Skoda Rally Blog

There haven’t been any updates on here for a few days, but that’s not to say I’ve not been busy – quite the opposite, in fact.

Firstly, I’ve sold a spare car that I had – I had a complete, brand new shell with roll cage that I bought a long time ago with a load of other bits – I had planned to build that at some point, or to use it as a spare shell should the worst happen to R477 KRU.  However, storage space for it was going to become difficult in the future, and I needed the money, so I sold it to a chap called Rob who is re-shelling his ex-challenge Felicia, so I know it’ll live on.  And what have I done with the proceeds?  I’ve bought a HANS device.  This may seem extravagant, but hire costs for Rally GB would be about the same as I will lose on buying it, and it gives me the option of using it on other events, including Monte Carlo, should my pipe dream become reality!  And more importantly it gives me a chance to see whether or not wearing it in the car is going to work out – I’ve heard several people say that their seat/harness/position made it really uncomfortable, and that isn’t something that I can afford to find out on the Thursday of Rally GB.  I’ve sat in the car with belts on, and it seems OK, I think it’s something you’ll just get used to after a bit.

It’s very light (made from formed carbon fibre, hence the funky appearance under a flash), and sounds like it’s ceramic when something knocks on it.  I guess it will be somewhat awkward to get off and into the back of the car at the end of stages, but there you go….

Next up:  Seating.  The FIA’s rules of seat lifing mean that Paul’s seat is out of date (being 5 years old), and the manufacturer won’t re-certify it.  So I have a perfectly good seat which needs to be replaced.  After a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth and shopping about, I found a replacement at Larkspeed for £360 delivered.  Which isn’t cheap, but is better than the £450 that others were selling them for.  To help recoup some of that cost, the old seat is being sold on eBay, and should get me about half the cost back as they are still useful for other motorsport disciplines and for the fast road crowd.  The big upside of getting a straight replacement is that bolting it in was straightforward – undo bolts, remove seat, put new seat in, replace bolts.  If only everything was that simple!  Another advantage of the new seat is that is has a recess to suit the HANS device (my seat already had this), so that’s an upside….

And yes, only my bank account knows the difference!

You want more?  Splendid.  I’ve got it.

Easy stuff:  Air filter.  The last one was a bit crap, so I went mad and have replaced it with a K&N filter of nominally the same size.  According to K&N’s calculator it’s actually a bit too big, but that’s no bad thing.  And being able to fit something in 3 minutes is a good thing too.

Less easy stuff:  The crank trigger mounting has been strengthened further, which seems simple but actually took 4 hours to do, with lots of messing about to make it suit a new (and replaceable) crank trigger instead of the old one.  This means I can finally get and carry a spare for this most annoying of devices.  However, I’ve not actually had the car running with the new one because of the next problem:  The ECU keeps resetting itself when cranking, and I think the battery is to blame; it doesn’t go flat flat, but when cranking the voltage drops enough to reset the ECU, and the end result is a car that doesn’t run.  This can hopefully be sorted fairly easily, but it means I currently have a car that doesn’t go.

Far more involved: The engine I’m running at the moment has a bottom end that did Rally GB in 07, and those with long memories (or an obsession) will remember that the oil pressure wasn’t all it could be – there were a couple of times when we’d finish a stage and the pressure would be non-existant at tickover.  This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that at one point in its life it had been run without any oil!  Worn bearings are a fact of life on the Skoda engine, so it was time to try to address this, something that I did before GB 08 with another engine which behaved similarly.   It’s fairly easy to do – drain the oil, unbolt the sump and oil pickup, and there you have the guts of the engine – here’s a pic of what it looks like:

If you’re not sure, this is from under the engine, looking up.  The white area at the bottom is the sky, and the wiry thing at the top is the dipstick.  No.4 big end is removed.  Removing the big ends was first, and when they were out, it was easy to see that they had seen better days!

They should be smooth without any wear, not shiny and stripey like these ones are.  The bearings that the crank runs on (main bearings) were much the same, although replacing them is a little more involved as getting the top ones out needs a bit more careful persuasion.  All good though, and then a case of bolting it all back together, using a new gasket and sealer as the old one was leaking.  This took a couple of hours, as I’d rather do it right than quickly, and also I wanted to avoid doing myself in.

More easy stuff:  The door bars look shabby (yes, I know, I’m talking about cosmetic things!), so I’ve touched in the chips in the paint from the harnesses hitting them, and they will be then covered in ‘helicopter tape’ which apparently is near-indestructible, so that could be very useful.  Plus the door bar rollcage foam was quite shabby (as I kick it every time I get in), so that’s been replaced too.  The car’s 5v supply (for the GPS unit, and to charge Paul’s phone which he uses with Memory Map) was playing up, and that was traced to a faulty connection which has been replaced.  Plus (more cosmetics), I’ve finally removed the grey and white overspray from the driver’s door shut, which looked terrible.  Again, not terribly important but given that I couldn’t get a new battery this afternoon (without paying Halfrauds which I simply refuse to do), I was limited.

Regulations: There are a few things that are needed on the car, and I’ve done some of them to keep with the regulations:  First is to replace the names on the rear door window – in previous years this has only been my name, but now the FIA has finally realised that people are capable of reading two names and understanding that there are two people in the car! So both Jones and Burley are there now, with the appropriate flags.

There’s something less trivial though, in that a fuel sampling point is needed; all cars competing in the event need to have provision for the fuel to the taken for testing.  While this isn’t something that I would think is a practical issue for us (after all, the line “Go to the Murco, mate” would get the fuel we’re using sorted), it is something we have to comply with, so I’ve bought a fuel sampling coupling and pipe, so that fuel can be taken for testing if needs be.

Note to the eagle eyed – this is only temporary, in terms of the pipe fittings, they will be finished better during the week!

Oh, and mudflaps.  The old ones were perfectly good.  Until I ran one of the rear ones over, when reversing into the drive after Rally Day (if you go up a kerb backwards, it gets ripped off!).  And the MSA have decided that mudflaps now have to be 4mm thick, so I’ve blown even more money on new mudflaps, which are very white and pretty, and 4mm thick.  The rears are fitted, but it was raining nearly all day today, so getting soaked doing that wasn’t really a good idea, so I’ll leave the others for whenever the weather is better.

So, that’s it.  At present the car is pretty much there – there’s an oil leak to trace (which I’m hoping the sump gasket already has done), the starting issue (a new battery), final mapping, and some cosmetic issues to address, plus some improvements to the sumpguard to protect the engine bay from mud getting in – basically some polypropylene sheet to fit to it.  And hopefully that can all be done next weekend.

Oh, and I was mentioned in Motorsports News, after speaking to Sean at RallyDay and on the phone last week!

Entries for Rally GB close on the 20th, which is two weeks on Wednesday.  I guess it’s time to enter?