Engine failure

jmroy6

Hello Gents

From the heading you can see i have some bad news. This happened a little over a month ago, when i was getting the car tuned at RT tuning. The motor blew on the dyno during a pull. The car is a stage 1.5 GTM SC kit getting tuned for flex fuel (using vp C85). Car does have 70k miles and made a little over 500 on pump.

Based on the feed back from Vince and the shop, they were making a pull and noticed white smoke out the exhaust, so they immediately stopped the dyno session and put it aside. At first they thought it was a blown head gasket, but when they pulled the intake manifold there was parts of aluminium/piston in the manifold.

Based on the feedback and the options at hand i decided to take the car home where i would just swap in a new motor.


Here is what i found so fair..
Right off the bat when i picked up the car, i noticed the fuel pressure gauge was foggy.



Once i started to take the car apart it looked like fuel was inside the actual gauge. I primed the fuel pump to confirm, low and behold fuel come pouring out the top of the pressure relief valve. This is an basic aeromotive fuel pressure gauge, part of the cjm fuel return kit. Just bad luck and the gauge failed at the wrong time or what??? Gauge failed on a pull.. fuel pressure dropped.. went lean... caused the motor to detonated?? Based on the amount of aluminum chunks and pieces of piston rings in my upper and lower manifold id say the ring butted and blew apart the piston?

Does this sound like a likely cause from everyone? Never seen a fuel pressure gauge fail like this before but its all over the internet so..

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2012 370z GTM SC