Redemption! (We hope)

It seems that by some miraculous coincidence, an Autozone 30 minutes away has the actual water pump we need! We're speeding down the road now to get it while the rest of the team disassembles the motor again.

After the initial failure, most of the team had pretty much given up for the night, waiting until morning to find out if we could find a new water pump. But Brent, ever the optimist said "Hey, the water pump's bearing is trashed, but it still spins! Let's just put it on, bleed it really well and hope for the best. We've got nothing better to do aside from sleep." So Brent woke me (Rob) up and sold his idea, and the two of us put it all back together with new belts. That's when we found the real problem.

Ok, non-car people you might want to skip to the last paragraph

It turns out that a bolt had backed out of the alternator and that had taken the tension off of the belt driving the water pump, hence the overheating. The fact that the water pump bearing was actually trashed was either exacerbated by the loose alternator or was just made apparent by it. Excited that we had solved the problem, we bolted everything back up and fired the motor.

As the motor spun to life, we could hear the shredded water pump bearing making one heck of a racket, but it was spinning. Brent raise the alarm though when he saw little "droplets of coolant" flying out of the water pump. Closer inspection showed that the "droplets" were actually little shredded chunks of metal flying out of the housing . The water pump was well and truly trashed.

The bolt backing out on the alternator bracket may have actually saved us a much bigger blow-up. Had the water pump seized, it might have broken the old belt we had on there and that could have torn up the rest of the belts, destroyed the cooling fan and possibly punched out the radiator.

But luckily, none of that matters, as we now have the new part in the truck, and we're heading back to take the checkered flag with what is left of the original field of 136 cars!