This episode of Carnage sees us bringing back the car that started all this YouTube madness five years ago: Turbo Taxi!
While a fan-favourite from the beginning, this FG Falcon has been missing from your screens for quite some time now. You see, she’s got a broken heart, having spent quite some time limping in and out of the workshop with suspected ring damage on the LPG Barra.
Regular viewers will know this definitely isn’t the first stock-bottom-end Barra this car has killed, and when this one let go, we finally decided to throw in the towel as far as using an SBE mill is concerned. While it’s totally possible to run 10s on a stocko Barra with E85, we’re still stubbornly using barbecue fuel, and it’s bitten us on more than one occasion.
With that in mind, a new Barra is currently being machined at Dandy Engines, which will be copping a set of aftermarket H-beam rods and forged JE pistons. That should help futureproof the engine against the trials of LPG, and hopefully see the car dip into the 10s – finally!
While we’re waiting for the new donk, this episode sees Scotty pulling the old broken engine out of the car in order to tear it down to see what went wrong.
Once the engine was down to a short-block, it didn’t take Scotty long to find the culprit. Even though there weren’t any obvious issues with the pistons still in place, as soon as he dropped out rod and piston #6, it painted a pretty nasty picture. All the rings – and in particular the ring lands – had been smashed to all hell.
As extreme as it looks, when you consider this was an unknown-condition SBE Barra that we pumped 620rwhp through on LPG, it’s fairly impressive.
Next up, we’ll be down at Dandy Engines to watch the machine work on the new-and-improved Barra for the Taxi, so make sure you tune in next week to see that as we get ready to finally run 10s in this pile!
Having spent his teenage years racing and wrenching on cars, Kian studied journalism at university only a few years ago before launching his career as a fresh-faced intern at Street Machine in 2018.