As your car accumulates mileage, maintenance is essential to ensuring your engine doesn’t quit. Gaskets dry out, leaks and holes appear and belts stretch. Making sure your plugs and hoses are in top working order is also imperative. Poor maintenance can also lead to serious cam problems.
As they say, timing is everything. Truer words were never spoken when applied to ultimate cam performance. Not only is maintaining timing crucial to the entire cam function for ensuring proper valve lift, but it is also critical to maintenance for torque and compression.
As engines accumulate mileage, belts and timing-chains stretch and slack. Because your timing belt synchronizes rotation of the crankshaft and the camshaft(s), neglecting it will lead to mis-queues on cam timing and diminished compression. This mistiming is something you will easily notice when you are behind the wheel, namely because of the subsequent doggy torque.
For belt driven cams, maintaining and checking your belts is twice as important for obvious reason. If your timing belt snaps, cams seize and the engine quits, which could lead to extensive engine damage. Taking simple preventative measures are much less costly than having to replace an entire cylinder head.