Last time you all saw our 1JZ-swapped Volvo 240 on your screens, it well and truly exceeded our expectations by running two nine-second passes at Heathcote Park Raceway.

While the new PB of 9.89 was bloody awesome, more runs afterwards to try and better that number actually went the wrong way, with the car getting progressively slower. We also found it was struggling to fire up and seemed a bit hurt.

So in this episode, Scotty’s back in the workshop to find out what went wrong, with the hope that it’s an easy fix and we can squeeze a bit more life out of that stock-bottom-end 1JZ.

Because the Trolvo runs a Haltech Elite ECU, we have the benefit of full datalogging. A scan through those logs revealed that during the runs at the Heathcote test day, the alternator had given up, barely showing 10 volts of charge on some of the runs. With the ECU, fuel pumps, thermo fans, transbrake and a few other gubbins, the Trolvo uses a fair bit of voltage, so having a dud alternator is not a good time.

The logs also showed Scotty was spinning the 1JZ to over 8000rpm, which is a known killer of knock-off 1JZ alternators like the one we had on the car. The solution to that is a genuine (and expensive) Denso unit, which we sourced from Goleby’s Parts with an oversize pulley to reduce speed and load on the charging unit during high rpm.

Being a genuine part, it was a bolt-in affair, and after some messing around with jump-starting the Trolvo, it fired up and indicated a much healthier 13.8 volts on our Haltech iC-7 dash.

While the charging issues are now sorted, we suspect that’s not all that’s going wrong with the little 1JZ. In the next episode, Scotty performs both leak-down and compression tests on the engine, as well as some surgery on the oil filter – so make sure you look out for that episode on Friday, because things get interesting!