How often to do you 'beat' on your car and how hard?

[commodore665]

Occasionally, I will open the taps on the cars , not mashing the throttle, but gently easing on the power , taking them for a long cruise is a regular thing too , I don’t thrash them by any means

 

[the_boozer]

What sort of racing you doing if you really open it up would be the question. Most hotties I drive will do 100 out of 1st easy. I flog the gutts out of my 4wd in low often. I had to buy a 4wd to stop myself getting speeding fines constantly to easy to be way over the speed limit in a commodore even the 304's I had.

 

[Commo Baba]

Beat on it ?

I thought you were talking about beating it with a stick or something.

I hurled a hammer pretty hard at my speedway car.

 

[Immortality]

I'm sure we've all heard to old wives tales about grandma's Kingswood that never drove above 60 km/h gumming up the back of the vales and glazing bores and needing a premature rebuild. Is there truth to that with modern cars?

My uncle has an interesting theory regarding engines that rarely see a decent rev. He believes if an engine never saw redline for 100s of thousands of kmls and suddenly got revved hard it could destroy. His theory was that a little extra flex in the con rod could allow the rings to bash against the ring land and cause catastrophic damage at redline. It was just a theory mind you.

I put a freshly rebuilt performance 308 on an engine dyno a few years back. Big dollars spend, lots of shiny parts, only to watch it get abused on the dyno from the second it fired! Nothing like a bit of piston thrust to bed in rings!

Engine break in certainly has changed. Old school flat tappet style engines certainly required a proper break in and getting a good ring seal quick requires running the engine under load at the very first fire up but modern engines start life off with fancy synthetic oil that is really slippery so you do have to wonder about getting good ring seal.

Early LS motors certainly had issues with getting a good ring seal and to this day it seems that consuming a fair amount of oil between services seems acceptable with gen 3/4 motors if GM is to be believed...

Personally I drive cars to both ends of the spectrum as the mood takes me.

 

[Immortality]

Beat on it ?

I thought you were talking about beating it with a stick or something.

I hurled a hammer pretty hard at my speedway car.

LOL, when I read the title the first time I thought he was talking about beating something else entirely...

 

[wetwork65]

LOL, when I read the title the first time I thought he was talking about beating something else entirely...

Hmmm - me too. Must have spent far too much time in NZ myself to be having these thoughts.

 

[Immortality]

Well, come on, seriously, who wants to see someone sitting on their car beating themselves? I'd be surprised you don't get arrested