Skoda Rally Blog

In response to several requests made at Rally Day, we are offering £20 areas on the car – a number of people showed an interest in sponsoring us personally, so for £20 you will get a 300mmx50mm area on the car for your message, which can be anything you like (within reason).  So if you have something to put on the car, whether it’s your name, a message for someone you know or something else, you can support us and do that at the same time.  If you have any questions, then please use the contact form

… rent it!

We’re pleased to announce another new sponsor, Don’t Buy it, Rent it, who specialise in low-price car lease deals – have a look at their website for more details.  Value for money is something we both appreciate!

Today was Rallyday, a rally-themed car show, which is annually held at Castle Combe circuit, near Bath.  Last year’s trip did not go well, leading to a blown head gasket, a dodgy drive home and a generally displeased owner.  So, when I set out at 6:30am this morning to get there, I was somewhat nervous; the car going wrong anywhere would be bad, but particularly on an important day, with a chance to get the car seen by lots of people, plus to meet up with a few rallying friends without the pressure of competing which often makes having a laugh difficult.

The car started up OK, and I got going to find that the heater motor wouldn’t switch on, so opened the windows and froze for a while – the engine warmed up pretty quickly and became fairly drivable then as well.  The mapping changes I’d made on Friday left the engine running crisply in the typical cruising speeds (about 4000 rpm in top equates to 60mph or so), and everything felt good – no unusual noises, dodgy readings or anything.  It even ticked over when I got to the inevitable queue at the track access road!

Got parked up and said hello to everyone from BDCC, and then went to get signed up for the track session – the briefing was much the same as ever (although from a guy who was nicer than usual), and then I was ready for noise test.  I ended up in the queue behind Matt Pyle’s legacy (which I navigated in on RBMR last year), and it was incredibly noisy – I didn’t think it would pass, although as Matt didn’t have his form filled out they wouldn’t noise test him.  I didn’t either, but they let me fill mine in (thanks guys) with their pen, and I passed (96dB).  Matt’s later test would be 110dB.  Which is 10dB over the limit, so he ended up having an extension silencer added, as did many cars.

It was time for the first session, and the weather was beautiful.  Got the car started and to the track, and I was first in the queue.  And went to pull onto the track, and…. nothing.  The rev limit light flashed quite a few times, which is usually a sign of the crank sensor problem and the ECU resetting.  Misery – the car would barely pull 20mph, and I limped round the track and exited having not even made a full lap.  Back to the place to park up and got the laptop on it, and saw over 1000 sync errors (each one will make the car backfire or stop running), and had a look – the sensor seemed to be too far away, so I adjusted it and third time lucky, it fired and ran sweetly – and now, no more errors.  Hopefully the second session would go better, so I went to queue and met up with Peter Trott from Top Oils, who are sponsoring us on Rally GB this year, and had a good chat about everything.  And then Sean Moriarty appeared, from Motorsports News, so we spent a bit of time chatting about this year, and the changes that have been made and plans to do Rally GB, etc.  And the more I talked about it, the better I felt about it!  Up until that point, it had seemed just like something I was saying, but now it seemed to be real.  Sean was really friendly as ever, and enthusiastic about what we’re doing, so hopefully he’ll run something in MN and we’ll bag some publicity for Top Oils as a result.

It was time to go out on track, and this time…. it went well!  Got out there and was taking it easy, but with the gravel tyres on the car it was sliding all over the place anyway, so it was good fun, even if it was slow.  Each lap I gave the car more revs and more throttle, and it seemed OK, although it was running pretty rich, so I didn’t give it too much.  Obviously all the other cars were going much more quickly, so I spent a lot of time moving left to let them pass, but it was good, and time to come in too quickly.

There was then a long time to the next time out on track (about 5 hours), so after speaking to Peter for a bit and getting a couple of Bardahl T-Shirts for Paul and me to wear, I went for a wander, and saw the usual cars there, as well as the S2000 Fabia:

The next Skoda? Right.

Which looks amazing, it really does.  And later I’d see that it goes pretty well too.  There was also the S2000 Proton:

Proton S2000.... nice!

Which you could get into all the nooks and crannies, and see what an amazingly built car it is – even the bonnet stay was a work of art (and very clever too).  Nice to see a car like that on display that you could get really close to.  The interior was a masterpiece of minimalism, there’s next-to-nothing inside it, and just a touch panel for all the car’s controls, and a large LCD for the navigator.  Really impressive, even this part of it.

Wandered about some more, and saw an RS200, which is my favourite car ever.  The back was open showing the engine, and spent some time talking to the owner, a really nice guy who wanted to use the car as intended rather than it be a show piece with every part polished.  I asked if I could look inside, and he opened it up and said I could get in!  Brilliant, I’d get to sit in my dream car.  For some reason I didn’t ask anyone to take a pic of me, but I did take a pic of my hand inside it:

I was IN AN RS200!

Brilliant!

So, a dream achieved, I wandered back to the car, and then Tammie arrived with the kids, so we wandered around some more and had lunch, and so on.  The feature stage was on at this point, and got to see various cars on there hooning around, and I still wonder why they don’t put the chicanes there for the “normal” people to go round – it’d be much more rally-like than the open track.  Oh well.

Soon enough, it was time for Tammie to get signed up as a passenger and then me take her round.  We got onto the track and headed for Quarry, which is a fairly fast entry for a corner, and I heard a squeal from her and could see her pressing hard on the navigator’s footrest, probably for an imaginary brake pedal.  Each lap I did I went a bit quicker, and took the corners a bit closer to the bollards, and afterwards was told that I’d scared her to death!  Still, she was smiling, your honour…. It’s just a pity that there weren’t any more takers for rides in the car, but there you go.  That, really was it – I was happy the car was still all in one large and running piece, and that as much coverage as possible had been had for us and for Top Oils, so it was time to drive home, which was thankfully uneventful aside from the left front coming loose about half way home, so i’ll need to look at what’s happened there as they were torqued up!  Thanks to James from BDCC for stopping to check if I was OK as he drove past.  Here are some more pictures from the day:

Renault 5 - lovely.

I have SAT in that car!

Exhaust tunnel, anyone?

The inlet ducting and plenum on this car probably cost more than my car did to build, and indeed more than it will cost us to do Rally GB 2010.

Minimal interior.

So, today has seen a bit of progress on the car – I finished work an hour early, so I got the crank trigger issue sorted – turns out the trigger wheel is slightly off-centre, so that and the vibration was the problem combined.  I have set the gap to sort the problem for the moment (using feeler gauges) but next week I’ll take it off and have it machined to be totally true.  However, it’s running OK, and I’ve even had a chance to clean the poor old thing up – where it sits outside the roof has gained some interesting black spots which take quite an effort to get off, so i’ve done about half the roof.  I’ve also fitted a mounting to the front of the roof for the new camera I have, the GoPro Motorsports wide, which will allow a few different camera angles to be quickly and easily set, plus running a camera inside and one outside as well – I’m hoping to experiment with that on Saturday.

New wheels have arrived – another set of 4 Felicia Fun wheels, so I have more lovely yellow Skoda alloys to bend on Rally GB this year.  They were only £20 each, a bargain – way cheaper than the tyres that will go on them!

.. for most people means taking an extra day off.  This time of year for me it means working on the car a lot!

The plan was fairly simple – the car ran OK the other day, so spend the day driving it, slowly improving the way the engine runs.  This, in principle, is fairly simple.  Last year I invested in a couple of piece of kit that allow me to map the way the engine runs – they measure the engine’s speed and how far open the throttle is, and measure the air/fuel mixture at that point, and record all of this information.  After driving the car for a bit (to average out little errors and to drive in as many different speed/throttle positions as possible) this log can be downloaded and then analysed using the LogWorks software which can also take the engine’s current settings and calculate new ones.  That’s how it should work, and within a few sessions you get a fairly driveable engine.  Then the car can be taken to a rolling road to fine-tune all of these settings and also to set the ignition timing (which is critical for maximum performance).

However, things aren’t quite that simple.  The first issue is the software that comes with the ECU that I’m using.  In short, it’s awful.  When I got the car mapped before Rally GB 2008, the dyno operator hated it, and I can’t argue with that at all.  Anyone who knows me knows I’m a bit of a techie/software geek, and I’m quite happy using things on computers that would freak most people out, so it’s not just a case of it being complex or even a bit geeky.  It’s just awful.  The kind of software that constantly leaves you saying “who did this?”, every time you change something.  Now, this wibbling might seem irrelevant, but it’s not;  it actually creates a real problem when setting the car up.  The reason?  You can’t copy or paste from/to the fuelling map.  No really, copy and paste, something which has been in the Windows World since, oooh, 1988.  No, you can’t do that.  Which makes for a far more complex setup.  I will spare you the full horror, but let’s just say it’s good that I’m game to use any means to get something done, in this case working out the file format that the software stores the engine settings in, and then converting that to a spreadsheet, and then putting the newly-generated values into that.  Then it’s the reverse – taking those settings and converting them back into the format the ECU will understand.  It’s about a 5-stage process, but at least I’ve done it enough times now to have it fairly well down.  And the big bonus?  You can go for a drive for 30 minutes and change maybe 75% of the fuelling map.

OK, so that’s the real plan.  And if it had gone that simply, then I would have been writing this 24 hours ago….

Saturday started out simply enough – got the car running, and went for a first little drive; Tammie was in the passenger seat, and it all seemed OK.  However, the car wasn’t keen to re-start, and as it was running so lean I thought it best to add some more fuel before driving back.  Two things happened – one was an amazed passenger that you can transform the way the car behaves without having to “do something under the bonnet” and two, the car drove better.  But the laptop’s battery was dead and I don’t like going out without it as it can diagnose an electronic issue instantly, so it was time for lunch, and for me to get on with it alone in the afternoon.

The problem came that the car just didn’t want to start up in the afternoon.  No amount of coaxing would get it to fire.  And it soon looked like the problem was the battery – when cranking, the ECU would disconnect from the laptop, I assumed from low voltage.  So time for a charge, and a few more hours wasted, but I took the opportunity to go buy some more spark plugs.

Even after that, when the car did run, it ran like crap.  Lumpy, unhappy, and really just plain odd.  Usually when a car is missing on one cylinder it’s fairly easy to diagnose which one, but removing an injector connector on each cylinder just made an incremental kind of worse, rather than changing anything massively (or as it should do, not making any difference if that was the bad cylinder).  Really weird and frustrating; sometimes it would seem to clear for a few seconds, and then run rough again.  A change of plugs didn’t do much for it.  I’d checked things over and over again, and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.  And when I tried the ECU’s “test” mode (where it fires the injectors and spark plugs), nothing happened.  I knew it would fire normally (otherwise it wouldn’t run), but there was clearly something odd.  In addition the laptop kept having communication errors with the ECU and with the logging hardware (both use serial ports, and I use an old laptop solely for this purpose). It was getting dark and I’d had enough, so I gave up.  At this point, any chance of going to RallyDay seemed to have vanished.

A good night’s sleep often does wonders.  Admittedly I did wake up with that “oh no…” feeling, but thought about checking all the little things that could be a problem, starting from scratch.  And found a few things – firstly, the reason for the ECU’s test mode not working – I’d followed Skoda’s practice of powering the injectors and coil from the fuel pump output, which isn’t triggered in test mode (for obvious reasons, you’d flood the engine and set fire to it at the same time!), so I rewired to power them from the ECU power, which enabled test mode (which plays a lovely out-of-tune tune) and showed that coils and injectors were all working (I primed the fuel pressure first and then collected fuel into a jar, one injector at a time).  So, two hours down, and no actual progress.  To eradicate the laptop problem, I had to go and buy a USB-Serial adapter (so I could use my ‘proper’ laptop), which meant I could download a log, but it still doesn’t work with the ECU software as it refuses to see the port in question.  GRRR!  Then something struck me.  I’d adjusted the valve clearances when building the engine, but not since it had been hot and then cooled, and some settling in may have occurred.  And it had – although there was clearance on each valve, on some it was much less than the spec 0.25mm, so I re-did them all. I also realised I’d not reset the ECU to the throttle body (having noticed when it was running that closed throttle was registered as 20%), and then fired up.  It didn’t sound great, but it did run.  And well enough for me to strap everything back in place, and try to go for a drive.

It drove OK.  Not amazingly, obviously, but above 3000rpm it was clean and clear, and went pretty well.  Well enough to do a 20 minute log drive, and to come home and look at the data, and realise I’d not reconnected the RPM trigger to the logger, so that data was all null as the engine was apparently stopped!

Another drive was done after it was connected, and the engine behaved much the same – quite a misfire below 3000, but above seemed clean and clear, despite running quite rich after my hamfisted “richen the map everywhere” adjustment.  I was careful not to stress the engine too much, and it seemed happy enough, so I did about 20 minutes and then went through the process of recalculation, and repeated this three times over the course of the day – each time with the car driving better, and being able to take it to more “extreme” areas of the map, either low speed with big throttle or lots of load, etc.  The main problem, though, was that when you got to 5500rpm in 4th or 5th gear, then the engine would keep stuttering; it woudl just die and kick back in and so on.  Didn’t do it in any other gear (it accelerates quite quickly), which was odd.  I had a think about it and then went for a final run with the laptop connected to the ECU; the software of horror has one screen which is really useful, which shows you a running count of things you’d not like to see, including crank trigger problems.  And lo and behold, every time the stuttering occurred, the crank trigger was at fault – the counter would jump up by 10 or 20 each time, and never change at any other time in the half hour I ran it like this.  It seems to me that the bracket that it’s on is vibrating at that speed (as it works fine above it), and when you’re in a high gear it’s at that speed long enough to let it get going.  A strengthened one is on the list of things to do this week.

So, having had a horrific Saturday, Sunday has actually been good and productive.  OK, it’s taken me all day (aside from slacking off to watch the F1 and have lunch), but it’s now fairly driveable, and with any luck the stronger bracket will kill the misfire for good (it also does it sometimes at about half that speed, which makes sense and adds credence to the ‘resonance’ theory).  As Gene Krantz said, “Work the problem.  Don’t make things worse by guessing.”  Hopefully this approach will see the car at RallyDay!

OK, so after the last debacle, I was left with three options:

• Fit a standard bottom end, but with a different camshaft in it (I have a standard Felicia engine in the shed)
• Fit a previous rally engine (One used on Rally GB 2007), which went really well, but was a bit low on oil pressure when hot – a simple thing to fit at a later date, and an engine which was known to have had a fair bit of work done to it, plus a good cam already fitted; fit the Motor Excel head to this
• Get a new bottom end built (or build one)

Option 3 wasn’t really an option at the moment – simply put, I don’t have the money.  So it was between the first and second ones; I elected for the second one as the engine was known to be good (the one thing we didn’t lack on Rally GB 2007 was power, and the fault that put us out was the throttle body), and it was actually a toss of a coin between fitting this engine and the one which has just died.  However, before doing so it would need to be checked for piston protrusion, just like the last one.  And once it had been grabbed out of the shed, cleaned off and then had the head removed, it measured up pretty well – 0.5mm against the spec 0.8, but I was happy that was close enough, particularly given circumstances.  However, it was missing the flywheel.  Now I know that on many engines the crank and flywheel are balanced as a pair, but the last Skoda crank I took for balancing needed nothing done to it at all, the flywheel ended up being balanced on its own.  And given this, and the fact that I just don’t have time to spend a week waiting for it to be balanced, having taken the engine apart, I took the flywheel from engine #1 (which had been lightened and balanced) and fitted that.  Next up, time to fit the head, which involved lots of careful cleaning, fitting of a new gasket, and setting the valve clearances.  Doing this meant putting the front pulley on properly (it was just placed on since it had been removed for use on another engine), and when I did this up…. the engine stopped turning.  Most puzzling, so I just carried on setting the valve clearances by turning the engine using the flywheel.  However, this still meant that I had a problem – the front pulley getting done up stopped the engine turning.  I checked inside the front cover and couldn’t see anything, so the only conclusion I could come to is that the thrust bearing (which controls the side-to-side movement of the crank) had moved – on the Felicia engine it’s a large ring which has a tab on it to stop it spinning, and if the crank moves to the back of the engine, this could rotate and get stuck.  So the sump had to come off (and gave me a chance to give it a good clean inside), and lo and behold, I was right – the bearing had indeed spun, but was easily put back into place, and then fitting the front pulley held everything in the right place.  Sump back on, another hour taken up.  Fitted the water pump, checked everything over, and then got the gearbox on, with the help of my Mum – again it was dead easy doing it on the stand.  What wasn’t easy, though was refitting the engine – I’d spent a fair while bent over sorting out the bearing problem, and managed to sprain something in my lower back.  Not really badly, not like last year, but bad enough to give me real pain.  Soldiered on and got the engine and box bolted into place (again, another thing that goes far more smoothly with a sling holding the engine in the correct balance), and then took a break for an hour to hopefully recover a bit (not much, alas).  Then the typical work of refitting the inlet manifold, starter, thermostat housing, alternator, driveshafts and hubs, etc.  Then… it rained!  So that was that for Saturday, and a good thing too as I was pretty much done in!

Sunday afternoon it was time to finish off the things that were needed to see if it would run well, and thankfully I had Tammie (my girlfriend) on hand to help out!  She’d been visiting this weekend, but had kindly gone shopping while I was fitting everything, and was happy to give me a hand for an hour to finish everything off, so she did various jobs including filling gearbox oil, engine oil and water, while I did the other things that were needed.  And then time to get it running.  As ever, firstly built oil pressure with the injectors and coilpack disconnected, and then reconnected them to fire it up.  Two things happened – it fired, but ran only on two cylinders, and revved a LOT.  Not a good start.

I did a compression test, and found all four cylinders good and consistent, so hopefully not a mechanical issue for the misfire, and put a new set of platinum plugs in.  And found the reason for the high revving – the servo hose was off, letting far too much air in.  With it refitted, I fired it up, and it sounded good!  After a bit of blipping the throttle to warm it up, it seemed happy enough, so I got Tammie to keep it going and felt the breather to see how heavily it was breathing.  It wasn’t at all – seemed really sound, so very little blow-by, a real relief.

So, third time lucky?  Let’s hope so.  The bearings will need changing at some point, but that’s £40 and an hour’s work, easily done as I’ve done it before, both big ends and mains can be replaced in situ.  But for the time being, that should do the trick, and won’t make any difference to the engine’s mapping situation, so I can start driving it during the week to get it set up properly for RallyDay 2010, and spend the week getting better myself as well.  Rides in the Skoda will be available on eBay!

…I wouldn’t have any at all!

This afternoon I was off work, so I got the sump off the engine (easy enough), and then set about removing the pistons – again, easy enough as it just involves undoing the big end caps, and then popping the pistons out of the top of the engine.  I decided to do No.1 first as it was where the problem apparently lay.  It came out easily enough, and it didn’t take too much looking at it to see what was wrong…

Oh dear.

The rings were fine.   The piston between them was cracked.  No idea how this had happened as I thought I was very careful when I fitted them (they fitted in really easily), plus it originally ran well for a good while before it all went wrong.  Very odd.  But undoubtedly not good news… Once the top ring was off, a big section of piston came out.

Bits missing...

And the same was true for the next ring too (the pic I’ve taken is really blurred, so i’ll do another one soon).  So, that looks like that’s it for that – the only spare piston I have is not the right ‘grade’ for the liner in the engine, and frankly given this I wouldn’t trust the rest of the engine, so it’s time for another!  Yes, it’s engine change time.  I have another good engine (ran very well) which has been in the shed for a while, so I will put that one in instead – the head is already fitted, so hopefully over the course of the weekend it will get fitted and be running.  That’s the plan anyway, as the weather is going to turn nasty here on Monday…

OK, so after yesterday I thought it best to leave the engine to cool down completely before removing the head, as I didn’t want any problems.  And that was wise, as the dismantling was fairly straightforward, as you’d expect with something that was only assembled 5 days ago.  Everything came apart easily enough, and the head has been undamaged by its undignified start in life.  Phew!

The bottom end seems to be a different story.  It would appear that most of the problem comes from the rings – from what I’ve been reading since yesterday, a too-gentle break-in can be a problem, as can too much fuel.  Both of which definitely happened when these were first being run – it was taken VERY easily for the first few hundred miles, so that could be a problem, and it was also too rich.   There is lots of oil build-up on the tops of the pistons, as seen on the one on the right in this picture – the ones on the left have been cleaned, while no.3 is untouched (and black and sticky!).

Hello, again, pistons.

The bores seem to be a bit glazed, from what I can tell, so they need honing:

Glazed bores? You decide!

The plan with these is to remove them (taking the sump off, then pistons out the top), and then hone the bores.  They can be removed from the block to do this, which is probably the best idea, as there will be grit, and grit and engines don’t really get on too well.  Or at all.

The other problem is whether or not the head gasket was actually blown – there was no evidence at all of it having done so when looking at the gasket, and the liners seem to be the right protrusion above the block – they certainly seem to have been clamped down well by the head/gasket as the gasket looks (to me) to be spot on.  However, the gasket was a bit dodgy, it turns out, there were a couple of bits of surface rust on it, which I’d not spotted.  I looked at another one in the same packet, and it too has some rust marks on it, so I’m hoping this is the issue, although I will have to re-do the liners anyway if I remove them.  All the parts to do all this are arriving tomorrow, so hopefully by the end of the weekend it will all be done and the car will be running properly.  End of the weekend?  Why?  Well, today’s my birthday, and I’m “out out” tomorrow night, so I’m not sure how precise my work will be on Saturday – I’m hoping to get everything out tomorrow afternoon before the carnage begins.

2 weeks to RallyDay!

…it was going to be easy.  Today started out well enough, went to the Post Office, taxed the car, got it started easily, got everything set up for mapping/logging, and then went for a short drive.  Came back, and noticed that the engine seemed to be breathing quite heavily.  Not a good start, but it seemed happy enough, so I carried on, and did a longer drive with the LM-1 logging everything it needs to do the mapping changes.  Car went well – not outstanding, but well enough for a first run, and didn’t play up, even ticking over without problems.  When I got back it seemed OK aside from being a bit smoky again from the breather.

Took all the data from the LM-1 and put it into the computer to adjust the map settings, and I’d forgotten how to do a lot of it (as you have to convert the ECU’s format into a CSV file, and then import that into Excel, and use this in conjunction with the LM-1 “LogWorks” software to calculate new map values, and then transfer it all back again, and finally upload it to the ECU) – it took an hour to get all this done, but it was then time for the second run.  I fired the car up and it didn’t seem to great, seeming to miss on one cylinder, but I thought it would clear.

It didn’t.

Came back and did some checks – low compression on number 1 cylinder, the other 3 were OK.  Putting oil down the bores increased the compression by 2 bar, even on the bad cylinder, so my diagnosis is that the rings didn’t bed in properly on this engine, so a new set are needed along with the liners being honed.  And, of course, a new head gasket and I would think re-setting the position of liner number 1.  Not a total disaster, but certainly not what I’d like to be writing about today.  Parts have been ordered, but won’t be coming until at least Saturday morning, so that leaves me plenty of time to get it ready for RallyDay…

Today was all about making sure the car would be ready for tomorrow – as I can tax it tomorrow and drive it on the road, and therefore get some rough mapping started.  There were a few odds and ends to sort out on the car, none of them that important, but each one needing to be done in anticipation of tomorrow, including changing some bolts for the right ones (rather than temporary changes I’d made to get the car running), getting the brakes working OK, changing the wheels for gravel ones (in anticipation of RallyDay aside from anything else), and checking everything that has already been done, such as the new suspension (remembering that I’d forgotten to do one of the spring collars up).  And then, seeing if the car would still move itself – it hasn’t done that for a long time.  I decided to start out with the same map settings we used for Rally GB 08, rather than what I’d done afterwards, as much of the engine is the same, and I’d think it probably will be similar at low revs.  And this seemed to do the trick – the car drove perfectly up the drive, and on my, er… private test track of 100 yards or so.  So I gave the car a good clean for its good work.  Tomorrow will be much more demanding!

Nice and shiny in the sun.