S14 update: matsuri, shims, rockers and woes

This is a pretty overdue update from last year but better late than never!

This started with me spitting a shim at Winter Matsuri. The first day of matsuri went pretty smoothly with the car performing faultlessly. 

Anyways it came to the second day and I went for a session in the rain. As I was pulling back into the pits and JP flagged me down saying there was a really loud ticking/knocking coming from my motor. 

After a bit of initial investigation I removed the rocker cover to inspect the cause of the noise to be greeted by this. There’s meant to be a flat shim but it somehow spat out presumably when I hit limiter. Bit of a bummer as I had no spares which ended my second day quite early. 

Luckily Denis had a trailer and Ned towed the car back. 

The motor was still stock besides poncams and head studs so we figured possibly the valve springs had softened up over time allowing the shim to spit out on limiter. I decided to order supertech valve springs and Evan came over to help me fit them. 

First you’ll need to pull out all the valvetrain components. If you’ve owned an sr for awhile you can probably do it with your eyes closed. 

Sorry I don’t have a better picture but this was the valve spring tool that we used. 

We also used an air line with a fitting to hold the valves up. Essentially you want to pop the car into gear and have the piston at TDC with air pressure in it to keep the valves up. 

It was a pretty nerve racking experience for me as I’d never done it before but it’s pretty straight forward. 

200k km old stock on the left, shiny new supertech on the right. 

I had pulled off the sump earlier to try find the missing shim but it was trapped somewhere else in the motor so I’d wasted a fair bit of time removing and refitting the sump. I decided to measure all of the shims and guides and it turned out that they were all the same size which made things easier. 

Anyways I reassembled everything and fitted a teal rocker cover that Phuong donated to me. Little did I know that I was about to experience the real curse for real. 

I entered Calder practice day keen to drift the s14 there as I’d only driven the 180 there in the past. 

On the way up I thought the car was misfiring from possibly fouled plugs which usually clears itself with a good thrash but I decided to wait till I got onto the track for that. 

I tried doing a few pulls and it was still cutting out but I decided to send it and threw an entry. When I jumped back onto the gas, the car bogged down and sounded like a wrx. Immediately I was thinking “ffs what now”. 

I pulled into the pits and we originally thought it might’ve been a dead coilpack as there was no change to idle on the one cylinder when we unplugged them one by one. We swapped them around and immediately knew there was a more serious issue when the same cylinder had no change. 

I opened the rocker cover to find this. 

I’d managed to completely shatter both rockers on cylinder 2.

I’d later discover the cause for this which I’ll explain in the next post.