IF you’ve seen the most recent episode of Carnage, you’ll know that we spectacularly blew the motor in the Turbo Taxi at Calder Park. That pass the taxi was on a mission and ran its fastest ever time, an 11.01, however when Scotty let off the gas it went boom and oiled down the braking zone. The motor carked it and there was no brakes and no power steer at over 120mph. If you haven’t seen it, you have to!

Over the last couple of weeks the taxi has lived at Maxx Performance where the boys have yanked out the old motor to try and figure out exactly went wrong. Something has caused cylinder number four to melt and weaken to the point where it has detached from the rod which has then sent the rod smashing through the block.

That has created a two-inch diameter hole in either side of the block, which is where the oil came from. The sump was unharmed so we’ll be able to reuse that on the new engine but the rest of it is toast.

So what’s next? We could have gone to a built motor but that’s probably overkill for what we want to achieve and very expensive, so we picked up another wrecking yard LPG Barra motor but this time it’s a fairly low kilometre FG version. The old engine had around 370,000kms on it, this one is around the 130,000 mark so it’s basically brand new.

We’re going to toughen it up with a set of head studs and a brand new set of Plazmaman valve springs before we transfer the rest of the setup across onto it before we try continue our quest for tens on LPG.