Skoda Rally Blog

This weekend has been…..long. And busy, hence me doing everything in one lump. It started on Friday afternoon…..

The previous issue with the car was the lack of oil pressure, and this was thought to be mostly down to worn big-end and particularly main bearings – certainly initial examination had shown this was very likely, and the lack of pressure (about 20psi down on where it should be) wasn’t good. Eventually the new bearings arrived from the Czech Republic, and they were firstly badly wrapped and secondly one big end was damaged. This would have been a disaster had I not bought a spare set a while ago, so luckily I didn’t need to worry, but when you send something as fragile as shell bearings, a bit more than a sheet of newspaper is needed for protection!

Next up was getting everything ready. Now I’d been told that this was possible in-situ without having to remove the crank, which meant it would be a lot quicker, but was a slightly odd way to do it. Anyway, I thought I’d give it a go, so got the sump off again, and then removed all the bearing caps (3 for the crank, 4 for the pistons), and found that it was indeed possible to get the main bearings out with gentle persuasion they would rotate around in their housings. And what a shock that was when I got the middle one out – it was absolutely knackered! A lot worse than the lower half that I’d already seen (which was already knackered), and the front bearing was even worse! The rear one wasn’t too bad (looked more like a normal high mileage road bearing), and then removing the ones from the conrods also showed a fair bit of wear (but nothing like what had happened to the main bearings). Here they are with the new ones as a comparison.

Next was getting the new ones in place – to quote Haynes, the reversal of the removal procedure. The front one was a bit tricky to get lined up properly (especially as the Skoda engine has a circular thrust bearing which needed to be protected), but third time lucky saw it all done. Then it was just a case of putting everything back together again (a la Haynes manual), taking care to oil everything as it was replaced, check the engine turned OK at each stage (not simple when you have 4 loose pistons to deal with), and torquing everything up. Once they were all in and happy, oil pump, strainer and sump went back on, but I had to leave it overnight for the sealer on the sump gasket to go off, as one of the sump bolts had sheared removing it and it wasn’t straightforward to remove it in situ, so i felt it was best left as is.

Next morning, the moment of truth. Spun the engine, no oil pressure. Span it again, nothing. Did this several times and I was starting to get really worried. I’d checked everything at least twice before moving onto the next stage, but maybe I’d missed something. To save the battery I pulled the spark plugs out, and the engine really whizzed round, maybe 500rpm or so. And suddenly, OIL PRESSURE! And not only that, but GOOD Oil pressure! Before it hadn’t had anything at 500rpm, it was registering about 40psi. I put everything back, fired it up, and it sounded sweet and had a right-on-the-money 3.5 bar at 1500rpm. Brilliant.

Now there was the next thing to do. I’ve been very fortunate to have had my diff worked on by the extremely helpful and thorough Steph Keldsyke, and he has rebuilt the diff for me, with a suitable amount of preload, and even managed to get it back to me in time for this weekend. If you want anything like this done, then I can thoroughly recommend him for a professional, prompt and knowledgeable service and work of the highest quality – email him here But I had a choice. Either just fit the diff into a standard gearbox, or go for an attempt with the close ratio gearkit I’ve been working with. This is a long story (and I won’t put it all here), but it’s the kit i should have had nearly 2 years ago, and no, I’ve not finally got it from Chris Bennett. Anyway, the main problem was that the standard Skoda gearbox means a top speed of 170mph. Well, more correctly, the car is geared to do that – it’s all set up for economy and relaxed motorway driving, which isn’t really much cop in a rally car. The other gearbox gears the car for around 100mph – fortunately Skoda homologated a massive range of options in this department, and these are from one of these sets. BUT they were completely untested. I couldn’t just ignore it though; I’m not sure how long I’ll be doing rallying for, but I know this will be the last time I do Rally GB, and I really wanted to have a ‘proper’ car, and the gearbox is a massive part of this. So I dedicated a couple of days to this, and found that there was some machining needed – one of the shafts was a bit over-size and one of the gears was too tall – when all the gears and synchros were built up, it meant 4th was locking onto the shaft and this would seem to have been the cause of the problems all those years ago with Chris Bennett’s box….

Once that machining had been done (thanks massively to Damien at Retel EMD), the box could be built up. I have a copy of the Skoda manual (thanks Ken!) and built it up, but it wouldn’t work. The gears all seemed to select OK, but it just wouldn’t turn smoothly, sounding as if something was catching. Long story short, 4 rebuilds later, I found the problem, and the easiest way of correcting it was to use a standard crownwheel and pinion, which handily doesn’t alter the overall gearing much (as it was only slightly lower on the S/C one), and is legal to do (and being a production ratio is obviously legal). However, I only had one in the box in the car (because I’d cleaned the damn garage out last week, I chucked 2 away!!!!), so today I’ve removed the box from the car, stripped it and used the parts from that to rebuild the box.

I’m OK at most mechanical things (although you’d never know it, given my history with R477 KRU), but gearboxes are the thing I detest the most. Firstly because they are a real trial to get in and out (particularly now on the Skoda – the engine needs to be dropped, adding a couple of hours to the process in total), and ‘cos they’re a pain in the bum to get back in place being heavy and awkward, and mostly because they have caused me so much trouble and it’s not possible to test one 100% until you drive the car. But this one seemed OK – every gear selected OK, neutral worked as it should, everything, and I’d fitted new bearings and shimmed them exactly as Skoda say. So I decided to go for it, put it back together with the LSD, and put it in the car. This meant a 10-hour day working on the car today, but although I’ve not driven it on the road (as I don’t have any insurance right now), I’ve spun it up, and it has 5 forward and 1 reverse gear, and they seem spot on. Perhaps, just maybe, things are coming together. I hope so, ‘cos I am beyond tired – like Ripley with the Alien, it’s been in my life so long now, I can’t remember anything else.