Fault Finding/Troubleshooting A Hill Climb Monster | Pikes Peak [TECH NUGGET]

A 550kg vs 550hp car is great when running correctly, but in the world of EFI tuning and motorsport, not everything always goes to plan.A 550kg vs 550hp car is great when running correctly, but in the world of EFI tuning and motorsport, not everything always goes to plan.


At the 2018 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb (Official Site) we were lucky enough to spend some time with Robin Shute Racing's 2018 Wolf Racing Cars TSC Honda K20 powered car, but not in the circumstances we would have liked.

In our own experience 1 out of 5 tuning jobs will go perfectly leaving 4 that require varying degrees of fault finding, diagnosis and troubleshooting ranging from simple things such as an empty fuel tank, oversights like the wrong spark plug after an FI conversion, to electrical gremlins on recently installed ECUs, and of course much worse is also possible.

With this in mind having a set process you can work through to methodically work through and find the source of a problem is a handy skill set to have. In this video, Andre runs us through some of what the team did and what the ultimate issue was that unfortunately caused them to miss out on qualifying for the event. While it was a disappointment for the team to fall at almost the last hurdle, the experience will have certainly helped grow the knowledge base the team shares making them stronger for their return next year.

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Comments
  • Alex Charles's profile image
    Rags can be trouble! The rag in the intake happened to me. I left one in the turbo when cleaning filter. We always start car before loading and it wouldn't rev. Scratching our heads with laptop plugged in it dawned on me what if! Removed the filter and there it was, my rag in our turbonetics compressor 🤣 I was shouting the beers that night. The boss wasn't impressed! Also timing a fj24 with a few beers under our belt the engine nipped up we were devastated until we realised a rag had wrapped around the exhaust cam 🤣
    - alxcar New Zealand
    2 years ago