I'm gonna change my Audi for a Nissan Sabre.... :)

[Gerard <gerard@poboxes.com>]

Hi guys!

We had a "topspeed day" at the local track today. It has the longest
straight in South Africa. I think it must be 2km or perhaps 1.5km
long. Only one Audi Turbo (200T) there... mine! :) Not on the track
though. Didn't want to put it on the track, I'd look like an idiot.
Anyway, top speed clocked was 216 km/h by some old guy in a BMW M3.
Top speed on a bike was 255km/h on a Ninja. The BMW was not the
fastest though. There was this one guy mulling around all day looking
at everything. He has a Ford XR8 called The Beast. Eventually he took
it onto the track. This thing flew. Visually going at a speed almost
the same as the bikes. But the speed trap couldn't get a reading. He
stopped after one attempt though. But he wasn't the fastest...by far.
There was a nicely done-up Nissan Sabre 200 with a turbo in it. This
thing, visually, was flying faster than the bikes. He made for 4 or 5
runs through the day. None of them got a reading. The guy has the
stock speedo in and he said he was running 240km/h before halfway
down the straight, after a long bend that runs onto the straight.

Lovely stuff. :) Also, the M3 got beat by a Nissan 1400 turbo 1/2-ton
pickup. :) Actually, almost everything got beat by this little Nissan,
even the 3 or 4 1970's models Mazda Capellas and Datsun cars with
the rotary conversions. :) The Nissan pickup hit 210 km/h on the
topspeed run.

So...urh...this might seem like a waste of time here, so perhaps I
should throw in some questions for the guys on the list. Firstly, I
sent a posting this morning, but it doesn't seem to have come through.
On Saturday my car (1990 200T) indicated a sudden loss in oil pressure
on the pressure gauge. This happened after I heard a small "thunk".
However, I was going around a turning circle and the they have a lot
of tiny potholes so that might have been the "thunk". The low pressure
reading only shows at idle though. I pulled the car off the road and
looked at the oil level. It is perfect. The leak I had fixed last
week is leaking again, but slow and not fast enough to warrant a
massive oil pressure loss. The sump gasket seems to be leaking and
not the turbo oil feed line. As for the pressure reading, the manual
says stop the car if the pressure drops to below 1.8 bar. At idle I
used to run 1.8 to 2.0 bar oil pressure. Now I'm reading 1.0 bar and
this evening I managed to sink as low as 0.8 bar on idle. At speed the
reading goes to 3.0 bar and not the normal 4.0 or above. I need some
advise on where to look to determine where the fault is occuring. To
me it seems as if I might now have a faulty oil pump.

Secondly, my car has smoked for quite some time. If I'm moving and
floor the pedal, pushing it beyond the kickdown on the slushbox and
the machine kicks down a gear there is a huge bang of smoke out the
back. I was coming back from the track this afternoon (struggling, I
might add, to keep ahead of a Toyota Corrola 1.8i standard, for some
reason it is a hard push away from 170km/h (but I didn't push the
pedal beyond the kick down at all)) and the guy riding behind me tells
me the pipe smokes when I back of the throttle. It is a greyish
plume. Could this be oil going through the turbo or its seals or
could I just put this down to needing new plugs or perhaps this is
just petrol smoke? Any ideas how to diagnose?

Thirdly, Audi decreased the motor compression on these MC turbo cars
by fitting a metal slab between the engine block and head. The S4 runs
higher pressures as I think it does not have this separator. Has anyone
thought of removing this slab and running higher compression as in the
S4?

Thanks guys. :)

G.
-- 
"a thousand miles from here, there is another person smiling"
name   : gerard van vught
tel    : +27-57-912 2658 (w) / 082 923 9609 (cell)
url    : http://www.acenet.co.za/homepages/gerard/
e-mail : gerard@poboxes.com  / han.solo@galaxycorp.com
         gerard@acenet.co.za / van_vught@frg.issi.co.za