Skoda Rally Blog

I’m not a fast driver, by any stretch of the imagination, but even I managed to give the Ibiza a fair thrashing on the Sunseeker – about half the stages are fairly slow, 2nd and 3rd gear stuff – and as soon as I did so, the engine was running hot, both oil and water temperatures.  The radiator’s lack of size was covered a fair while ago (it had a 1.4 radiator fitted!), and the large-capacity 2.0 radiator I found after a lot of searching fits well in the front panel, but has an issue – the water inlet and outlet are on the “wrong” side of the radiator for the plumbing the car did have.  This isn’t the end of the world, but needed addressing next.  Fortunately I’m friendly with the staff at the local Motorist’s Discount Centre, and they had a box of radiator hoses that they were happy to lend me so I could measure up.  What was really good was that there were hoses with the right bends and sizes to do the job!  5 hoses (£5!) later, all I needed was some tubing to make up the links between them, and £15 later on eBay I had them on their way to me.  The top one is steel (as it has a take-off for the header tank), and the bottom ones are aluminium, and I’m generally pretty pleased with how it has all gone together:

Cool.

The hoses actually fit better than the originals, in terms of missing bits of the car – I don’t know where the originals came from (it wasn’t a 2.0 16v Ibiza!), but everything looks and fits better now.   Hopefully it will give enough cooling capacity to keep the car cool on the stages; certainly it will have more than it did before!