Skoda Rally Blog

This morning it was time to see if everything worked OK, but first there was a list of things to fix before taking the car out – a new thermostat housing was needed as the old one leaked, re-filling the gearbox oil, replacing a few bolts and nuts here and there, but in about an hour the list was checked off and all was ready to go. Nothing else to do after running it up to check there were no leaks but to go to the Post Office and tax the beast (handy, being 1st September), and then take it up the road.

It starts fine, and sounds sweet, but the mapping is completely wrong now – it really doesn’t run well at all, compared with the pussycat that it was before.  This isn’t unexpected as the cylinder head is completely different to the previous one, having had far more work done to it (still within the rules, of course), but I wasn’t expecting it to be this far out – it’s so far out that it makes it very difficult to drive, particularly as the engine is brand new so I can’t rev the hell out of it.  However, a trip up and down the road went OK, and nothing fell off, broke or burst into flames.

Another thing struck me as I drove it – the diff is nowhere near as vicious as I expected – you can feel that it’s working, but it’s not hard work to drive, so that’s a relief.  However, I need to put a few hundred miles on the engine before I’d risk putting it on the dyno to get the full-throttle fuelling sorted out, so it’ll either mean spending a long time with Paul, the laptop and the wideband O2 meter sorting things out step by step, or to get an extra bit of hardware that will log all the fuelling as I go, and allow much more accurate and quick alteration of the fuel mapping.  The downside is that no-one in the UK seems to have any stock of them, so I’m a bit stuck…. I’m trying to get it ASAP, but it’s looking bad.  Typical!