Hmm...I thought that ESC looked familiar. It's Castle. Probably a Sidewinder. Looking at the specs on
AXIAL's page for that ESC, the motor limit is 19T. So 45T is way off. Add a 3S battery, and I'm not too surprised the ESC went *poof*. Honestly tho, I don't know if 19T is the max or min limit. Lessee....lower T = higher KV = higher RPM/volt. Higher T = lower KV = lower RPM/volt. So a 45T motor would be a crawler motor. And the AE2 is used in the SCX10 etc....so I would
think it would have been ok, but maybe the design of the motor, plus the 30* advanced timing, was just too much for the AE2. Castle designs to pretty close margins, IMO, and I think the 45T is just too far outside the ESC's 108Amps Peak, or the motor caused some kind of back-voltage or ripple that killed the ESC. Not knowing the motor's specs, I'm guessing.
I doubt you did anything to the motor if it had been running ok,
then you noticed the end bell was loose. You should have heard a scraping sound as the rotor started chewing into the windings on the inside of the can. Unless you didn't recognize that sound. In which case, you mighta killed it. If you can take it out of the car and spin the rotor with your fingers and it feels free and smooth (except for the magnet drag of course), then it's probably ok. But putting an un-known motor into a system is really not wise, unless you really know what you're doing.
Looks like you're gonna be in the market for a new motor/ESC combo. Stick with the stock Axial replacement for now.