How I met Ryan Kado and the rest of the Kado family:
The weeks leading up to Formula D Long Beach are always insane. April 2011 was no exception. Phone is ringing off the hook. We've got Papadakis racing, Jeff Jones, Dennis Mertzanis, Brad Hettinger, John Russakoff juggling for dyno time. All of them have new motor setups or new cars all together. Kenny Moen's team is trying to get his car through customs. Then my neighbor Ross Petty and his guys are finishing his LS7 S15 while trying to tune the Megan racing team, Pat Mordant and others. Name dropping aside can you imagine that many pro cars coming in and out of our little alley in one month? Insanity.
The week of Formula D comes around I get a call from some guy saying we're in trouble, Formula D this, 350z that, we're at AEM and we need help!!!!! Sure whatever come down and we'll see what we can do. Thinking they need a tune or something simple. Boy was I wrong.
The car wont start and it's spitting flames out the ITB's. So we sneak it in the back and thrown it on the lift while the Papadakis team try to get Aasbo's car tuned.
It's all bad the motor has low compression and sounds really really angry....not in a good way like it does now.
We pull one of the cam covers off and the cam gear has broken off the cam. So the motor has to come out. We get on the phone and scour the earth for anyone who is in possession of a VK56 long block. One was found at a salvage yard in Fontana. We sent Ryan's dad to retrieve it and we set out pulling everything apart. Well a picture is worth a thousand words:
Worst of all the brand new JWT cams seized destroying the cams and the journals on the heads.
The used "new" motor arrives and we end up pulling a 24 hour marathon session to get everything swapped over and back in to car to make it to Formula D. We run into some snags here and there but over all things go pretty smoothly.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eKUQre02Q8[/youtube]
To put you in the right frame of mind we've been up at least 24hours at this point. If you look at the background of the second picture or the video you can see the sky is a faint blue because the sun is coming up. It's 6am, the car has run for 20 minutes and it needs to be in Long Beach by 7AM. The drive to long Beach is about 30 minutes from my shop...no pressure. You may notice in the video at the 16 second mark the car bucks just slightly. A couple more pulls and the bucking gets worse. One more pull it's 6:27am and the used "new" motor seizes.....what......the.....F#@%????? I'm so sleep deprived at this point I can't process what happened. We all feel destroyed. The Kado's load the car onto the trailer and take the car to FD so they can at least display it.
To be continued.....
