Desperate Mom Needs Help w/ Son's '85 Regal GNX

Thank you. He’s down at the shop pulling the turbo out now. I’ll keep everyone posted.

Do not recall plumbing. Does car have inter cooler or not? I think 84 did not but 85 on did? Maybe just remove pipe from throttle body inlet? Let motor suck fresh air?

Stop pouring money into it and do these simple things;

Is it getting fuel?
Is it getting spark?
Does it have normal compression when cranked?

One of those three will be missing…

It’s no use Caddyman, time to sit back and enjoy the show…

I think desperatemon’s son is going to find a lot of internal damage in the engine. The engine was not designed to run on methanol and methanol needs an air/fuel ratio of 6.42:1. Since it wouldn’t go above 3000 rpm, I suspect that it was running a ratio for gasoline and not methanol. Running that lean, methanol would run very hot.

Methanol is highly corrosive to aluminum too.

There are 2 issues and hopefully the OP will post back with more info about determining if the injectors are actually pulsing.

The first issue was that the car ran smooth, had 190 PSI compression, etc but would fall flat at 3K RPMs.
The second is that the car will just not start even with a good spark and proper fuel pressure so that’s why the injector pulse thing was mentioned.

The complaint of falling flat at 3 grand is what led me to the possibility of a waste gate glitch. What if the vacuum situation were reversed with ported vacuum being applied instead of straight manifold vacuum or vice-versa and this was leading to a wide open waste gate instead of a closed one when the pedal was nailed?
Or if there’s a problem with the waste gate solenoid, solenoid wiring, or the ECM not communicating with the solenoid?

Just theorizin’ anyway.

Well, he was going to start pulling out the turbo when he decided to run through all of your suggestions again and lo and behold, he is no longer getting spark (was one of the first things they tested after replacing everything and they had been getting spark), so he’ll start there and work forward. But he asked me to thank everyone for their input. Baby steps…

Sincere thanks for the followup post.

let us know what he finds. We do care. Beaides, I’m still wondering about the engine flattening out at 3K.

“We do care.” I’ll say! What a wonderful forum this is. My son was able to get the Regal fired up for the first time, but then it quit, so he’s looking into the spark and checking all of the connections. Thank you all for the ideas and suggestions!