| Hi Tony, Thanks for sending the pics over – it is pretty clear where the damage is. However, I am in disagreement that the plugs are the source of the problem. Dee’s car is running PFR6B-11B plugs and his engine also has shaved plug bosses. His car makes 666RWHP and 580RWTQ. His car also makes about what yours does when his car is running pumpfuel and his plugs have never had an issue. The Peacemaker was a car I built when I was at Z1 many years ago and it put down 811RWHP at 687RWTQ and also uses the 6B-11B plugs. The car was running at 35psi of boost pressure with C16. That car was run at the drag strip on racefuel in Georgia and never had an issue with the plugs. It also has shaved plug bosses. Russell’s widebody convertible with ~300HP shot of nitrous making 1053RWHP uses the NGK 6F-11 plugs – same heat range with extended tip and with shaved plug bosses in the heads and it never burned up the spark plugs. I have a long list of vehicles producing at least as much power as yours, many others also dragging them at the strip, who have shaved plug bosses and are running the very same plugs. The problem with your car is that the engine ran lean at some point in time. The issue your car had isn’t because of the plugs themselves – they were just one of the parts that were damaged because the engine ran lean at some point for unknown reasons. The exhaust valves were burned/broken for the same reason. A lean fuel mixture is significantly hotter and can produce temperatures high enough to vaporize the metal of the electrode. It wouldn’t matter if you used plugs that were 10 times cooler than the 6B’s, the electrode itself is not the physical attribute of a plug that denotes its heat range – the heat range specifies the depth of the ceramic insulator around the center electrode, which controls how quickly the center electrode dissipates heat into the head. Too hot of a spark plug will cause preignition and if this were the case, the damage experienced by the engine would have been in the rod bearings. The fact that one of the exhaust valves clearly show where it burned up is the #2 indicator it ran lean – the lean mixture was so hot that it was able to melt inconel, which requires several hundred degrees more to reach that point than what it takes to melt plug electrodes. We need to find out why the car ran lean as this is the source of the issue. It is highly likely that if you put the iridium plugs into your car and drive it down the track once it is back together, you will run lean again and something else will break. I really wish you would have installed the wideband into your car before taking it down the strip. In one of my previous emails prior to the tune I strongly recommended you to put that into the car so that you would have the feedback necessary to prevent something like this from occurring. Although we can’t turn back time and re-do this over again, it is imperative that you install the wideband into the car once it is back together so we can figure out why it ran lean. If you would have sent the heads to me I would have taken care of them for you this week. I’ve kept my schedule open to help out and I have everything here to address that issue. Hopefully Kyle will be able to get them addressed quickly for you. Let me know what I can do for you – I will be here until Tuesday afternoon and have an open schedule. -Ash
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