Skoda Rally Blog

Often when you spend money, it’s painful. However, using plastic and buying things over the phone makes it all seem easy, just give them a number and away you go. Which is largely how it went on Thursday when I ordered the diff. And what’s arrived?

I’ve heard a lot of differing opinions about grippers, but most of the people whose opinions I trust have said they’re OK – indeed the guys who bought the Hyundai have had one in their car for many seasons without any issues (or even needing servicing), and in addition plates are only £3 each! This is slightly offset by the diff relieving me of £750, but there you go, I guess that’s the price you have to pay for traction. So, all that’s needed now is some fresh diff bearings (which have been ordered), and then it’s time for another gearbox rebuild. My least favourite activity!

Updates have been a long time coming on the site, this is because for the first time in a couple of years, I’ve been on holiday (snowboarding in France, and also a trip to Italy), and also I’ve been too busy with work to write much up. But I’ve not been slacking off. The engine and gearbox came out of the car several weeks ago, and I’ve stripped the gearbox down to see what was wrong. No, that’s not true, I knew what was wrong, I stripped it down to find the extent of the damage. And what I found was quite bad – the diff casing had entirely broken up, with the one side of the case having split into several large pieces and a lot of small ones.

These pieces had then gone on their merry way, wreaking destruction as they went – as you can imagine, having large pieces of metal flying around inside a gearbox isn’t usually a recipe for a happy ending.

But in this case, amazingly, it wasn’t too bad. The crownwheel and pinion were the only parts of the gearbox to sustain any damage, where a piece of the diff casing had become stuck between them and been crushed, heavily damaging the pinion, but amazingly the gears themselves were undamaged.

This is a good thing as damage to them would have doubled the cost of the repair. Close inspection found that the gearchange mechanism had also suffered some damage internally, the reason for the box feeling jammed in gear, but luckily it was actually in neutral, which had minimised further damage. Clearly 90% of the box is scrap, in fact only the gear kit is going to be retained, but this is a major relief for me – looking at a £800 bill is bad enough, but doubling that price would really have killed me off.

So, the next issue became how to fund the new diff, and that would really mean saving up or selling something. As some of you know, I bought a Hyundai Coupe at Christmas, with the hope of making this a quick project to become a new, fast and cheap replacement for the Skoda, but it had to go as the extra time I’ve needed to spend on the Felicia and the cost means keeping both isn’t an issue. Once this had sold (it went last weekend) it was just a simple phonecall to John from Gripper to order the new diff – this is on its way now. I have the week of the 23rd off, so hopefully I’ll be able to build up the new box then, and then it’s just time to move onto the engine; I’m sure there are a lot of areas that can be improved on the engine when it’s rebuilt, as I know there are several improvements that can be made while still keeping the engine Group A legal, so this will be the next thing to look at.

One thing I hope I’ve always been when writing this is honest. And I’ll be completely honest – retiring from Rallye Sunseeker 2009 has really knocked me sideways. WAY more than any other retirement before, including Rally GB 2007. The Sunseeker has always been so good for me, and always turned out OK, but in addition, it’s the reason I started rallying, so it’s particularly close to my heart. What makes it worse is my route to work takes me past several of the stage entries and on the rally route, so I kept seeing where we should have been (all the stages we missed out on doing, etc). Anyway, I’m largely over it now. Sniff, sniff….

So, with that out the way, got the car up on stands and started taking it apart. The whole lot won’t be coming out this weekend as I’m making 100% sure that I don’t re-injure myself before going snowboarding over the Easter holiday (first time in a few years), but I thought I’d see what bits would fall off or out of the gearbox with little effort. With the sumpguard off and the car on stands, it was fairly easy to see the damage, and removing the offside driveshaft was at least made easy by the destruction of that side of the diff.

And here’s what I’ found so far:

It looks as if the diff casing has shattered, but I have no idea why at the moment – it’s not what I’d originally thought (that the gears inside had broken up), so the full post-mortem will have to come after the box is out and dismantled. However, there are large bits of the diff casing missing (as they aren’t where they ‘were’ – it’s more than just the end having popped off the diff), so where they’ve ended up will be a big issue. As will the bill.

Well, things have looked up considerably since my last entry!

Firstly, thanks to some good work at the Chiropractor and dedicated rehab work, my back is much better (I’ve just been to the gym this morning, so that’s how much better it is), and secondly (and far more importantly) the car has a new clutch in it, and is nearly ready to run. As ever, Mum came to the rescue and helped take the car apart (right up to the “heavy stuff”), and then Paul came over and did the rest with me (unfortunately the engine needs to be dropped out to change the clutch), making him realise in the process that it’s not straightforward ‘just changing the clutch’ – OK, it’s not rocket science, but it’s a physically demanding task and at one point he asked if it’s “usually this difficult” – it was actually fairly easy for once. Everything else bolted back up easily enough and it’s given me a chance to check everything over (one of the shafts needed a new boot, aside from that all is well).

So the car will be back running in a bit, and then I need to sort out the tankguard, and it’ll be ready for a run; I’ve got a nice, shiny and re-painted bumper ready to go on the back (as the current one is marked and melted from Rally GB), and then the last job is to change the windscreen as it’s cracked from Rally GB too.

By this evening, all should be done and we should be ready for Rallye Sunseeker 2009. Another Skoda battle with the Beckett Brothers is ahead, and it’ll be good to have someone to compare times with for a change!

Anyone who’s been in the UK in the last few weeks will know the weather has been cold and miserable, with a bit of snow thrown in. So no work has been done on the Skoda, and there is a fair bit to do.

However, this week the weather is looking up. Which would be ideal as I have the week off. But I’ve managed to injure my back doing a 10k run (after 18 months without any problems) so I’m currently laid up, unable to do anything on the car at the moment. This has been the case since Thursday, so things are a bit slow. The car needs:

Tankguard
Clutch

As a bare minimum. Neither of which are easy to do when you can’t stand up for long let alone anything else! The Sunseeker is next Friday/Saturday, and without progress I’d obviously need to withdraw. Time will tell…

So, there’s been some aftermath of Rally GB.

I spent several hours cleaning the mud off the car – it took about 2 hours of jetwashing to get it clean underneath, it really was terrible. And while I was putting it on the ramps… the clutch went! So I was right to take it easy on the last day with the starts, as it was slipping just putting the car up the drive. Since then the coilpack has also packed up (I think), but it’s been so cold it’s not been worth working on it. Next up is the Sunseeker, which is some time away yet, and I have a week off in hopefully warmer temperatures.

In the meantime, there are a couple of videos:

and part 2:

It’s in 2 parts because YouTube won’t take more than 10 minutes of video at a time. The appaling quality is down to their conversion – the original file (120MB) looks much better….

Despite a few last-minute delays, this is easily the most prepared I’ve been for Rally GB – the first year we were several hours late and had all sorts of things forgotten, and last year is best forgotten. I was only an hour late leaving this year, and that was ‘cos I decided to take it easy and have a bath. An uneventful drive up here was nice enough, and the house is spot on, just as it was last year. About a mile from SA1 (where service is this year), and warm, clean, big and comfy. Nothing else to report really, tomorrow should be fairly straightforward although it may involve a trip to Cardiff to pick up the stickers and passes to get us into SA1, and then leave the van and rally car there. Nice.

Ready!

In contrast to previous years, we’ll actually be leaving on time. I’ve even got time to relax for 10 minutes or so. But the weather here is mis-er-a-ble. Cold and wet. Looks like that’s what we’ll be having all week, lovely! Car is all ready to go, just need to load up my clothes and that’s it.

I’ve nearly finished work before Rally GB, just the morning to work tomorrow, and then loads of little things to do on the car. But there was something I could do this evening, and that was sort out the lamp pod. While it looks impressive, it has 4 100W lamps in it, but it has seen better days (all the reflectors aren’t as good as they could be), and I’ve never been that happy with the beams from the lights – two are very directional, and the others don’t seem to add much (although I wouldn’t want to go without).

All modern cars (and decent rally cars) use HID lamps, which output a LOT more light for a lot less power consumption. An HID conversion from the Demon Tweeks catalogue that turned up yesterday? A snip at around ?1000. But there are lots of cheaper alternatives, and for a huge ?64 I got a set of four lamps with ballasts, ready to go. I fitted them tonight, and I can’t believe the performance of them. I’ve only had a chance to go to a nearby lane which is still lit (albeit sparsely, but it’s not properly dark), and it’s a revelation compared to the halogen lamps. The light is much easier on the eye (being a slightly blue tint, 6000k), and seems to light up things far better, including in the distance. The lamps themselves are a lot deeper than the halogen ones and this seems to make the focus much better – the lamps on the outside provide a broad spread now, and the centre ones a more directed beam. So hopefully they’ll be a LOT better when we’re on the stages…..

Now, I’m sure there are ‘proper’ rally bods who are taking the mickey at this point, and I’d love to have the money to have a proper HID kit, but I’m amazed at the difference that a relatively small amount of money can make. I’ve seen a number of people say that HID conversions are crap, but I think for the money they’re well worthwhile. Certainly any car I have in the future will have them in whatever additional lamps I put on them.

… it’s coming together!

Today I’ve taken the car on a trip to shake it all down, and so far everything has been OK. Yesterday it passed the re-test for the MOT (which was obviously only a couple of minor things), and driving it there and back showed that the changes we’d made in the fuelling had improved matters a lot. Today’s drive has reinforced that view – obviously it’s quite buzzy as top gear is somewhere between third and fourth on a standard box, but now it’s fuelled properly (and looking at the figures we cut nearly 50% out on some light-throttle load/speed sites), it drives very nicely. There are a few minor tweaks to make, but Friday afternoon should see all of those taken care of, and we should be ready to go.

Another upside, the van situation has been sorted out, and that was the last major piece of the jigsaw to get in place. I’m certainly better prepared than at any time before any rally I’ve done, and a world away from the mess that was last year, so I’m really hoping that my last ever International event (because, let’s face it, unless there is a massive change in my finances, I won’t be buying a HANS device and new helmet and neither will Paul) will be a success. It seems like I’ve worked non-stop to get everything done, and hopefully now I can just ease off before the week proper. There are only a few things to do (including the HID conversion on the lamp pod, which is set for Thursday night), and then it’ll be upon us.

This year, I’m really, really hoping that we’ll get enough time to be able to post more ‘multimedia’ stuff – more pictures and also some video footage. We can put blog entries in via email, so there may be updates in-between stages (just short ones), as both of us can send email from our phones, but we’ll see how that goes. If anyone reads this and takes pictures of the event, can you please PLEASE email them to me so I can put them up? In previous years people have very kindly sent what they’ve done (and one, in particular is a cracking shot, better than any professional ones that I saw), but all is appreciated, even if only as a memento for me so I can bore people in years to come!