Celica Forums General Discussion General 2nd gear doing 75mph =...

I'm not after sympathy; this is for anyones information... Here is what occurs when a Celica is dropped into 2nd gear while cruising at 75mph.

So back in August i got my 2000 VVTL-i 6spd Celica... absolutely stoked!!!
Cruised to the coast the weekend after i purchased it, but unfortunately on the way home I miss-shifted due to lack of familiarity with the shift gate and picked 2nd gear coming from 6th instead of finding 4th.
Letting the clutch out most of the way for the split second before i realised what Id done was enough to see the engine spin quickly to Im guessing somewhere between 9,000 - 10,000 rpm, but the engine braking brought the car down to 60mph very quickly. Luckily it didn't compression lock and send us skidding into another car or a barrier.

Instantly there was something wrong with the clutch & the engine didn't seem the best either. I finished the drive home & got it towed to the mechanic on monday. The entire clutch assembly needed replacing & flywheel machined. But the engine was a little bit rough still, and upon further inspection 6 of my outlet valves were bent as they had clipped the pistons due to the excessive rpm. So the head was sent off to have my valves replaced and re-seated.
All this resulting in an aus$3000+ bill and a month without the Celica.

The engine is a bit noisier after all this, and i'm not sure if all the power is still there. So my next service will include a thorough check-over and dyno to ensure everything is back to norm.

An interesting miss-hap that occurred during the rebuild process, was that the engine reconditioner put the rocker-arm/plate (?) on back-to-front (outlet over inlet & inlet over outlet). This resulted in no 'Lift'. The cause was that there are tiny oil holes over the outlet side, so the computer would pick up the error and terminate the 'Lift' process.

Toyota in my area know of one other occurrence like mine (Celica's aren't common in OZ) and said i got off lucky compared. Has anyone ever seen or heard of a similar thing happening???

like i said, this is just for peoples info... hope ya learnt something

Yeah the rocker arm above the valve was placed incorrectly, so it doesn't engage lift. Sucks to hear that mate!

wow, that sucks... good luck for the future. would it have been cheaper to just replace the engine?

let my good friend, at the time take the celica out with me as wingman. He got a taste of lift in 1st, 2nd and 3rd, as he was about to peg the limiter in 3rd, he went to 4th, nope i mean second. Nothing happened then, later on i was alone with my girlfriend, we went to go eat, then when we were leaving, my clutch seemed to have a vibration, and could feel it through the pedal and steering wheel. I was like wtf?! So i got pissed and reved the shit out of it, and slipped on the clutch to see if it would help. Then all hell broke loose, it started knocking and banging hard core. After a tow truck ride and a case of beer i made it to the next day, to be asked by the service manager of toyota how i managed to rev the motor to 13,700 rpm. After 32 days with no celica, i got a brand new engine, built and shipped in a crate, new head, valves, a tranny update so it wont happen again, a new flywheel and bought myself a trd clutch. Which they installed for free at the time. thats my story

so you go from 6th straight to 4th in my opinion that is a bad idea and is a easy way to misshift especially on a Celi, next time I recomend going through all the gears instead of skipping around to prevent a disaster like this. Sorry to hear about this though hope enverything gets fixed and back to normal.

lotsa people misshift the 2000 models. when you get your car back you'll most likely have the 2002 shift gates

i've miss shifted like that before, but my engine survived luckily

same here i got a whole new bottom end for free got 2 love that warrenty . but i bought mine certified but it was messed up when i bought it so after the 9th time of my car being in the shop they fixed it and then they put the wrong head gasket in it so they had to fix that 2 allllll for freeee

how much would it cost to get the 2002 shift gates?

geese mis-shift

i have a 2000 i go from 6th to 3rd really good. It impresses my friends when i am cruising at 70 miles and hour and drop to 3rd and right into lift to fly by people. But the first month or two i had my celi i would try to down shift thinking i went 2 or 3 gears down and only went 1 i would get so pissed try and downshift to 3rd and get 5th sucks ass. your like NO POWER!!!

That's really shitty man, I'm surprised you were able to mishift from sixth into second because a lot of cars have a safety feature where you can not jump so many gears, I think I've had similar incidents where I am approaching a light and I just end up coasting to the light down a hill and I hold the clutch in and make the jump from sixth or fifth and into second and then I release when the speed and rpm's match.. what causes the block is doing it too quickly so it automatically stops the stick from going into gear and it acts like some thing is in the way and to do a quick fix one must shift into fourth or even third and then you are permitted to go into second.

Again though shitty stuff, must be a real pain to have to pay it all out to get it back to stock when you could have spent the money on mods.

see i rev-matched for 4th so the revs were 4-5 maybe even near 6 grand, allowing it to slip into second with ease.

yeah the $$'s factor is a real bitch... i didn't even have the money to upgrade the clutch, flywheel, valve springs or anything internal while it was apart but such is life

$3000 australian is maybe $2000 US... so nope.
plus aus$700 was for the new clutch

didn't give it to toyota, and the only work that was done was the new clutch & head reconditioning.

are the 2002 shift gates better? what's the difference?

i've done some bad things to my tranny, only one being potentially harmful. when i first got the car i had never driven a manual. while driving for the first few days it took me a while to get used to the shift gates. i would drive and when i'd shift to 3rd i'd get no power, then have equal or more power in 4th. well, you guessed it, i had been shifting to 5th. that didn't do any damage, but what i did today may have. i was speeding up in second and decided to skip 3rd to cruise at 4th on the street (30mph limit). well, i accidentally went to far and grazed reverse. i don't think it had any time to do any damage, and i had the clutch in the whole time and hadn't begun rev matching. as split second after i went too far i threw it back into neutral. i haven't noticed a problem yet.

That Sucks.

I'm about to take my car into get the transmission fixed and the wider shift gates.


Its extreamly hard to put it into second gear after hitting lift in first.