Are you a sick puppy or was that an accidental choice of words? I'm inclined to believe the former.
Dealership claims I "abused" it and "drove it aggressively" and "neglected" it. Total damage was $10.6k and the new engine feels a bit less powerful than the original and has a tendency to run very hot but not quite overheat.
There are a lot of problems with the claims of the dealership and the regional rep and we're going to have to get nasty about it.
Their basic claim is that in 1987 miles I never checked the oil and it simply used 3 quarts of it in about 1700 easy street miles (the first 1000 being super-easy) and nearly 300 track miles.
I'm participating in an STi forum and it turns out that though these cars seems pretty good, a disturbing number of the ones that're used at Driving Events are guzzling oil at reported rates as high as a quart in 20-30 track miles. The owners of cars that've done this have been giving me their VIN's so I can subpoena Subaru for all the information they have on these cars. The most recent one I'm aware of had the engine yanked from the car and sent to Subaru for analysis. In my case they tore it down at the dealership and found the #1 rod bearing was spun, but no other evidence of oil starvation, but plenty of (described as "normal") evidence of excessive oil consumption and another possibly unrelated problem with the way the engine was assembled. Well, I found that part. They're ignoring it.
FWIW, track use is not forbidden by the warranty and the owner's manual even tells you which settings to use for the track.
I've started a website that'll document the whole situation but haven't put much of it together yet.
The short answer to "how did you blow the motor?" is that I was using it at Heartland Park in a Driving School and entering the front straight, I noticed the temperature gauge further past the halfway point than I'd seen it before, so decided to breathe the engine and nurse it though the 2.25 miles it'd take to get back to the pits, but the temperature kept climbing until the Check Engine Light finally came on at about the same time the horrible rattling started and I coasted a few to several hundred feet to get off the track safely and shut it down.
The damage to the rod bearing and the rod itself does look like it must've been driven miles with the bearing spun, but it wasn't the case. My word against theirs. But I'd have to be pretty stupid to flog a rattling car (a rattle I correctly predicted was a spun rod bearing) for the miles they claim.
One of the biggest frustrations (and perhaps what'll most weaken their own case) is that they didn't plug in an ODB reader until after the new engine was in a little over a week after the old one was taken out. I'm pretty sure the lifetime of the data when the battery is disconnected is measured in minutes, not days, though they assured me the data would be intact after they put the new engine in, but when it showed no trouble codes, admitted the ECU probably had been powered down long enough to lose the data.
I know if it were me and I were dealing with a car that could tell me a lot of information on its own, I'd ask the car before taking the engine out. If they were doctors, they'd do a heart transplant without asking the patient what brings them in today. |
