[sperry]

Just a quick summary, because I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about blame for this issue:

Mike Warfield tunes, what, 20 Subarus a week probably? I'm sure he knows what he's doing. When the motor failed, he was about 400 miles into the break-in, and was just starting to get into the boost and rpms... the car was running 11:1 AFRs and no timing, so the chance this was a detonation issue is pretty much nill, unless there was something else wrong with the motor (fuel pressure, injectors, etc) in which case the failure is my fault since I did the assembly of all that stuff. It's Mike's opinion that the bearings on the motor we size incorrectly and clearanced out during break in until failure as the car behaved similarly to a new race motor he had a bearing issue on. Now, Mike's pretty much an expert on this sort of thing, so he opinion means a lot to me, but at the same time, no one can diagnose this just by listening to the motor. We need to pull the motor apart to figure out what happened.

Now, AIMS built the shortblock, so if there was an error in the bearings (i.e. they put in something they didn't intend to put in there) then hopefully they'll take responsibility for the failure. However, there's a very good chance that they put in the correct stuff and "shit happened", as it sometimes goes. I just got off the phone with Robert at AIMS about the motor, and he's interested in taking a look at things. So, I'm going to pull the motor for him and strip it down to the long block so he can take a look at it. Maybe the bearings are the wrong size as Mike thinks, maybe the crank just didn't polish up as good as we thought... But at the very least, we'll know what failed, even if we can't figure out why it failed.

But ultimately, unless we can sort out specifically what went down, the blame for this failure is on me. I'm the one that assembled everything aside from the shortblock, and it's the 1st time I've ever put something together like that. The chance that this is the fault of one of the pros is far lower than it is that I botched something along the lines.

I just don't want folks getting the wrong idea. I don't want to be one to assign blame or stir up animosity over crap like this unless it's warranted. So far both Mike at GST and Robert at AIMS have been very helpful and professional regarding the situation.