The original plan was to take care of the engine completely last. Because the work took a little more time than hoped for, we did some things in parallel and from then on time, energy and money is put into the engine.
This was not an easy choice either. The only thing that was clear from the start was that we have to compromise between reliability, budget and power. Because we do not know the history of our original power source, let alone that we know how long and intense its life path has been, we quickly chose to start from a new base block and crankshaft. Because torque for a rally car is certainly not a superfluous luxury, we go for the 2.5 S14 version. Here we mount Mahle pistons and Arrow connecting rods. We immerse the oil pump in an extra large welded aluminum sump pan so that it can pump enough oil at all times to keep the case whole.
Because we still have a lot to learn and we also want to keep the running cost within limits, we have limited our maximum speed to 7800. With this we leave some horsepower but we mainly want to do km’s, drive out and this without having to open the engine after 2 rallies. So this is a conscious choice. This means that at the moment we are not quite sure which camshafts we are going to use because at this speed it makes no sense to use +300 gr cams. We are going to try to compensate for the loss of horsepower at high revs as much as possible with torque in the midrange.
The cylinder head and camshafts topic will probably only be posted after Birmingham (Jan 2012) when there is more clarity here. The target for the coming weeks is to completely reduce the lower block.