Model Year -- 2014
Mileage -- 21k km
Daily Driven -- yes, usually 5 - 6 days a week, but the normal daily work commute is only a mere ~15km one way
Race -- yes, the car has been irregularly autox-ed and tracked on numerous occassions -- probably 30+ times combined
Long road trips -- a few 400-ish km trips, at least 2 of which involved a lot of highway hill climbing. Another 1000km+ round trip from the city into the Canadian Rockies.
mods -- camber bolts, AWR 70 durometer engine mount, Dynotronics ECU tune
Issues:
Not sure whether I should consider this to be a major or minor issue. But recently after coming back from a track day, I was cruising at a leisurely pace on the highway when the CEL came up. An OBD2 scan returned a P0300 code, which was engine misfire. The car still seemed to drive no different than usual, but during idle, the revs did feel a bit lumpy. I cleared the code and kept driving the car like I normally do for another 2 days, and the CEL never came back. It was within 1000 km of my regular oil change anyway, so I brought the car back to my usual shop, and had them look into any potential issues in addition to the oil change.
My well-trusted mechanic friend came back with the following report:
- 1 single misfire in cylinder #1
- Compression and leak down test returned a clean bill of health -- 180 compression across all cylinders, and leakdown was minimal (He told me the percentage but I forgot)
- Replaced the factory FoMoCo plugs with some NGK 5464 iridium plugs. I wouldn't say the FoMoCo plugs look particularly good or bad. With such low mileage on the plugs, the porcelain still looks white; the gap size look consistent and reasonable. But the tip and electrode seem to have a thin coat of deposits on them, and I am not sure if that's the norm for this car or not.
My mechanic friend has mentioned to me that he generally doesn't like FoMoCo branded plugs too much, and he has had much better experience with Denso or NGK plugs instead. Since replacing the spark plugs, the engine has become smoother, but I am not entirely certain whether that is really due to the spark plugs, or was it because of a fresh oil change. Granted, the engine wasn't coarse prior to the service either, but I definitely noticed the extra smoothness.
For the time being, I will continue to monitor how the engine is doing. Without any indicative hints of why the misfire happened, I can only chalk it up to the general abuse I have subjected the engine to. I use high octane good fuel with the car (usually Chevron Ultra 94 or Shell V-Power whatever, but always some sort of Top Tier fuel brand); I service the car on a regular basis. Hopefully, it was really a matter of the factory FoMoCo plugs not being able to keep up with the abuse, and have just started to give up.