Well, I suppose it was always going to happen after over 2 years of torture... and when it did happen, it was always going to be big! As you may have gathered, it doesn't take a genious to work out what I'm talking about. Yes, it's finally given up

We don't know the cause of mechanical failure at present, as it only happened on Friday, and we are having a new garage built at the moment so our house just looks a bit like a building site! We have had a quick examination, and basically the engine has hydraulicced - so we're looking at catastrophic engine failure. All 4 chambers were filled with water, which is unheard of! The headgasket has obviously failed, but must have totally failed! It went without warning, no loss in performance, smoke or anything beforehand. The engine was not running hot, it was at its normal operating temperature I exited Cascades corner and was pulling 6000rpm in 3rd, about to shift into 4th, when a big cloud of white smoke erupted from the rear of the car.

Various vids can be found by clicking on the following link, including a tribute video for the Punto: http://www.gpmotorsport.co.uk/videos.htm

I'm not looking for sympathy or anything like that, because when you tune an engine to the extent that this engine was tuned, you expect problems. We haven't had any over the last couple of years (a few minor niggles here and there in the early days, through no fault of our own), and as I mentioned earlier in this post, we're still unsure of the exact cause, so no pointing fingers please.

We'll let anyone who's interested know the outcome, and obviously the resolutions once we know the task ahead of us.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,
Matt.