How Not To Build A Rally Car

[altezzaclub]

I'd given up turning around and was reversing down by now, and was asked to go down and move the ambulances, at which time Ashley's face lit up with glee and she piled in for the ride down. We were all set for racing ambulances but found Steve and a couple of 4WDs had dragged them out of the way and were clearing the little space as a helicopter was due in. He had left the 2-way radio from the rally car up at his crash site, which was just a little further up passed the bad one and wanted to go up and get it, but I figured if we didn't get the truck out of town we would be loading the rally car in the dark.

 

So he hitched a ride up in a 4WD and we went down to Pete. He had moved the radiator hose so it wasn't kinked and filled it with water and it ran fine while the water dribbled out. While we were deciding whether to drive a very rolled car back through the center of Orange or go and get the truck, Steve phoned and said he had the radio and was waiting for a lift down, We had left when the medic heli was circling the stranded ambulances trying to find a landing path in, but he'd actually stood there and got pictures! Back up the hill and I met him coming down in one of the 4WDs, and when we got back Pete and Ashley had driven the car into town. The control said they had cancelled stage 5 because of the crash, and then had to cancel stage 6 as the First Responders had all gone to the crash site as soon as they found out... so we had done all the stages... but hadn't handed in the road book to be counted as a finisher!

 

We finally loaded it in the dark in the almost-deserted showgrounds, & I stopped to talk to the Clerk of the Course (Event Director) as he was packing up. He said we might be able to get out times accepted if we hurried into town where the scorers were working flatout. Then Pete came over to see what was happening and said he had got Ashley to hand our card in when they arrived just as she was meant to!!

 

So we rolled AFTER the rally, seeing that stage never counted! We never got time to take revenge on Leichty, and of course he will rag Steve for years about rolling. Give us a clean run and we will whip his ass, its just a matter of time.

 

Steve came 14^th overall, after two dud stages with the puncture and the slower car, and the 10^th place in a stage was great. There is a 2minute gap in the results between 9^th and 10th, and that is where he should have been. However you need a clean run to do it...

 

We found TRDKE70 and Steerfast at the prizegiving, they came down from BNE & won awards for coming 4^th and 5^th in their KE70 and RA65. It was great to finally meet people off the forums here, especially such great guys.

 

There was another white RA40 Celica there, an immaculate one the driver said had been built twenty years ago and not touched, they were 16th. The Celica GT4 we have run up against before came 17th, a Levin was 26^th an MR2 30th, and a KP61 Starlet was 31st, so Toyotas were there in force.

 

Amongst the non-finishers were an AE86 and and RA23 Celica.

 

So we have some chassis pulling to get done, a lot of welding in of structural engine bay panels, a roof panel-beaten, another radiator support front nose welded in, and we need new doors, new front guards, new bonnet, & new windscreen.

 

It was all just a stress test of the welding a lot of people thought was crap- our strut spring bases, our cross-strut bar (saved the whole driver's side behind the turret from collapsing over) our seat mounts, our chassis welding (the actual box section chassis is fine, all the damage is above it)

 

..and my rustic farm-spec roof vent made from the Valvoline oil tin got destroyed before I got a decent photo of it!

 

We picked the truck up this morning and stripped a mudguard off to see how bad it is underneath, and made a plan to move forward. Chassis-pull it, or cut it off and fit a new front, or get another shell and build that, or change to a KE70 now instead of being stuck in Celicas...

[67Rolla-Ken]

Wow, sounds like you guy's really saved the day!

 

 

I'm sure you guy's will have her back up and running in no time!

Fantastic write-up as always.

[snot35]

Love the write up. Good luck with the repairs. Hope that driver is OK too.

 

It must have been the weekend for it, we had rally SA and there was a fair amount of carnage this year.

[corollaart]

Thats a buggar. Iooks like a big month in the wool shed coming up.

 

Steve , Kieth,If you need a hand with any think or just need a hand for a weekend pm me.

 

Just heard about the guy that had the big crash very sad news

 

rob

Edited May 27, 2013 by corollaart

[InSaNiTy]

It's a very sad day today for rallying and motorsport.

 

Thanks for the offer Rob, there's definitely plenty to do...

 

Keith worked tirelessly for 8 days straight in the freezing cold up at the woolshed leading up to the rally. I helped over the weekend but had to go back to uni. It was this commitment that ensured the car ran perfectly as always, I can't ever thank you enough Keith.

 

Keith's update was thorough so I'll just give a quick summary of the event:

 

Hit the first stage cautiously to settle in, car under steered gently with half worn steers on and new drives. Despite a few rookie errors that both me and Ashley (navigator) seem to always have the first two stages, all was good. Beat Leicthy by 6 seconds.

 

Just settling into stage two and then got a front left puncture 6kms from the end, was pretty annoyed, just kept driving on it. Ash fell off the notes again and we ended up going up the wrong road for a km because someone ran through the tape and didn't put it back up. dodged a head on with the Skyline that had caught us because of our flat tyre. Got to the end and there's dad and Keith, as always the most dedicated service crew I've ever seen, they tour around in The Girl's blue KE70 to meet us at the end of stages even though it means they miss spectating due to it. They helped install the spare, and then we realised we only had 6 rims left. Ash and I drove back to service and got a new drive tyre put on our only spare wheel, so now we were running two new Dunlop drive tyres on the front. Keith and dad went to the wreckers and picked up 4 steelies and then got 2 new steer tyres put on two of them.

 

 

So we head out of the service park behind Leichty to hopefully run behind him for the next long 36km stage. we get to the start and we're following Leichty as another Datsun (1600) cuts us off and goes between Leichty and I. there wasn't enough room to drive alongside him to say something and the officials had already given them a leave time before we could do anything.

 

So sure enough, don't even get half way though the stage and we're stuck behind two old blokes going on a Sunday drive. I tried my horn, flashing lights, practically denting their rear bumper, but they were either completely oblivious or weren't going to move over. I couldn't pull away from them exiting corners as they had equal power, so we were stuck behind them, and I was getting angrier by the km. This isn't the first time this has happened either for those wondering. They didn't move over until 2km until the end! And they didn't even move over properly at that. Either way I didn't see them after the next corner. Turns out these new drive tyres on the front were incredible compared to the half worn steer tyres we had on previously. Chalk and cheese. No more understeer!

 

We just finish the stage and start heading back to service only to run out of fuel only 3kms after the stage... So once again Keith and dad are back out in the KE70 to save us haha. we eventually get back to service and we throw the new steer tyres on the front as an experiment to see if this whole steer/drive tyre thing was actually worth worrying about.

 

Get out to stage 4 (stage 1 redone), behind a skyline turbo this time to make sure the same thing didn't happen again. We actually won our class and came 10th outright on this particular stage. :) finally things were starting to go well, it wasn't even a push as such, just nothing went wrong for a change. :)

 

Now it was time for stage 5, I'd worked out these new steer tyres were indeed even better than those new dunlop drive tyres as they were supposed to be. Ashley had settled in well, car was absolutely perfect, I found myself hitting 5th gear quite a bit, you could say I was having a push. Generally I get warnings, or moments, where you know you need to back off a bit. I didn't get that. We were flying along but still tidy. There were a series of humps that I'd been getting faster over... Basically I didn't slow down enough for the third one, because of the speed I let the car get a tiny bit untidy around a left hander. Probably should had been in second not third gear... but as Ashley says I wasn't listening :P.

 

The driver's rear quarter hung out just enough to clip something (can't find any marks, I think it was the tyre) a metre or so before the hump. Whatever it hit pushed back causing the navs rear quarter to come out, precisely as we hit the hump, and as we landed the new grippy front left tyre dug in under the car and we did a slow 3/4 roll, with the car stopping in the middle of the road on the driver's side. If I had just backed off a tiny bit, I could have kept it tidy and it wouldn't have happened. Just pushed a tiny bit much at the wrong place.

 

Turns out that only 200m down from our roll, the fatal roll off the side of the road had already taken place by the 180B Datsun and they were stuck there for 30 mins before anyone found them. You simply couldn't see them from the road.

 

We're going to see our panel beater on Wednesday, and if that turns out too expensive, I just bought another shell today. So no need to fear, as I promised to Keith, the Woolshed Rally Car will be back precisely how it was at the start of the stage, in time for John's river on the 24th August- 3 months!

 

Cheers

 

 

Thats a buggar. Iooks like a big month in the wool shed coming up.

 

Steve , Kieth,If you need a hand with any think or just need a hand for a weekend pm me.

 

Just heard about the guy that had the big crash very sad news

 

rob

[altezzaclub]

hmmm... Well, its a Celcia and there's no use WASTING it at a wreckers..

[InSaNiTy]

It's even white... wow, should we be cutting it up instead? Those panels don't look too bad? Hmm... what occupies your thinking?

[InSaNiTy]

Photographic evidence of old men going for Sunday drives and not moving over. How hard is it to check your mirror once a minute?

 

15kms later...

 

 

They were nice people who did stop and push the Celica back over with me when we rolled it though, so I'll hold my tongue...

 

 

Keith, we're going to have the loudest, most ridiculous, outrageous novelty horn ever installed in a car before the next rally. :)

Edited June 5, 2013 by InSaNiTy

[aspheric]

A subtle nudge now and then might get the point across :lovin:

[luk3333]

I want to go to orange just to look around your wreckers. Is that a datto behind the celica?

[altezzaclub]

Yeah, old Dattos there, old KEs, old Coronas... Some guys came down for the rally and I met them at the wreckers. They left with a Stanza that had been there for over a year on their trailer.

 

Those photos are very telling! Jeez that Celcia is a big girl! Look at the second photo, its miles wider than a 1600.

 

We will have to practice subtle nudges in the paddock bashers! Still, they were good enough to help when you were blocking the road...

 

The panelbeater has dropped out, so its all on for the Uni holidays as we do it ourselves.- it will be bloody freezing in that woolshed!

[67Rolla-Ken]

You'll just have to work harder to stay warm! :D

[altezzaclub]

faaaark! Nearly wet myself reading this!! My wrecker is pretty keen... I feel sorry for the girl. In our local paper-

 

http://www.centralwesterndaily.com.au/story/1552621/red-white-and-a-big-blue/?cs=103

 

 

NICOLE Stevens was “gobsmacked” wrecking yard staff towed her car away, despite it being a different colour, having a different registration number and being parked in a different street to the car they were supposed to collect.

By the time Mrs Stevens tracked her car down its wheels and battery had already been removed.

Mrs Stevens, who works at Glenroi Heights Public School, said she did a double take when her white 1986 Laser wasn’t parked in Maxwell Avenue where she’d left it on Friday, May 24.

“I automatically just thought my car had been stolen,” Mrs Stevens said. “I just couldn’t believe it had been stolen in the middle of the day, that someone would be brazen enough to do it.”

After reporting the “theft” to police, Mrs Stevens thought there was little chance the car would be returned.

 

Realising she couldn’t get by without a vehicle Mrs Stevens spent the weekend looking at cars online and eventually put down a deposit on a Holden Astr, but when she arrived at school the following Monday a colleague informed her someone had seen the car being towed away.

On Monday Mrs Stevens and her father drove around Orange’s towing garages until someone suggested she try Great Western Auto Wreckers in Forest Road.

“When I walked in, straight away I saw my car with all the tyres off, the licence plates off and I looked under the hood and the battery had been taken out,” she said. “I said that’s my car, I’m the owner.”

Mrs Stevens said the workers admitted they’d picked up the wrong car and asked her to come back in an hour after they’d put everything they’d removed back in place.

“They didn’t even seem sorry,” she said.

When she picked up the car she saw the red laser which the staff had been supposed to tow away on May 26.

Mrs Stevens said she informed police the car had been found and said she was told she could take civil action for compensation but she has decided not to.

“I’ve forked out enough,” she said.

Mrs Stevens said if she’d received an apology in the first place she wouldn’t have entertained the thought of taking the issue further.

“No one even apologised, I can’t believe it happened.”

Great Western Auto Wreckers manager Leanne Porter said the mix-up was an honest mistake.

“It was miscommunication,” she said.

“The car that was supposed to be picked up was exactly the same. We work on models, not colours.”

Ms Porter said the two cars were manufactured within a month of each other....

contd...

[InSaNiTy]

Hahahahahahaha

[InSaNiTy]

Not the Woolshed rally car... but... Still an RA40 with an 18R-G... Look at those revs! This is to all those saying they're too fat and that the 18R-G's too old!

 

 

EPIC.

Edited June 9, 2013 by InSaNiTy