Thread: Honda Cup Round 2

It's a bitza for sure. I am guessing that with stock rods, and stock pistons and a stock crank, even with the blading and balancing that has been done on them, there would be little room for cheating! I just find that for racing, it's great. I think it does about 134kw, there is aDyno plot somewhere at home too.

Sure the 1.8 has a bit more torque low down, but you can drive around that anyway with the 1.6 by running hi revs all of the time. I thought we had it set for 10,000rpm soft limit, but it's actually just 9,500. You will know better than me but the blading and balancing etc is really designed just to push the boundaries of what the engine normally does, as opposed to trying to make it do something entirely new.

This is easier and cheaper to achieve in the 1.6 than in the 1.8 in my opinion, but I am talking about track work. My 1.8 was a two year saga. Great motor - 205bhp at the wheels, but it developed a bad habit of pressuring the water system. We could never recreate its particular hang up during hours on the dyno or driving on the roads around where I live (and I did something like 2,000km in total through running it in every time it pressurised the water system). It just didn't like going racing. When Justin and Glynn fitted the 1.6 they saw that one of the mounts on the side was cracked and the only thing we could come up with was that there was a tiny dimple (four thousandths of an inch) across the deck of the 1.8 after it had been skimmed, it couldn;t really be skimmed any further. Our best guess was that the motor was flexing during track running because of the knackered mount and opening this gap enough to pressurise the water. We tried all sorts of head gaskets, different cooling system configurations and just about everything. In the end, I called time on it.

Every time it was rebuilt we were really optimistic that it had been solved. It would go great guns on the dyno without problem then I would drive up and down Whakamarama Road here running it in for hours on end (with plenty of beans I hasten to add) again without problem. Within a session or two on track it would misbehave again.

It's sat here all folorn - a crack free Lynn Rogers head, and lots of new bits inside like one weekend old pistons and rings. I doubt it would ever give any trouble on the road, well, we tried VERY hard and couldn't get it to misebehave in anyway under normal conditions.Frustrating. Often look on Trade Me at old EGs and hope one will come along that is in good nick that it could go into and make a cool run around, but they don't seem to and I haven't got the time or the energy to be honest. Have to say though, that even when it was working well, for me the 1.6 is a better motor for going motor racing.

By the way, the engine in the car now has a different block entirely, but I think it is a B. Nathan would know if he is reading this thread.