Skoda Rally Blog

Today I took the car for a first lengthy driving test, having fitted oil pressure and temperature gauges to get to the bottom of the oil light issue. The drive was to work, about 25 miles away, and involves some stop-start traffic as well as a couple of decent-speed thrashes. Towards the end of the second thrash, the oil pressure seemed to have dropped off a bit, as the oil temperature rose. This is not a good sign, but at least I had some (admittedly not that great!) instrumentation rather than just a light when it’s too late…

Some wise advice from the britishrally forum sent me back to my original idea – replace the shells. But to do that I had to find out what size they were, and that meant repeating what I did after the first engine died, dropping the sump, and in this case getting the oil pump strainer off and removing a big end and main bearing cap to find out what size bearings were in there.

This went reasonably quickly (took about an hour in all), and revealed a very nicely built bottom end, and also a crank that was on the original bearing sizes, so these have now been ordered. I hope they come quickly as it will mean I can still MOT the car on Tuesday, but I don’t want to put these ones back in only to have to do the work all over again for the new bearings. In the meantime, a picture:

On the left, a main bearing from a car that had done about 85000 miles – it’s mostly unmarked aside from a bit of wear at the edge.
Next up, the main bearing from the rally car. Now do you believe that rally cars have a hard life? This hasn’t done a lot of miles, and in the time I was using the engine it got an oil change every other event (I’m glad I did it now!), but you can see that it’s far more worn than the standard item, very polished, and has some scoring in it too. The crankpin that runs on this looked OK though, which is a relief.
Next, a new big-end for comparison. The scoring on this led to its replacement, but I thought it was worth seeing what they start out like
Finally, the big end from the rally car – not looking too bad, but still fairly worn and polished.

So, here goes…. although it’s only another couple of hours’ work to change these, I’m now a bit worried!