Skoda Rally Blog

Last time out I had a small list of things to complete, and I’d bought everything to do it.  The original plan was to complete this on Saturday, but unfortunately real life got in the way of that, so I had to spend the weekend looking after Tammie who’d hurt her back for the first time ever.  Fortunately she’s OK now and even more fortunately I have this week off, so I’ve spent today finishing off all the little things on my list in the garage.

The first thing was to sort out the breather arrangement – it had been bodged together previously and looked very dodgy, so a quick trip to Thread and Pipe up the road saw the correct fitting added to the inlet hose, and then the setup all finished off – now any breathed gas will be fed back into the inlet, as it should be.  The engine doesn’t breathe at all heavily, however, so that’s all good.

Breathing properly is important.

Next up, an oil change, and for this I needed to drive the car for a bit, and for that I needed to put some fuel in, so a handy time to calibrate the fuel gauge.  What wasn’t so handy was that putting 10 litres in made no difference to the fuel gauge reading.  20 litres registered an extra 1/8 on the gauge, so clearly it’s not up to scratch, and I’ll need to work on it in the future.  For now, though, I’ll have to run a large reserve of fuel and try not to run out on the Sunseeker.  Hmm.  While out and about, I made use of a local half-mile marker to calibrate the Terratrip which now works flawlessly.  I’ve said this before, and then had them die on the day, so we’ll see if the 404 is any better than previous ones!

On the upside, the car drives like a pussycat – granted the clutch is heavy and binary in operation, and it’s not a quiet shopping car, but it’s very pleasant in traffic and will be a nice relaxing drive in between stages.  Once the oil was up to temperature, back to take the sumpguard off and do an oilchange which was routine, but a chance to do a spanner check on everything underneath, which was all as it should be.  The thing that is really odd about the Seat is that most of it is really well built and seems professional – lockwired fasteners, well-made rigid pipes, etc., and now and again I come across something which just seems out of place; the sumpguard has a shield on one side which is a bit of mudflap material, and it was held to the sumpguard with nuts and bolts, which would be  really hard to get to in practice – meaning you’d have to remove it from the chassis rail instead when you remove the sumpguard, which is a pain too.  I replaced the nuts and bolts with rivnuts, and now it’ll be a piece of cake to take off, and still keep the mud and stones out of the engine bay.

See the rivnut, deep in the engine bay?

The rest was just bits and pieces – the towing eyes were not a “contrasting colour”, and it’s difficult to contrast with Council Yellow, but I’ve done it with Hammerite Red – helped at the front by painting the surround in matt black; the bumper on the car had been repainted from the original red and in this area it was a right mess; painting this not only highlights the towing eye, but also stops the front of the car looking like a piece of scrap:

Neat.

It looks better at 30 paces, honestly.

The harnesses are now fitted into the car, and you can see how neatly the bit of velcro keeps the intercom cable in place.  As I said on Friday, I’m really pleased with these, I hope Prima have a lot of orders now that FIA harnesses are the norm for rally cars.

Nice new harnesses

And where I sit is ready to go – everything is back in place, and looks great; all the controls work as they should.

The office.

And that is just about it.  Everything is crossed off of the “To Do” list – the car is ready to rally as it stands in the drive, right now.  There are a couple of cosmetic things to attend to – it needs stickers which have been sent today, and it needs a polish as it’s rather dull-looking, but that can wait for Wednesday or Thursday.  I actually feel a bit weird as the car is ready so early!  Anyway, as it stands, here it is:

Ready for the forests.

Just need to change the tyres and job’s a good ‘un.