Who’s there?
Connecting rod.
So during the last hour of Drift Matsuri I had a rather impressive and total failure of the oil relocation fitting on my oil pump. I was just transitioning off the 1st corner on the fast track when what can only be described as a ‘fan’ of very hot oil started pumping from under the Audi all over the very hot manifold. Reports of me dying in a heroic fireball into the sea are exaggerated, but there was a fire (which I didn’t know about) and I pumped 7 litres of oil all over the circuit. I’ve seen a picture someone took of it happening, but I can’t find it now for some reason, will keep looking.
I don’t think I was very popular at the end of the day, but it was just one of those things, it wasn’t my fault and everybody was cool about it. We pieced it back together in the pits and it sounded okay as we loaded it on the trailer.
However, it was not good. After checking on it yesterday I found that the bottom end is gone – it sounds okay at idle – but give it gas and you can hear all the hammers trying to escape.
With an event on Saturday in Norfolk, the clear thing to do was find a short-block on eBay, see if I could pick it up last night and go an get it…
Enter our hero for the evening – Martin Russell. We settled on a deal and I jumped in the car for what ended up being an 11-hour round trip, arriving back at my house at 3am this morning. My favourite part of the trip was when talking to Martin and he said to follow him, he was in a A4 Wagon… He was, in fact, in an extremely well sorted RS4 – and packing some serious power. It was just perfect, and I wished I was in something a little more punchy than my TDi Passat as we wound through some back lanes to his unit. We chatted amongst a ton of cool Audi and VW parts and after loading up I was off into the night. Cool to meet someone else passionate about Quattros.
Tonight the engine is out, and I’m going to try and swap everything over to this new block. I want to drive on Saturday, so I’m willing to take a chance on it. Of course I would normally tear it all down and be my meticulous self about it – but drifting just doesn’t play by all the rules. Sometimes, you just have to put your foot down and hope for the best!
