Skoda Rally Blog

…. I’ve always maintained that the Skoda will stay as a reliable and inexpensive rally car. Yes, this has its disadvantages, as of course I’m never going to be a “front runner” in any class. But I don’t have a great deal of money, and certainly not to spend on the car at the moment. So this really is going to limit the performances that we put in. But it will have some big upsides. Firstly, the car doesn’t owe me a great deal of money; if something really unfortunate happens and it gets written off, then it won’t be the end of the world. If it ‘just’ needs re-shelling, then we’re only talking about £500 if not less to get a good car, re-shell the current mechanics into it, and get some money back for the other standard bits (or have a big bonfire). So that’s good. The other main upside for this is that the car is only mildly tuned – it goes very well for a Favorit, but compared to some of the other cars in the field (well, OK, compared to all the other cars in the field), it’s not quick; something that was accentuated by the nature of Smeatharpe (i.e. some long straights, and good weather).

But I’ve always wanted to have a car with programmable injection on it. Don’t ask me why, ‘cos I don’t really know. it’s just always been something that I’ve wanted to do, so I could plug a laptop in, set the car up, and get the best out of it. So I’ve done a lot of looking, but all the commercially available aftermarket ECUs don’t come cheap; ?600 is the bottom line, and that’s just for the ECU kit. Then you need throttle bodies and injectors, a manifold and all sorts of other gubbins. Which basically is too much money, especially if it’s going to be spent on the “cheap” Skoda. I’d seen a couple of “DIY” projects on the net, all of which seemed to be half-baked at best; some of them were still in the “mixing the dough” phase of the project. Boo hoo!

The thing I like about the Internet is that it works a bit like my brain does; it can go off at tangents. The reason being was that I decided to look on eBay for throttle bodies, and saw something that looked ideal; they are throttle bodies from a Kawasaki GPz1100. I thought these could be ideal (especially as they start at £4.99), but didn’t know the internal bore. Spent some time googling to find the internal bore, and found a guy who was cobbling them onto another motorbike engine. And in his links page was the holy grail!

Yes, a DIY EFI system that actually works! – it’s easy to build, you can get a complete kit, and there are lots of people who are already using it successfully. This is great. And it gets better! They do a kit for a scrolling display of all vital settings and readings! This is just wonderful! It looks like it’ll cost about ?180 or so. Which is doable. All I’ll need is to make an inlet manifold. This won’t be easy, but it will be possible. As it’s a weird set of injectors/bodies to put on such an engine, it’ll obviously need to be a one-off, but I think I can do it; it’s basically a flat plate that bolts to the head, with four tubes coming off it to the injectors.

First up, I need to win the auction for the injectors/throttle bodies. Once they are with me, I can make the manifold; handily I have a spare head for the Fav, so I can make it fit that. This should be interesting.

On the downside, the front shock on the Fav is knackered – it’s sicking out everywhere, so I need a new one. Which is going to be £150 minimum. Bugger. And this is a cheap rally car!