[Blown353]

Yikes! That's totally unacceptable on a $2000 "Goodwrench 350" crate engine, let alone the $20K Ramjet ZL1.

Must have been a Friday or Monday motor, as the saying goes. I'd love to know exactly how that got out the door. It's quite obvious someone became distracted and skipped a rather important step; my hunch is it happened around lunch time, break time, shift change, etc. I've had similar incidents happen with my crew at work before on several occasions.

Glad to hear you caught it before anything really major happened, but personally I would be tearing the entire motor apart right now; if they forgot to torque the rods and mains, who knows what else they may have got wrong?

GM usually doesn't like people tearing into their crate engines for warranty reasons (they will usually tell you it's OK to open it up to a certain point but stop there until an authorized party can look at it), but as you stated the time stipulation of the warranty is already up. My guess however is that being their "flagship" crate engine they would probably honor it anyways even though the 12 month period is up simply to avoid bad press. However, I know there's a time concern here as the car is supposed to leave for Power Tour in a few days, so if you want the car to leave on time I don't see any real option other than fixing it yourself.

FWIW, all of the dozens of over the counter crate engines I have seen from GM (ZZ4, ZZ430, the spec circle trackers, ZZ502, etc) did NOT appear to be run-in nor did they specify they were in the documentation.