Okay, so it wasn’t that dramatic but my good ol’ faithful EJ20 in my daily driver finally decided to bite the dust this last weekend at a local time attack event at Miller Motorsports park.  The poor thing had over 100K miles of pretty hard abuse over it’s lifetime currently making around 280 w.h.p. on stock internals so I knew this was a bit of an inevitability…  especially under harsh road race conditions.  It’s not like I didn’t try to prevent it though, the week prior I had spent some time on maintenance in the form of a new timing belt, water pump, tensioner, idlers etc…

But unfortunately none of that  prevents rod bearing failure :(  Maybe it was the sheer awesomeness of the new exhaust I just fabbed up a couple of weeks ago that the motor just couldn’t handle.

Either way, I ended up leaving hard parked on the “Kar Toad”.  At least the driver was kind enough to bring an awesome pony tail with him that made the situation a little better.

Oh well…  these are the risks of tracking your daily right?  I’ve actually been blessed with some pretty amazing luck over  my 15 years of modifying cars as this is the first motor I’ve lost.  The bright side of this whole ordeal is that it looks like I’m finally going to get that 2.5L motor I’ve been lusting after since this car’s inception.   Unfortunately my other daily (the Starlet) is in the middle of the 4AGE swap so it looks like I’m going to have to go into crazy overtime mode unless I want to drive my mother and law’s 88′ Pathfinder for the rest of the summer.

In a bit of lighter news, I had a very nice couple of visitors stop by the shop today from Colorado that just so happen to make some pretty cool shirts and they were kind enough to hook me up!

Thanks guys!!!  You can pick up your own here at  GEAR HEAD‘s site, I’ll be hitting them up again as soon as they get that rad Toyota “TEQ” shirt in a medium.   One more old friend stopped by recently that has a JDM SiR EF Civic with some axle issues that has honestly been one of the first cars Ive seen in a long time that has gotten me excited about a Honda again.

Bronze TE37 V’s on green is match made in heaven on this car….  no silly stretch or 90 gazillion degrees of camber either.  This one is straight grip mode baby!  Meatyflush,  just the way I like it.

The TA22 Celica and KGC10 Skyline are currently ruling my world right now so hopefully you will be seeing some updates on those two as soon as I can make some good progress…   Have a great weekend,  and try not to break your car……  but if you do, I know a guy :)