Skoda Rally Blog

Since last week, I’ve had a bit of time to spend on the car, cleaning it up and assessing what’s needed.  Here’s what I found:

Firstly, cleanup – this didn’t take as long as last year – the roads were much dryer than before, so it ‘only’ took about 2 hours to jetwash the car off – there’s still a great deal of mud stuck to the car, even when it doesn’t look too dirty.  Obviously I don’t want to leave all that there as the car won’t be seeing much use in the foreseeable future, so it needs to be as clean as possible.  Last year it took me ages to clean all the mud off the road, so I decided to do it on a tarpaulin this year to make it easier:

Clean up!

And once it was all done, and de-stickered, looked much better:

That's better.

Next up, assessing the damage.  The first thing was looking at the driveshaft, which had sheared off where it goes into the outer CV joint.  Once I’d removed the boot, the CV just fell off, revealing this:

Shake it up baby...

A cleanly sheared off shaft, just twisted off at the end.  Once I’d taken the outer CV apart, I got the end bit out, which was a little more revealing:

...Twist and shout.

As you can see, the splines are twisted, and the shaft has just said “enough” and broken off.  I’ve done some asking around and had some helpful advice and info from people on britishrally.co.uk and the general consensus is to fit new shafts and life them, stripping and examining after each event.  However, one guy has a Golf which uses the same shafts, and he had a similar failure on a brand new shaft with only 300 miles on it.  I am still unsure what to do, but there’s no immediate rush; I will look into the possibility of getting some stronger shafts made up as I don’t want to suffer a DNF on the car’s next outing (which may well be Sunseeker 2013, alas!).

Other than that, it was time to see what happened to the power steering pump; while moving the car about, I realised the power steering had failed again, and saw there was no fluid left in the reservoir.  I was surprised to see that the loose union wasn’t the cause of this second failure, it was another problem – the low pressure feed into the pump had a cut in it, so that’s something else to look at.  The pump, however, is dead – it was whining like hell after refilling as I had expected, so I am hoping the damage is just down to that and not the rack as well.  Time to order a new pump, which shouldn’t be too expensive.  Or rather won’t, once I’ve found out what it is, as the pump isn’t one from an Ibiza 16v, according to the books I have seen, as the inlet is at a different angle…. a bit of experimentation is in order.

And aside from a few bits an pieces, that’s it really.  At ‘normal’ prices, the damage from the Sunseeker is as follows:

Power steering pump:  £80
Driveshaft: £70
Lost fuel cap £150.

So, with a stupid error, I’ve pretty much doubled the cost of getting the car back up and running.  D’oh.