By: StaubRacing
A cracked cylinder head, a garage door with bad timing, and the winterization checklist I never got to. Pre-season prep started early this year, whether I wanted it to or not.
Featured Post!Every racer has a list in their head. Sometimes it makes it to a sticky note, a notes app, a scrap of paper on the workbench or like me a whiteboard above the toolbox. But mostly it just lives up there, a running tab of what the bike needs, what got skipped, what you swore you’d handle before the cold and snow hits. Life has a way of putting itself between you and that list.
Later came. -20 degrees came with it.
I usually run Engine Ice, a propylene glycol racing coolant with a lower freeze point that runs cooler than water. It’s org approved, which matters when you’re teching in. But last season handed me an injury, and somewhere in the fog of recovery and just getting through it, the winterization checklist didn’t. The Engine Ice never happened. The distilled water stayed in.
You tell yourself you’ll get to it. You don’t get to it.
Family left in the early morning to go to work, return to college, and all the normal family life routines. Vehicles outside struggled to start, engines and batteries complaining, and I guess so did the garage door. Because in the cold, nothing works correctly. Seems like the door closed and probably hit some ice, or just plain old wanted to be a jerk and opened right back up. No one noticed until it was too late.
When I returned home from work, I immediately noticed how cold it was in the garage. “Ah Shit!!” My gut tightened and I already had a bad feeling. I went to the bikes and tried to squeeze a coolant line on the Supermoto, hard as a rock.
I got the heat going in the garage, just a fancy sunflower heater, and tried to begin the defrost. Hoping maybe, just maybe, I will get lucky. Once the bikes were defrosted, I started assessing the damage. I immediately noticed the oil sight glass on the KX450 was full. I knew I had it full but not completely. I removed the radiator cap and peered inside only to find a solid piece of ice. Damn.
Once everything melted, the ice was gone but so was the water level in the radiator. I began adding some antifreeze, just in case there was no damage. As I was adding it, coolant started coming out of the oil overflow from the crankcase. I won’t bore you with the disassembly, but the verdict was a cracked cylinder head on the cam chain side.
The KX450 has a cracked cylinder head.
Let that one sit for a second.
Not a leaking radiator. Not a damaged water pump seal. A cracked. Cylinder. Head. Time to open eBay and hope some guy in Ohio parted out his KX last fall.
The second bike, 2009 ZX6R, is still being assessed. This is racing language for I’m not ready to know yet.
So here we are. Round 1 approaching, the shop smells like regret, oil and frustration, and I’m elbow-deep in a teardown that started with an injury, a distracted off-season, and a garage door that had other plans.
That’s not an excuse. It’s just how it goes sometimes. You can prepare for your own mistakes. You cannot always prepare for the things that happen while you’re not watching. But you can close the gap. Drain the coolant. Run the right fluid. Finish the list even when the season beats you up.
A handful of minutes. That’s what Engine Ice and a proper drain would have cost me. Just drain it you idiot and add automotive antifreeze is what I want to scream at myself.
The KX gets a new head. The checklist gets a revision. And somewhere in the back of the shop, under a tarp, the second bike is waiting for its verdict.
More to come when the damage report is complete.