Skoda Rally Blog

Well, I finally ended up putting N158 UBD on eBay, and it sold for ?2050. It’s just been picked up by it’s new owner, Andy Pecover. Had to be packed to the brim with the spares I was selling with it (he was driving it back), so for the first time in 3 years I don’t have a rally car.

But I do have the money to go on a spending spree – I can spend the money from the old car in about an hour, I think…. I have to order the rollcage (more on that when it arrives), extinguishers, sumpguard, all sorts. The plan is to have it built by around September, but we’ll see how that goes.

Tomorrow I’m navigating again!

Yes, unusual, I know, but I’m navigating for Chris Temple in his first event ever in his Mini. He’s from the Swindon end of things, and the event is at Down Ampney, near Swindon. He got let down by his original nav, and asked for someone to help out on his first event on the Britishrally forum, and I volunteered! It should be a fun day out, ‘cos Chris is about as excited and enthusiastic as you can get. I’ve only got one taxed and insured car at the moment, and that’s the rally car, so I’m taking it – should look the part anyway. I’ll have to make sure I don’t get confused and end up on the stages!

OK, a quick summary.

Firstly, I did the 10k run. Which was amazing as I had been properly sick for 2 weeks beforehand, and I’m still (a week later) not over it. But I did finish, which was an achievement, and in 1:02:40, which wasn’t great, but considering I couldn’t walk to the car the weekend before, was a good effort.

Secondly, I’ve not sold N158UBD yet. I’ve had a few people interested in it, but as yet it’s not sold. Which might be a bonus in view of the third piece of news….

… I’ve been off all week, and the idea was to seam-weld the new shell. But I’ve not done it because getting a roll cage for the car isn’t proving to be straightforward. The new shell is a “Reinforced Body” one, which has a different inner sill shape to the older (Favorit-based) shell – it curves up at the front, in front of the door opening. This would mean a minor modification to the new roll cage at manufacture (which I would be happy to provide measurements for – it just means the tube needs to be a bit shorter with an angle on it. Phoned Rollcentre (makers of the current cage, which is a very nice piece of kit), and they said they wouldn’t make one to fit. This is despite it being made to order. He said it was made on a jig, so “not possible”, which, frankly, is just coded talk for “I’m a lazy, miserable git who can’t be arsed to accomodate a paying customer”. My other questions were met with useless, lazy responses, and his solution to the problem was to buy a standard cage and then have me cut the feet off and re-weld them!

So at the moment I’m in limbo. The alternative of a weld-in cage fitted by a manufacturer would be lovely, but would break the budget. Money’s tight at the mo, so I’m thinking that maybe I’d be better off giving up, which I’m really not happy about as I spent a full day removing the awful bitumen soundproofing from the floor (and still have the burns and stains from it to prove it).

Today has been a good day. Mostly!

Firstly, the car is now clean inside – the mud that had been everywhere after the floor incident on WRGB is now pretty much gone, although there was much scrubbing needed in places (the headlining looked like a bomb had gone off), and it’s amazing what you can get at LIDL for £2 – all the cleaning products, as ever, were supplied by the bargain basement organisation! The seats have been re-fitted (for the first time ever, without ANY swearing at all at any point), and I’ve even replaced all the white and grey cable ties with black ones while I had all the rollcage padding off for a scrub. In short, things inside the car are lovely.

There was a shock earlier in the week – the R700 Kumhos I’ve been using for ages have shot up in price from £35 each to £65 plus VAT each! However, I’ve managed to find 8 of them that have 8mm tread, so I’m sticking with them for the Sunseeker – they’re all on the yellow rims, which will at least look nice.

The alloys from the Felicia that I broke ages ago (5 spoke) will now be having the Yoko A048Rs I bought on eBay (for £200, only 5 miles’ use for the set!), but before then they will be painted as they’re a bit scabby, and I’m quite liking yellow wheels. The rest of the paint will be done on Friday.

A sad thing had to happen today – I had to remove the WRGB stickers from the car. My filing cabinet in my studio has a plate from each forest event I’ve done on it, and I managed to get the door plates off without too much stretching, so I should be able to add to its wonderful colourscheme with that iconic sticker now.

However, there is something fundamental missing. I have no gearbox. Not even a spare that is 100%. I don’t know what’s happened, but the guy who picked up my old gearbox (along with the diff that cost £370 and has only been used for WRGB, and the money for the gearkit) has gone AWOL. I can’t get hold of him, despite having phoned every other day and left messages. Which is clearly a problem – apart from anything else, I obviously hope nothing bad has happened, but it leaves me in a bit of a pickle as I have no gearbox to fit. So I’ve been scouring the boards and eBay, etc, and hopefully I’ll be able to turn something up before the middle of next week. Otherwise, well, I have a box, but it’s the one we pulled out of the car at the end of last summer’s 6 events with Paul driving, and it’s not great. But it’s better than pushing the car, I guess.

Anyone with a gearbox, feel free to get in touch!

As an aside, I’m very excited about the Sunseeker now.

Well, we’re in the Sunseeker. And we’re seeded last again! Which is actually a GOOD thing – firstly because it means we can go first on the Friday night (third time in a row), and secondly because we won’t have anyone behind us on a forest stage unless they have problems. Which I’m happy about, and it also means we have the Beckett Bros in front of us so we have someone to aim for. Last year we were behind on the first few forest stages but then Paul told me to pull my finger out and we got in front until the cat broke up, blocked the exhaust and meant we lost speed and therefore finished last. Again.

That’s not going to happen this year as I’m ready to really give it some beans. Relatively speaking, anyway. This will probably be my only rally this year apart from WRGB should we choose to do it again (we both have shiny new credit-card style MSA International licences, just in case), although I would really like to actually finish Somerset stages one year, so maybe we’ll give that a go. It all depends on money and whether I’ve made any changes to the car.

Talking of which, the first thing that’s happened is I’ve cleaned the poor thing – it was filthy inside, and took two buckets of hot soapy water to get it anywhere near clean once the seats were out. But removing the seats showed the true horror of the damage to the floor – on Paul’s side it was about 3″ above where it should have been, and totally convex instead of flat. I had thought I should leave it, but amazingly using a bit of 3″x2″ wood as a former and hitting it with a sledgehammer worked remarkably well – so well, in fact that it now looks better than it has done for a while. As with many of my ‘projects’ I didn’t take any “before” pictures, but it was pretty bad. Honest.

The other thing to do was to remove all the crappy sound-proofing (which cracks each time the floor bends), so 30 minutes with a hot air gun and a scraper, then petrol, then brake cleaner left a very spanky-looking (but grey) floor. And then weld up the drain holes in the floor, which were the source of the mud in the first place. As ever, not straightforward as the welder decided today would be the day it wouldn’t feed wire properly, so had to work out how to fix that, but then finally got those holes welded up, and then painted the lot with thick, white gloopy hammerite. It looks good. Way better than it has any right to. And hopefully now it’ll stay dry and relatively clean in there too.

The other thing that’s happened is that my gearbox is away being fitted with a close-ratio straight cut gear set. OK, this has cost £800, meaning that the gearbox and diff is £1200 worth (or cost that, anyway), but I think it’s the way forward. Once I work out how to re-write megasquirt code to read the Skoda flywheel (which isn’t straightforward as the code isn’t very well documented, IMHO), then I can build a ‘proper’ engine (under Group A regs there is a fair bit of freedom), and then use the MPi injection system (with appropriate changes to the injectors) to produce a fully-legal, but tuneable and powerful engine. If I can get 110bhp out of it, I’ll be happy. But at the moment, just need to get the thing back together for 2 weeks’ time. And buy some more tyres!

Quite a few people have asked me how much it actually cost to do WRGB. I don’t think it would be possible to do it any cheaper than we did, unless you lived in the area; the B&B was the biggest single cost aside from the entry fee! Anyway, I was asked by Paul Stevenson of WRC Results Magazine to do a short piece on it, as he will be covering it in the next issue, along with the costs of a WRC team. Should be interesting!

Anyway, here are my costs – firstly to be in a position to enter the event – car preparation, safety gear, and the events to get Paul’s licence.

Car preparation for FIA safety equipment: £1000
Competitor Safety equipment: £300
Car preparation for event £1500
Events to be ready to get Navigator to International £2000
Recce Car £350
Pre-event cost: £5150

Licence upgrade for driver £122
Licence upgrade for Navigator £142
Recce Car Preparation £100
Service Van and trailer £200
Service Van fuel £100
Recce Car fuel £200
Rally Car Fuel £165
Rally Car Tyres (8 Kumho R700) £282
B&B £577
Food £100
Service Tent £93
Rally and Recce Car Insurance £92
Entry Fee £1445
WRC Tracker “damage” (their poxy aerial fell apart) £30
Damage to car: Steering Rack £45
Front Subframe: £122
Wheels: £44
Alternator £65
In Car Camera £40
Wales Rally GB Total £3964

Do I regret it? Do I b******s!

It’s funny. On the way home from WRGB, I was thinking “if the car had only had 50 more horsepower, it would have really been something”, and then of course I came back to reality as I remembered the homologation runs out on the 31st December 2006. However, the Felicia was made until well into 2000, so it would be possible for it to be extended, but I was unsure if Skoda would do such a thing (or indeed what the process/cost of this was).

Anyway, today I mailed Skoda to ask them if it would happen, reminding them that I had (as James Johns pointed out) given them a 21st class win on Wales Rally GB. While at a loose end at work, I checked the FIA’s homologation list, only to find that….

… yes, you guessed it. The Felicia’s homologation doesn’t expire until 2008.

Guess what I’m planning now? Never say never!

This weekend has seen the final push to get the car done, ready to set off tomorrow. There have been some setbacks, partly because the weather has been beyond belief, and partly because I had to play a gig last night, meaning I couldn’t work after about 4. However, sitting here on the Sunday night, I think we’re pretty much there. There’s about an hour’s worth of work to do to the car tomorrow and a short test drive to see if the one problem I’d found (there was a tapping sound from the upper mounting of the right rear damper which I think I’ve sorted but not driven it yet) is fixed, and also just to check everything finally before loading up.

This weekend’s work has mostly been little things, getting everything tidy inside the car, making all the little things work (such as the horn on the new steering wheel, the toolbag sorted out, the seats bolted in (sounds simple, but took ages as the bolts are hard to get to), harnesses adjusted, extinguisher nozzles mounted), and all of which took a long time. One great thing was that Stu came over and put the rest of the stickers on the car, and I must say I really love the way it looks. I know it’s just a little old Skoda, but I’m really proud of the way it looks – OK it’s got a few rough patches here and there, but it’s an 11 year old rally car, and it won’t look out of place on Thursday’s ceremonial start, or the stages, providing all goes well. I’ll take a picture tomorrow providing it’s not torrential rain again.

We fitted the Terratrip to the recce car, and….. it didn’t work! The wheel bolt sensor is SOOOO picky you have to have less than 1mm clearance for it to work, so a bit of adjustment finally gave us a tripmeter that works. I know it’s not that important and we’ll probably just be making very dodgy notes, but there you go. At least we’ve tried!

I’ve got the service van, loaded and catalogued all the spares that we have, and we’re just about ready to go. Tomorrow isn’t too hard a day (drive to Cardiff, pick up paperwork, go to Swansea, get set up), but it’s the calm before the storm. This is going to be a very, very interesting week.

You know when you go on holiday, then think “ooh, I’ve left the gas on”? Well, I had a car equivalent. The other day when I put the LSD in the gearbox, I got a bit distracted while putting the ‘box back together. And a couple of days ago I thought “Did I do the nuts up properly at the end of the gearbox shafts? You know, the really important ones that hold fifth gear on?”, so I thought today I’d better check them out.

Good job I did. Fortunately the Felicia’s design makes it dead easy to do – probably 10 minutes to get the end cover off, and then a further, oooh 10 seconds or so to realise that they were now finger-tight, and I really hadn’t done them up tight or staked the nuts in place. Idiot.

So, there they are, all done up properly and staked in place. Refitting was easy, and filling the ‘box up with the suggested Castrol B373 had an upside and a downside. The minus was that it stinks. Even more than EP90, which is hard to believe, but when Mum came in she thought that some Tomcats had got in the house! The plus is that it’s made the diff’s action even more progressive, so it’s easier to drive. Splendid.

Got a few other things sorted on the car today – rollcage padding (the FIA stuff that is mandatory for WRGB, and that’s cost me ?80 as I needed two different sizes), rear hatch safety clips (which you need in Group A, for no good reason), Fuel pipe (it had been bodged before, so I’ve done it properly now with metal couplings), and then another horror hit me around 5pm – the extinguisher pull (which worked fine last weekend) had rusted and seized. So I needed to order another one. Except it’s Friday night and past last post, so I won’t be getting it until Monday or Tuesday, so I’ve had it sent to the B&B, and I’ll fit it on Tuesday afternoon. What was it they say about Planning?

Finally, I’ve replaced the front wishbones. Again. The other ones I’d fitted were new, but one had a jack-related bending accident, so I’ve fitted new ones again, having strengthened them first with some extra welding. And also shown that it’s possible to change one in 14 minutes, start to finish, so if we do bend one, it’s possible to do it with hand tools and keep going. Not easy, but possible. Hopefully all of this will be unneeded, but best to plan ahead.

Tomorrow should have been an easy day, but there’s still lots to do. And another bonus – I fixed the broken Terratrip, so the recce car will have a trip meter in it. Not sure how much that will please Paul, but we’ll see!

Many rally teams (probably most of them), including the guys we’re servicing next to are doing some testing before WRGB. This usually consists of renting a bit of forest or private track and then driving the car at competition speeds to get the hang of it, and set the car up. This, like just about everything else when you do rallying properly, is expensive.

Yes, you guessed it, no testing for us! So instead I’ve just been trying to make sure the car is reliable, and everything’s working properly. Which has consisted of using the car for work this week! It’s been a bit unusual turning up in the Skoda, but created some interest here and there. It has also given me a chance to get a bit more used to the diff, which has gone well, and the car hasn’t missed a beat all week. I’ve also been able to calibrate the fuel gauge a bit, so I know how much fuel I have left at each point, and what the car does to the gallon in “competition” trim, which is useful for calculating how much fuel we’ll use on road sections, something that’s vital as we don’t want to run the car too heavy on the stages, but we also don’t want to run out!

So, that’s gone to plan. Tomorrow I have the day to do all the little jobs that I’ve written on my sizeable list, but most of it is small, bolt or clip-on stuff, so I might even get half of Saturday ‘off’.

The recce schedule has been altered by the organisers which is a bonus, as it now means we ‘only’ have to maintain an average of 50kph to fit into the time windows on day 2. Oddly you can make the times on day 1 even with a 35kph average. We’ll see if 50kph is possible…

One last thing – two people today have asked if I was on Fire. As in the radio station, not in a state of combustion. So clearly someone listens!