Skoda Rally Blog

Well, we’re in the Sunseeker. And we’re seeded last again! Which is actually a GOOD thing – firstly because it means we can go first on the Friday night (third time in a row), and secondly because we won’t have anyone behind us on a forest stage unless they have problems. Which I’m happy about, and it also means we have the Beckett Bros in front of us so we have someone to aim for. Last year we were behind on the first few forest stages but then Paul told me to pull my finger out and we got in front until the cat broke up, blocked the exhaust and meant we lost speed and therefore finished last. Again.

That’s not going to happen this year as I’m ready to really give it some beans. Relatively speaking, anyway. This will probably be my only rally this year apart from WRGB should we choose to do it again (we both have shiny new credit-card style MSA International licences, just in case), although I would really like to actually finish Somerset stages one year, so maybe we’ll give that a go. It all depends on money and whether I’ve made any changes to the car.

Talking of which, the first thing that’s happened is I’ve cleaned the poor thing – it was filthy inside, and took two buckets of hot soapy water to get it anywhere near clean once the seats were out. But removing the seats showed the true horror of the damage to the floor – on Paul’s side it was about 3″ above where it should have been, and totally convex instead of flat. I had thought I should leave it, but amazingly using a bit of 3″x2″ wood as a former and hitting it with a sledgehammer worked remarkably well – so well, in fact that it now looks better than it has done for a while. As with many of my ‘projects’ I didn’t take any “before” pictures, but it was pretty bad. Honest.

The other thing to do was to remove all the crappy sound-proofing (which cracks each time the floor bends), so 30 minutes with a hot air gun and a scraper, then petrol, then brake cleaner left a very spanky-looking (but grey) floor. And then weld up the drain holes in the floor, which were the source of the mud in the first place. As ever, not straightforward as the welder decided today would be the day it wouldn’t feed wire properly, so had to work out how to fix that, but then finally got those holes welded up, and then painted the lot with thick, white gloopy hammerite. It looks good. Way better than it has any right to. And hopefully now it’ll stay dry and relatively clean in there too.

The other thing that’s happened is that my gearbox is away being fitted with a close-ratio straight cut gear set. OK, this has cost £800, meaning that the gearbox and diff is £1200 worth (or cost that, anyway), but I think it’s the way forward. Once I work out how to re-write megasquirt code to read the Skoda flywheel (which isn’t straightforward as the code isn’t very well documented, IMHO), then I can build a ‘proper’ engine (under Group A regs there is a fair bit of freedom), and then use the MPi injection system (with appropriate changes to the injectors) to produce a fully-legal, but tuneable and powerful engine. If I can get 110bhp out of it, I’ll be happy. But at the moment, just need to get the thing back together for 2 weeks’ time. And buy some more tyres!