Skoda Rally Blog

OK, a quick summary.

Firstly, I did the 10k run. Which was amazing as I had been properly sick for 2 weeks beforehand, and I’m still (a week later) not over it. But I did finish, which was an achievement, and in 1:02:40, which wasn’t great, but considering I couldn’t walk to the car the weekend before, was a good effort.

Secondly, I’ve not sold N158UBD yet. I’ve had a few people interested in it, but as yet it’s not sold. Which might be a bonus in view of the third piece of news….

… I’ve been off all week, and the idea was to seam-weld the new shell. But I’ve not done it because getting a roll cage for the car isn’t proving to be straightforward. The new shell is a “Reinforced Body” one, which has a different inner sill shape to the older (Favorit-based) shell – it curves up at the front, in front of the door opening. This would mean a minor modification to the new roll cage at manufacture (which I would be happy to provide measurements for – it just means the tube needs to be a bit shorter with an angle on it. Phoned Rollcentre (makers of the current cage, which is a very nice piece of kit), and they said they wouldn’t make one to fit. This is despite it being made to order. He said it was made on a jig, so “not possible”, which, frankly, is just coded talk for “I’m a lazy, miserable git who can’t be arsed to accomodate a paying customer”. My other questions were met with useless, lazy responses, and his solution to the problem was to buy a standard cage and then have me cut the feet off and re-weld them!

So at the moment I’m in limbo. The alternative of a weld-in cage fitted by a manufacturer would be lovely, but would break the budget. Money’s tight at the mo, so I’m thinking that maybe I’d be better off giving up, which I’m really not happy about as I spent a full day removing the awful bitumen soundproofing from the floor (and still have the burns and stains from it to prove it).