Yaris Hilton - What went wrong? (Engine Inspection)

Poor Yaris Hilton, Martin. She's no longer smoking up rubber on the internet, is she? No, no longer handing out the chops with no ill intent. No longer... The original threat. No longer the original threat. Just a dead hunk of metal. I'm in a cold sweat thinking about what's wrong with it though, after all that work. Well Martin, hopefully we're about to find out. Maybe. At least we hit our goal. We got a sub-minute lap, which is what we wanted. Well you did, well done. Thank you Martin. Did it feel fast? You know what, it felt fast, but for the amount of effort that we put in to get from the 105 to the 102 to the sub-1 minute, it's exponentially more. But that's race car, isn't it? It is. Until you're kind of getting a hole saw and drilling out your doors and measuring every millimetre of weight, it starts to get a little bit crazy. It does. There's obviously better grip, but then coming out of the corners, planting it, it's still... before it kind of winds on. So you reckon clutch, or you reckon too much power? And just spinning a wheel? Well I think it's a combination of all these things. I don't think we can just go, it's just that thing now, because if we replace that one thing, then the next thing down the line will have an issue with it. Totally. You want to point it out of the corner and just put it on, and then off you go. It's not laggy, but there's just a bit of time. I think most of the time lost was, other than the driving ability, but at least that's constant in our scientific tests, is coming out of the corner and just putting it on, you just want to wind it on, rather than have any kind of, you know, loss of grip or anything like that. No bouncing out of the corners, all drive style. You're actually dragging yourself out of them. And an LSD might fix that, but as you say, it might also then go, oh now the gearbox, now the clutch broke, and then the gearbox broke, because it's too weak for the LSD, and you can just go down this rabbit hole to get 0.3 of a second quicker. And it's easier just to go, well why would you bother on small cars? But that's the thing, is that a project like this is exponential. It's like people do woodwork, make a table, and spend like a year making something, spend all this time, all this money, and people go, why wouldn't you just buy one? Because the value is in learning to make it. It's not buying one, you know? That's true. For a lot of people. And I didn't think on the street, when we drove this around on the street, that it was lacking, did you? No, no, on the street it felt great. And that's usually the way I like to go about things, because I don't want to build a race car, and then drive a race car on the street 95% of the time. I want to drive my street car 5% of the time on the track. You know what's funny about that? Most people who are building their cars by the internet go, I'm bringing in coilovers, because it's a thing to do, and I'm going to do this. Hard bushes and stuff. They compromise 99% of their driving time, I guess for street cred, or for whatever, but the reality is they make their car worse on the street. Because as we know from history, sometimes lowered springs are enough. Sometimes coilovers are cool, but sometimes springs are enough. What's interesting is our lowering and our big rubber, hard to know exactly how much. If we were being fully scientific, yes, okay, you do the lowering springs, and you go back to the track, and then you do the tyre, and you go back to the track. Ain't no one got time for that. Turbo, big wheels, suspension. So we are just the problem that we just described in a way. Probably. But on the street, freaking awesome. Until it went ka-dunk, ka-dunk. Well, it did that twice. Yes. At least the first time it was only something that was minor and not actually a problem. But right now, the engine does start. So I'll show you people. It actually does start, but it's not making noises that are easily rectified. It hesitates when you put the power on. Yeah. It's as wobbly as an old ball sack. Yeah. Something's not right. So. Yeah. We weren't sure whether we do like a full teardown or not, but we think probably as an initial step, what we might do is drop the oil and see if there's any evidential material in there. Go penning for gold and glitter. Yeah, have a look around in there, and then we may be able to, yeah, we might be able to glean some information from that. Yeah. So that's the thing. You can pull the entire engine out, pull the whole engine down, and go, oh, look, we've got rod knock, which is probably what it is. And the knock just means that that rod is flapping around and the bearing is not holding it in place. The theory, my theory, because I could be completely wrong, but my theory is that it's just too much power for the bottom end of this engine. Yeah. And it happened again. Okay. There's too much power for the bottom end of this engine. We were putting too much, expecting too much at the top, too much cylinder pressure, which is what the boost makes. Yeah. Cylinder pressure. And that's just with all the revs and all the power and the heat and everything of what's happening on the track, it's just too much. It's overpowered the bearings that hold it all together and it's like wrecked them. And now the rod is flapping around. That's my guess. And the sound is very reminiscent of that. Yeah. The thing is, though, even though it probably would drive under its own power, I mean, we tow trucked it back, like we haven't driven it, you know, since then, but trying to drive it like that, eventually it's just going to go kaput, right? Oh, totally. The heat, because there's no longer the cushioning effect of the bearing, which is the softer metal and the oil to sort of cushion it all, it will eventually just chew itself out and then it will seize and go full Rodney. Yeah. All right. Well, why don't we just, for a first step, why don't we just drop the oil, have a look, see what's in there. Yeah. And then make some decisions about what we're going to do and how we're going to fix it. Sure. So first things first, we're just going to check the top end. You can, through the oil cap, you can take the rocker cover off, you can pull a spark plug. Just have a look and see if there's anything obvious in the top end. I'm pretty sure it's a bottom end thing. I don't actually think there's something going on here. So this is a, I think it's a little ball scope? A ball scope, people. A ball scope. Same thing they use to check you and you. Ah. Oh, wow. Salmon. Anyway, so this has a light on the end of it too, so you can turn the light on and then go into dark places and see what's going on. So we're just going to have a quick look in the top and see if there's anything obviously floating around in there that's broken. I know what you're thinking as well. Why shouldn't we just throw the car in the bin? It's because we bought Yaris as a bit of a funny joke thing and then as what happens when you put a lot of energy into something, we actually love it. Like this car is actually freaking awesome and I think it's actually worth finding out what's wrong with it so we can fix it. It's worth saying as well that this issue that we have is the same thing that would happen if you actually didn't have any oil or enough oil in your car. But we definitely changed that. Ours is still honey fresh, like it's still looking good. And it's a good level, yeah. Low oil level can cause that because it starves the oil pump and then you've got metal on metal and it breaks. Yeah. Martin, I reckon let's just at least drop the oil out, have a look through it, stick the camera up the butthole, see what we can find. See if we can find a little Lego man up there. There's nothing super obvious in here. There's nothing like floating around or it all looks good. The oil springs are where they need to be and everything. Yeah, we'll look at it. I will grab the jack. Up the bottom. And we will drop it. Let's see what we can find, Martin. How good's the dose? I didn't expect it to be that good. It sounds so similar to the GTI-R that we worked on recently. Like the actual sound of the turbo. Yeah. Yeah, it makes the same whooshy noises. And even this engine has like a bit of an SR vibe going on. I mean, I know it's a four cylinder, it'll kind of sound the same, but it doesn't sound like an Evo. The Ryobi bendy light. Do you get them in America? So good. Some of the stuff that you don't get over there. Do they get these in America? I don't know. Can someone tell us if you get these? If you don't, go get them. Yes, Ryobi is a sponsor of the show. Yes, we've been using these for years and years, even before they were a sponsor of the show, just so you know. Probably just going to be honey coloured. There is, it hasn't shredded anything. You know what I mean? I don't think it's shredded something and crushed it. I think it's just spun a bearing and the bearing goes like that. Around and around and around. You know what? Let's just take that sump guard. Yeah, let's take the little sump plate off, hey? And have a look with our own eyeballs. Grab a whizzer and let's just whiz it off. Just be ready. When you do take it off, it'll go kazoomp. Okay, and I'll just drop the oil out of it if there is any in there. Oh, so much goo. What's that? I can see bits of metal. Dude, metal. We found it. Sparkling in here, see? Yeah, which is always the risk when you're opening up, you know, engines. But yeah, there's just quite an abundance of metal, which is probably bearing material. That's a piece of steel that has broken off. It looks like cast steel, which is what those rods would be made from. Maybe we can try our bowl scope again to see if there's anything up here. We can only have access easily to one rod from this end. Does that sound a bit like the noise? Would you say that's what it sounds like but faster? Yeah. That's me pushing the conrod left to right on the bearing. The noise sounds exactly like when we turn it on, so I'm guessing that's what it is. And it just sounds like metal on metal. So Yaris Hilton has been blown. At least once. Yep, at least. That we know of, anyway. The question is, if you rebuilt that engine, would it just do it again? Maybe. There's big question marks over this engine anyway, because wrecker engine, who knows how many k's it had on it. We think it may have had a couple of hundred, right? Probably. I mean, most rollers do, because why else would you get rid of it? Because they just keep working. But this is like one of those things, was the oil changed regularly? Was the servicing kept up to date? Did it have rods and bearings and stuff put in it before? People replace bearings in engines like this just to keep them going. So a good friend of mine reckons 0.008-ish axial side play tops is the most you'd want from that rod moving side to side. It's moving way more than that. You shouldn't really be able to even feel it. And we're moving it like two mil. So that rod's done. And that's just the one we can get to. But do we need to pull the whole motor apart just to work out that the other three are probably also stuffed? Yeah. I don't think so. And a little bit of, yeah, material in the oil. So this motor's cactus. So we probably need to sit down and have a long, hard chat about our future with Yaris Hilton. And maybe, you know what, it sounds really sensible, which I'm not usually into, but maybe we should actually work out how much we've spent. Yeah. And how much. And by spending, people often think that spending is just money, but there's more currency than dollars, people. Like rupiah. And time. So we should sit down and work out how much more we want to invest in it based on what we've already invested in it. Diminishing returns on the track and potentially diminishing returns emotionally. Whilst I have my arm around it. A very fun car. I didn't mean to do this. That has brought us a lot of love, even though we're paying for that love, which means I'm not sure if it's actually love or not. Does it count still? I don't know. Let's go and have a chat, Martin. Let's go and work some things out. Yaris Hilton's sound. I still can't get over the sound, though. Well, I can't believe how fun it is to drive on the street. Oh, man. And part of me feels like we should have never taken it on the track, because that's what actually blew it. But then we only built it to put on the track. That's true. To measure. So confused, Martin. I've got so many conflicting thoughts going on. That pad's high. We'll un-conflict you. It's raining. Beautiful rain. Spectacular.