spun a bearing on his relatively new engine from another builder. I checked his ECU after the fact and there were no signs of recorder knock events. From what he communicated to me, he was never instructed on what weight oil to run and he had no idea what the clearances were set to in his engine and what oil was appropriate for it. Running oil that's too thin to begin with for a specific engine, and then throwing a ton of heat at it will generally thin the oil out significantly and cause a huge drop in oil pressure. Bearings tend not to like tons of heat and low oil pressure and won't put up with it for long. I don't know the specifics of his engine build, so I won't try to make any other assumptions about what happened until we pull it apart.

Its always easy to blame parts, tunes, whatever, but remember that these are not normal conditions and situations and proper precautions MUST be taken. There are many thousands of moving parts under the hood and any one of them can fail from extreme conditions and cause other serious failures. Most of the cars at this track day were running our tunes and had zero issues. We had customers out there ranging from simple stage 2 setups with quality tunes, all the way to our own fully built engines with large turbo setups and they all made it out just fine. Its certainly sad to see this sort of thing happen to anyone, but its not at all fair to point fingers at any particular part of the car/setup before knowing all the details of the situation.

Again, this sort of thing is always sad to see, but we will take good care of these cars and customers and they will be back on the road better than ever and much more ready and prepared for their next track day adventure .

Thanks
-- Ed