By the time you read this Art “Arturbo” Ortiz and his crew chief Chris Stein should be on their way to sunny California for the Nitto World Finals in Pomona. After blowing his motor in Vegas Art has been working hard to get the car back in shape to race.
“I hurt the engine in Vegas.” Ortiz said. “After a strong showing in Denver we had hoped for another good showing in Vegas but just the opposite happened.”
After having clutch engagement problems Ortiz just barely made it to the final round of qualifying. He then proceeded to get the win in the first round of eliminations and move on.
“In the second round I was leading the race until I decided to put it into second gear instead of fourth allowing my opponent to pass me.” Ortiz said. “So basically I over-revved the engine.”
This would end the weekend for Ortiz leaving him with a long drive home back to Texas to tear down the motor and assess the damage.
“When we got home we did a leak down test on the engine and it only had two percent leak down.” Ortiz said.” I was really excited to see this so I fire up the engine and it is knocking like crazy. I pull the oil pan and we have bearing shaving which was a huge let down since the motor was pretty much new.”
At this point Ortiz knew it was time for a rebuild so he called up his engine builder Larry at Endyn.
“Larry has always been a huge help in my program and has always offered to help me and he really helped me out this time.” Ortiz said. “If it wasn’t for Larry at Endyn I would not be going to Pomona.”
Since Ortiz was going to be rebuilding he figured he should step his game up and revamp his turbo set-up with some bigger and better parts, but getting things together in such a short period of time had proved to be quite a task.
“I received the new engine from Endyn on Monday Oct. 9th and it was in by the 11th.” Ortiz said. “I was out of money but I wanted to upgrade my setup to the GT42R and the Full-Race divided manifold that has the twin 44mm Tial wastegates. I didn’t have any money to buy them so my good friend Philip Whight let me use his Full-Race manifold and extra wastegate and even offered to let me use his GT42R but ATP Turbo went out of their way to help me out and gave me a really good price on it.”
Now that the turbo and manifold were out of the way it was time to complete the set-up to work around what he already had.
“We needed new intercooler piping and downpipe so my crew chief Chris Stein cut the pieces while Mike Morris of T1 did the welding.” Ortiz explained. “Mike is Tony Palo’s crew chief and is always going out of his way for us.”
Everything was going smoothly for Ortiz and his crew until this week came around.
“After doing the finishing touches on the car we decided to put the car on the dyno on Monday Oct 16.” Ortiz said. “This is where the trouble started as injector #4 was not firing.” Although Ortiz is always busy working on his car and his business he also has other priorities.
“Keep in mind I am at my full time job at AT&T while Tony and Chris do the tuning. It’s late and I have Chris go home. Later that night I head to the shop after work and check continuity between the computer and the injector and everything seemed fine. I fired it up and it worked. I still don’t know what happened. Tony calibrates the idle and gets it running smooth so we make plans to put it on the dyno again on Thursday Oct. 17th.
As the crew at T1/Arturbo was getting the car ready for the dyno Tony Palo noticed that the car would not go into 4th gear.
“This is the same tranny I had in Las Vegas,” Ortiz said, “and I never checked the condition of the tranny.” Fearing the worst Ortiz starts making some calls to see if anyone had any transmissions but it was to no avail.
“I pulled the tranny and cracked it open.” Ortiz said. “It was nothing major and luckily I had some spare parts at the shop so I stayed until about 4 am and got the tranny back in.”
At this point on Wednesday night Ortiz is just waiting to get the car onto the dyno and tuned.
“When we get it all done hopefully it works and we’ll get some good numbers on the dyno.” Chris Stein said. “I expect the car to run good and all the hard work to pay off. Hopefully we’ll get the nine second pass we’ve been working for.”
Although it has been a lot of work and stress, Ortiz is just happy that it all came together like it did.
“This is what makes racing so much fun.” Ortiz said. “Ain’t nothing gonna take my pride. Can’t nobody hold me down. Oh no! I got to keep on moving…”
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