Skoda Rally Blog

In a decidedly non-chronological manner, I am now going to bring you up to speed with a new project, something which the eagle-eyed may have spotted in the odd photo here and there, and that’s that I’ve bought another rally car.  I am a traitor, however, as it’s not a Skoda!

First up, at the moment I am keeping the Skoda; I’m still on for doing Rally GB 2012, and the Skoda is the car to do that in, as the new car’s homologation would have long expired, and it’s not in a homologated spec anyway as far as I can tell.  I also still harbour the idea of doing an IRC round at some point (although as the Monte is back in the WRC, that pipe dream has fallen by the wayside).  But in the summer I had saved up about £2000, which I was going to put towards a new bottom end in the Skoda; this would have covered a 1.4 conversion, better rods and forged pistons, so the bottom end would be good for 8500rpm or so, and allow the head to fully perform; it would have hopefully gained me about 25-30bhp or so, and made the car a bit of a rocket for what it is.

But while I was thinking about this, something popped up on eBay.  It was a Seat Ibiza rally car, which looked interesting; fitted with a 2.0 16v engine, with a lot of ‘nice’ bits fitted; a custom cages weld-in rollcage, AP front brakes, Bilstein suspension, a close-ratio gearbox, Quaife diff, quick rack and lots of little details that looked good.  It wasn’t too far away (about 70 miles), and worth a trip to take a look – in the advert it looked a bit of a shed, as it had been stood for a while, and had scars from its last outing on the Sunseeker 18 months beforehand, with broken front and rear bumpers.  Long story short, I got it for a bit over two grand, but with a huge amount of spares thrown in – enough to completely (and I mean completely) fill Mark’s van when I went to pick it up.  It had a few issues (all declared) – head gasket leaking oil, a cracked oil cooler, handbrake seized up and a few other bits and pieces, but it ran well.  Here’s what it looked like when I got it home:

Battered but good.

And inside it looked like this

Tidy indoors

Nicely done inside with a proper upright hydraulic handbrake (retaining the mechanical one for the MOT and scrutineering), raised gear lever tower, Terratrip 404, digital dash (which does datalogging and all sorts), plenty of gauges and so on.

On the downside, the seats were out of date so would need replacing, and there were a couple of holes in the floor that had been drilled to let water out (the car lets water in, alas), and the floor was a bit rusty with surface rust.  First thing to take care of was that, so soon after it looked like this:

Nice new seats and shiny floor

Next up, the handbrake needed sorting, which was straighforward – the cables were damaged and had rusted, so £20 saw that fixed – fortunately they were standard items and dead easy to change, particularly as the car has the tank in the boot (an ATL bag tank) so the standard tank isn’t in the way.  The thing I noticed while doing it was that everything seemed to have been done to a high standard – there were no bodges or anything like that, everything looked really well thought out and engineered.

Obviously the bumpers were a real mess, so they needed to be binned, and fortunately I got a pair from a breaker at a good price, and replaced them and the mudflaps, taking the opportunity to change them to black instead of the original blue, and getting them up to current MSA spec.

The oil cooler was cracked, and luckily £50 saw a Mocal one to replace it directly, much better than saving £10 by buying a cheap one and then spending hours making new mountings and worrying about it falling apart.  The front brakes were in a sorry state – one had been replaced by a temporary one of a different size, but spares were included.  Unfortunately they had been stored without protection so they had a bit of surface rust on them, so they have been dispatched to be surface machined, and the pads have been replaced.  The AP calipers on the car are ENORMOUS – the kit with discs, pads, calipers and mounting bells is around as much as I paid for the car! They should stop the car really well, and it has a bias box which will have a remote adjuster fitted (included in the spares, handily).

The exhaust had a break in it as one of the mountings had ripped a section of pipe out, so this was replaced; typically a perfect-looking bit of welding on something that will never be seen, but hey ho.

Finally (at the moment), the head.  The engine has been fitted with ARP studs, but was leaking at the head gasket.  The head had been replaced (originally it was fitted with a ported one, but had some problems) with a standard one, so once I’d removed it I took the decision to get a better/ported head fitted.  Unfortunately time and so on has got in the way, and it’ll be a couple of weeks until I get the head back from being done; although it’s cost a fair bit more money there’s not much point in not getting the most out of the car from the start, I think.  It’s fitted with a set of Kent Cams and was seeing nearly 200bhp, so this should be achievable with that combination, and should make it fun to say the least.

Off with its head!

The last thing at the moment is the sills – they had a lot of stone damage, and surface rust as a result of being left for so long; I have stripped and painted one side and have the other to do, but both need tiny repairs at the very rears which should be a morning’s work and no more.

So, as it stands, there’s a few days’ work to go to get it all back together, once the head returns, and then I want to get it MOTed as soon as possible.  There’s a possibility I may be doing an event before the Sunseeker as a shakedown as I’d hate to have a small issue cause a problem on it, but whether this happens will all depend on if everything goes to plan.  At the weekend I’ll get some decent pictures of the car as it stands, and hopefully get the sills finished off.