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Yo,
I know most of you are sharper than I am, but with my car essentially in storage and unused (un-raced) for months, I forgot about having nothing but water and Water Wetter in the coolant system. I nearly forgot to change the coolant back to a glycol solution, so this is just a friendly reminder for those of you in colder climes to do the same. What a bummer it would be to ruin an engine by simply letting it freeze!
Sasha
Sasha - thanks for the reminder. That happened to me last year - went out on the warmup lap, and steam was pouring out from under the hood from the expansion tank. Pulled in - and yep, the radiator was frozen. Didn’t hurt the motor, but could have.
Ed
a few years back, in a a prior e30 of mine, I had a coolant leak. My solution until i could get a new radiator was to just top if off every so ofetn with water.
The car got parked when cold weather came, and I had forgotten about the mix (or lack thereof) in the car.
I came out one morning after a good cold freeze to find the upper coolant hoses literally off of their flanges with ice sticking out. The car was parked outdoors and for some reason was immobile (Ican;t recall why). Sooooooooo, I got a couple of space heaters and put them under the engine bay and ran them about 24 hours straight. At that point, I was able to get it towed to my dad’s heated garage.
To my surprise, I had zero damage to the engine or head and not even a popped freeze plug.
Dodged a bullet there. :woohoo:
It is easy to forget that task after the end of track season. So Sasha’s post was a good reminder.
I switched out the water/wetter mix right after the PBOC event at Barber in November, so I’m set for freezing weather…