Heart-stopping moment

[carl_w]

Came up the A414 today and whilst changing gears the accelerator pedal sank all the way to the floor and the revs went round to ~7000 rpm and stayed there. I switched off and coasted to the side of the road.

The AA man turned up and found that the rear-most screw holding the nearside airbox onto the manifold had come undone, and was sticking out about 1/2". The end of the throttle crosslink bar thingy had got stuck behind it!

So my questions are two:
1) What does the bolt do, apart from hold the airbox onto the manifold? The bolt in question had a 10mm head, but all the others are allen bolts.

2) Would I have damaged the engine with it sitting at 7000 rpm unloaded for a while? Is there a limiter at all? It seemed an eternity, but I guess it was no more than 5 seconds.

Car was a bit of a pig to start afterwards (guess there was a lot of fuel around from shutting down the engine with the throttles wide open) but seems OK now.

[neilus]

carl_w said:

1) What does the bolt do, apart from hold the airbox onto the manifold? The bolt in question had a 10mm head, but all the others are allen bolts.

In answer to your first question, it holds the airbox in place. The rear of the airbox is only held on with one bolt, so it would rattle around a bit if it wasn't bolted in.

Also, it should be held in with an allen bolt.

Neil.

[Boosted LS1]

I had a shut down issues like this with a 4.5 rv8 doing some testing on a bypass. The ignition switch wouldn't kill it immediatly but it was ok after it had cooled down a bit. All was normal after that but a very scarey moment You will probably be fine.

Boosted.

[carl_w]

Shutdown was immediate as soon as I'd composed myself enough to hit the kill switch.

Of course, I had forgotten about the lack of PAS, brake servo-assistance and indicators but all was OK in the end.