With the motor back together and retorqued a few times it was finally time to take Lil Debbie to the track and see what she could do. After two somewhat easy passes and no issues we decided it was time to “let er buck” as the Canadians say. Unfortunately, though we could not get the truck to spool and all it wanted to do was fall on its face until the later part of the track. With the waste gate as the suspect we decided to disconnect it but still nothing, so first time to the track was a bust. The next day we began to take a closer look to see what our issue was and we noticed that the wastegate actuator mount had come loose and one of the bolts was missing which caused the wastegate to hang open. We put it all back together and took it for a test drive down the road and Lil Debbie was nothing less than impressive. While we were enjoying testing we ran head first into the limits of our 6.ohh intercooler. The plastic crimped end cap literally blew off the side of the intercooler and not to mention scared the crap out of us. We thought for sure it was something big but fortunately no damage other than the intercooler and the air filter which took the impact.
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blown intercooler 2.jpg
With a test and tune followed by a local diesel drag racing event coming up the next weekend we called around and found a friend with a 7.3 intercooler which is all aluminum. We quickly retrofitted it to take the place of the 6.ohh and we were up and running again. The next Fri at the test and tune Lil Debbie ran fantastic and actually gave a corvette a run for its money and as many of you have seen blew a Miata out of the water.
So the next day we made our way back to the track for the diesel race event and during the test and tune portion consistently ran in the upper 14s but began to run into another issue this time not on the truck but caused by the truck. The smoke from the pipe during spool up was interfering with the lasers which was fooling the timing by about a second which was giving us a false time of high 13’s.
Taking into consideration the times when the smoke was not interfering our best time was 14.70 @ 89mph. We were very excited about this because we finally had reached the point with the combination of the aftermarket exhaust manifold and the fairly aggressive DIY port and polish we were able to put it on full fuel and keep the peddle to the floor the entire track instead of lifting because of high boost and egts. The boost now does not go above 80 psi and the egts do not go over 1500. SUCCESS AT LAST!! No more blown head gaskets and time for the next goal of breaking into the 13’s.