A while back, YouTuber Joe Achilles did something that every car enthusiast fears—a money shift. What is a money shift, you might ask? It’s when you’re at the top of a gear, nearing redline, and, instead of upshifting, accidentally downshifting a gear. In Achilles’s sake, he was at the top of forth gear in his BMW M2 Competition on track and went to upshift into fifth to keep accelerating down the straightaway. However, instead he accidentally shifted into third. As you can imagine, that over-revved the engine, which made some crunchy noises.
When he first made the video, explaining what happened, he wasn’t sure of the damage that was done to the engine. All he knew was that it didn’t run anymore. So he had it towed to Swift Performance to have it looked at, to determine the damage and how much it was going to cost. However, it was going to take a couple of weeks before Swift Performance could check the car out, so Achilles had to wait.
In this new video, you get to see Achilles head back to Swift performance in hopes of figuring out exactly what was broken, how it could be fixed, and how much it will cost. Whenever a car gets money-shifted, the timing can go out of whack, causing the pistons and valves to make contact, thus kissing the engine goodbye. So that’s where Swift performance started their investigation.
Plugging the car in showed error faults for timing, so they were pretty confident something was wrong. However, it wasn’t immediately clear just how wrong things were. While checking for issues, they pressure-tested each cylinder, to make sure they were all holding pressure. As it turned out, cylinder three wasn’t holding any pressure at all, while the other five were perfect. So clearly something went horribly wrong with cylinder three.
Exactly what went wrong and how much it will cost is yet to be determined. While the valves seemed OK under first inspection, there could still be damage there as well. It could end up being expensive or extremely expensive. However, Achilles put a lot of money, time, and heart into his M2 Comp, so it’s likely worth fixing. Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks they’re a proper hot shoe: Achilles is a pretty good driver and even he money-shifted his car. It can happen, and when it does, it can be a very expensive fix. Let’s hope Achilles’s M2 is back on the road soon enough.
