Porsche 944 sp1 owners guide

The problem looks to have been air in the coolant system. I double checked all the wiring today from the relay box to the wires and everything checked out. Still overheated. The fans would come on at around 3/4 on the temp and would lower it briefly before it started rising again towards red.

Next, I tried bleeding the coolant system and there must have been a minute and a half of steam come out. I then turned it off and put in 3/4 of a gallon of distilled and then repeated this 3 or 4 times until just water was coming out. The car now runs in the garage perfectly at 1/4 on the temp guage.

So, overall, the car took another 1.5 gallons of water which means there was a massive air bubble in it. I bought more 15W50 to change the oil tomorrow and put a new filter on it, figure the engine has had enough heat in it now to warrant a change. I made a new addition to what I keep handy at the track and it's a 5 gallon tank of distilled water.

John Engle was killed at Mid Ohio in his BMW M3 when it spun on oil into another stationery car that had spun two laps earlier. He hit the other car in the rear with his driver side door at high speed, some say 100mph. The cage apparently failed and it took an hour to cut him out. The other car driver has bruising and a torn muscle. It makes me revisit the safety side yet again. I'm going to improve my cage over the winter as a result.

I put the belts on and they are tensioned and working well. The car overheated after 20 minutes of running in the garage and pushed out .5 gallons of water through the overflow. I waited for it to cool down.

I added distilled water to top up the coolant tank. The fans didn't come on so it's something to do with the cooling relays or fans. I tried my relay (the big one) in another car and its fans all worked fine. I then went back to my car and checked the fuses for the fans, #10 and #15. Both were blown. This must have happened when the wires were pulled in to the alternator and shorted out so I replaced them with another pair of 25A fuses. I turned the car on and same thing. No fans, car heats up.

Next is to check the fans actually work and the wiring and thermistor. More later.

The alternator belt and steering belts came yesterday from Paragon so I'll try put them on now and hopefully thats the car back to normal. I saw some wire tubing in Radio Shack yesterday that was good to 275F with a 3/4 inch diameter so that looks a good candidate to cover the repaired harness in the car. 275F should be good enough for the temps on that side, especially with the air flow coming in.

Fixed the car tonight then. The front wiring harness has more than just the fan and lights etc. The coil wire is there also and this was cut along with 6 other wires total. No coil wire, no spark, won't start. I spliced them all back together with the appropriate wire gauge and it starts right up. I zip tied the harness to the unibody so this won't happen again, I'm suspecting the harness wasn't zip tied out of the way before although there is an old tie on the unibody but it's broken so it could be broken because of old age or other reasons and it looks like this let the harness move in to the path of the alternator blades and that pulled it in to the belt and zappo. Hard to know whether the belt pulled the harness or vice versa though so it doesn't matter now one way or the other.

I just need to buy the alternator belt, fit it and it looks better than before. I wrapped the harness in electrical tape but I'm looking for something better, i.e. waterproof and more weather/wear/heat resistant to put over it.

Next track day is BIR with Donnybrooke again Sept 15th and then with PCA for 3 days at Sept 28th.