Skoda Rally Blog

Well, after getting the car ‘running’, I had a few more things to sort out. First up, moving the engine across to a more sensible position and adding a driveshaft spacer has meant that with any luck I won’t be popping any more driveshaft inner CV joints out. There were a few more little things that needed doing, but thankfully most of them were simple, like making the throttle pedal work with the new cable, etc. But amazingly the fast idle works OK, so the car is actually dead easy to start from cold – one ‘false start’ and then it works – no pedal required, just turn the key and away we go.

But there’s something much more exciting! My new wide-band O2 sensor arrived! If you don’t know what this is, it’s a device that goes into the exhaust pipe (near the engine) and allows accurate measurement of the fuel/air mixture that the engine is burning. This is crucial because the engine runs best at around 14.5 kg of air to 1 kg of fuel, and making this measurement by ‘intuitive’ means (i.e. guesswork) like I did with the previous installation is hit-and-miss at best. This allows a totally scientific, accurate tuning of the engine, so we went for a drive for about an hour with Kev in the passenger’s seat, measuring the amount of fuel at given engine speeds and loads, and then re-programming the MegaSquirt as we went. The end result was a reasonably driveable car – it’s not perfect, but it’s driveable, and much better than the old engine in terms of behaving itself, grunt, and fuel consumption. There’s plenty more to do, but it’s a good starting point.

When we got back, we found that the tracking was MILES off, and I mean a very long way. Kwik-Fit wanted ?40 to do the tracking, and I’m not paying that, so we improvised with a couple of lengths of straight metal run on the centre of the wheels to the front of the car, and then measuring between the two – it worked pretty well, and the car drives a lot better now, funnily enough!

RallyDay 2005 – this was the time pressure in getting the car running. I didn’t have any real chance to drive the car apart from the brief test, so I was half expecting the car not to make it to Castle Combe, let alone round the track for 5 laps and then back home again! There was a problem getting it started, but this was traced to the plug on the back of the ECU – plugging it back in made it run like a dream again, and it barely missed a beat on the way there, much to my surprise. There’s a bit of a mis-fire around 3500-4000 rpm, but I think that’s the ignition, as the mixture looks fine there Weird.

And then we hit the traffic – it was really heavy, and at the gate that I was supposed to go in via, we got waved on into more traffic. And the only other entrance wasn’t the right one, but fortunately the guys on the gate weren’t jobsworths, and we got in OK, and parked up, next to Andreas Claridge, who is the only other person in my class in the Tempest Rallysprint next weekend. Had a wonder around and saw a few nice cars – RS200 and Mk.1 RS1600s, and got signed up for the track time.

Had 5 laps on the track, which was good fun – every other car on the track was way quicker, but still had a good time. Tyre pressures were a mile off, so the back was drifting all over the place. Still, I managed to catch up with an RS500 in one of the chicanes (so much so that I needed to brake mid-corner to avoid hitting him!), and keep up with a 6R4 during a long corner – obviously as soon as the throttle came into the equation then he shot off, but for about 10 seconds there was no difference in our distance! Most importantly, got through the time without hitting anything, or blowing up! The car stalled after I came into the pits, but started OK again, which was handy. Parked up, and went for a wander and saw a few people I know, and took some pictures.

And then….. the rain! It was chucking it down, and this really put the mockers on, so after an hour or so (with so sign of a break) I felt it was time to go home, and off I trotted again. The car was (once more) good, and I did some logging to allow a great program called MSTweak3000 to work out a better map for the engine – a really impressive thing this, so I now have a revised map that I can put on the car to see how it goes…..