Rally Car

[aw11rally]

Suspension all done in preperation for the North West Stages.

FRONT
Caster 7 deg
Camber 1 deg negative
Toe in parallel

REAR
Caster (same both side)
Camber 2 deg negative
Toe in 4mm total

Feels very good, front is especially impressive. Very wet roads plus worn R888's isn't usually a good combination however 'she' feels solid, very little understeer. Rear traction is also better than expected but I think that is more down to the Quaife ATB, better be, the price of it!

All is looking good for the weekend apart from the fact that my Range Rover LSE has fired something out of the rear dif, leaving a nice 5p sized exit wound and oil all over the roads of Warrington (we were going to use it to toe the car and spares up to Blackpool). No whining, crunching or other noises of any kind to hint at the destruction within, you can even see the bits of cog in the bottom of the dif if you shine a torch through the hole. Going to keep driving it until it dies, if I do not manage to find a dif/axle in the mean time that is.

Anyone got a spare Range Rover classic axle by chance?

[pistol pete]

dude that is fantastic.. love the idea..
want to see that car in action!!!!

on a side note i think you'll find nik (zombie wings) stopped doing mk1 parts due to lack of interest and is now doing kit car parts...
but you would need to confim
HTH
pete

[aw11rally]

dude that is fantastic.. love the idea..
want to see that car in action!!!!

Get youself to blackpool this weekend then. Scrutineering is at 4pm in the conference centre behind the Norbreck Castle Hotel, there will going to be all kinds of kit to see. Three (ex)WRC cars are confirmed, a 6R4 and a Group B Mazda RX7 along with dozens of top spec mk1 and 2 Escorts.

There are two spectator stages on Blackpool prom on friday night, another two at he same spot on saturday and four on Fleetwood prom, two saturday morning and two in the afternoon. The Fleetwood stage is new and from what I hear it is very fast and very narrow, WRC and Group B stuff should be flat in top, ~120-130mph.

Going to be a great rally this year. Have a look at the website. http://www.nwstages.co.uk/

[Tiamat]

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is the gain from having the 6 speed gearbox?

If anyone says "one more gear" then I will slap them.

Just over £2k on the gearbox is an awful lot of money and was wondering why focus so much cash on just the gearbox.

[LimeyMk1]

One more gear.

Couple of benefits for 6 speed I can think of:
1: A longer 5th gear so that you're cruising at lower revs at high speeds (that's what you get with your average 6 speed mondeo)
2: Closer ratios so the engine remains in the powerband for more time, especially useful for cars with narrow powerbands.

[aw11rally]

The reasons we changed the box:
1) We broke 3 bellhousings and 3 or 4 inner CV's
2) C50 / 52 final drive is far too long, we were hitting over 100mph in 3rd
3) Quaife etc no longer make final drive kits or gear sets for the C50 series box.
4) We wanted a longer 6th to save fuel on the long stages (obviously!)

The reasons we went for the C64:
1) There are lots of crashed Exiges in breakers around the country (box, shifter and shafts were £650 for the lot)
2) The C50 series bell for the 4age bolts directly to the C64 box
3) Quaife and Lotus supply various different gear sets, dog engagement sets, final drive kits, diffs, sequential shift mechanisms etc etc etc for the C64
4) The standard final drive ratio on the Exige S C64 is 4.6ish.
5) We could use the stronger Lotus / Toyota drive shafts from the Exige.

The difference on the road/stage:
1) We can run the kind of negative camber on the rear that we want without smashing CV's and Bells as the new shafts are longer and stronger.
2) The gear changes are now a lot faster and more reliable.
3) With the 4.6 final drive we hit 120mph in 6th at about 7000rpm. 6th in the C64 is the same ratio as 5th in the C50 but the overall final drive ratio is advantageous. With the C50/52 and our 8500rpm red line the car was geared for about 160mph, useless in a rally car with a highly tuned 4AGE.
4) Acceleration is faster.
5) Engine comes on power faster and can be kept in the power band.
6) We can develope the gearbox further with of the shelf parts if we want.

Well worth it I would say. £2100 for a 6 speed short ratio gearbox with an ATB dif is cheap compared to most other options such as a SEDEV or QUAIFE.

[MartG]

There are two spectator stages on Blackpool prom on friday night, another two at he same spot on saturday and four on Fleetwood prom, two saturday morning and two in the afternoon. The Fleetwood stage is new and from what I hear it is very fast and very narrow, WRC and Group B stuff should be flat in top, ~120-130mph.

Going to be a great rally this year. Have a look at the website. http://www.nwstages.co.uk/

Hope you've got some decent tyres - it's snowing here at the moment

Planning on popping in to scrutineering - hopefully see you there

[tonigmr2]

Would love to see it, but it's hours from me. Have fun!

[aw11rally]

There are two spectator stages on Blackpool prom on friday night, another two at he same spot on saturday and four on Fleetwood prom, two saturday morning and two in the afternoon. The Fleetwood stage is new and from what I hear it is very fast and very narrow, WRC and Group B stuff should be flat in top, ~120-130mph.

Going to be a great rally this year. Have a look at the website. http://www.nwstages.co.uk/

Hope you've got some decent tyres - it's snowing here at the moment

Planning on popping in to scrutineering - hopefully see you there

It is snowing here too!

Tyres....hmmm

I've got 4 part worn R888's for the dry and 4 brand new soft R888's which have been cut for wet / standing water.

Unfortunately no snow tyres are available for 16in rims, if there is snow at the weekend we will be chucking some ST165 brakes on the front in place of the 310mm Bremsport 4 pots and putting on standard teardrop 14in rims with gravel tyres.

I hope it melts!! weather forcast looks ok, or it did last night.

See you at scrutineering, make sure you come and say hi at some point.

[cogboy]

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is the gain from having the 6 speed gearbox?

If anyone says "one more gear" then I will slap them.

Just over £2k on the gearbox is an awful lot of money and was wondering why focus so much cash on just the gearbox.

I'm the co-owner of this car. Having 6 speeds wasn't the point of this conversion. If you read aw11rally's recent post and my first post back on page one, we explain why we did this swap - because we broke lots of Toyota driveshafts and bellhousings, because of gear selection problems and because the gearing was far too long for a rally car.

The goal was to have a close ratio transmission and a much lower final drive ratio. As has been said several times, the car would pull 105-110mph in 3rd gear with the 5 speed box. This was hopeless for tight, twisty stages, with short staights, where what we need is acceleration. In competition, we are unlikely to ever need sixth gear. The point is that 2nd, 3rd, 4th & 5th gears are all shorter than the 5 speed box, and the final drive in the 6 speeder is 4.529 vs 3.722 in the 5 speed box.

Fuel economy is also not an issue. On full chat, with the 45 DCOEs, the car doesn't do more than 6 - 7mpg anyway. We really don't give a monkey's about the economy.

Also, if you think 2k is a lot of money for a transmission, have a look at some of Quaife's bespoke gearboxes (once their website is working again). They can cost upwards of 10k.

I think 2k was money well spent, because our gear selection problems last year slightly spoiled the fun of competing and probably cost us at least a couple of class finishes.

[tonigmr2]

Absolutely - as I said earlier Quaife wanted £7K from me. I'm in fear of breaking even the E51 gearbox once my car gets running, or more likely popping driveshafts. Hence I find this a really interesting conversion.

[vashy]

I've had a look at some of your other posts about your mental engine and I can see why you want close ratios! (do you actually have a limiter?!) Sounds like it will be brilliant, good luck at the weekend!

[aw11rally]

Yes we do have a limiter, it also has a flat shift and a launch facility. The problem is we have never managed to get it to work correctly, its rather old and just uses a clutch switch rather than the more modern versions which also take input from a wheel speed sensor.

Basically the rev limiter was cutting in when it shouldn't so we took the fuse out. We now change gear when it feels right!

I think Cogboy had the tacho off the scale when we were stuck in second at Anglesey, the engine survived.

And yes the closer ratios are great.

[cogboy]

I think Cogboy had the tacho off the scale when we were stuck in second at Anglesey, the engine survived.

Errrr, might have just touched 9000rpm a couple of times, but fortunately with my crash helmet on I couldn't hear what that sounded like.

[MartG]

Scrutineering

[cartledge_uk]

Absolutely - as I said earlier Quaife wanted £7K from me. I'm in fear of breaking even the E51 gearbox once my car gets running, or more likely popping driveshafts. Hence I find this a really interesting conversion.

At least you have a E51! I'm wondering if my C52 and flimsy 1a shafts will last the MOT

I'm interested as the 6speed box has to be lighter than the E51, and I need a stronger box I think (although I cant justify the ££ on mine and will probably buy a E51)

PLus it has an extra gear!

[aw11rally]

Unfortunately we went OTL (over time limit) on the last leg of the event. We had a few problems on friday night, but managed to fix them in service on saturday morning. Saturday was going great, we really got into a nice flow and were picking up a couple of places per stage. Then we gave her a good flat out thrashing around Weeton barracks, managed to blow the gasket on the water outlet from the cylinder head. Everyone was blaming us for the fog, the car looked like a steam train. Anyway with about 20L of coolant and 3 bottles of rad-weld we nursed her to the end to find that we went 3 mins over time between one of the stages.

GUTTED

But we did make it to the end, unlike half of the field. Out of over 100 starters only 47 finished, 48 if you include us.

Mostly good news though, the clutch and gearbox worked well, the engine was excellent (apart from not restarting when hot after a stall at Weeton on friday night, lost us about 2mins).

Developements for the next few weeks/months will be.....
1) Fix water leak and fit electric water pump and controller. (the location of the standard water pump on the AW11 makes it completely unservicable during a rally)
2) New, eccentric or camber adjustable roller bearing top mounts as the ones on it are getting very noisy and do have a bit of play in them, some of the stages were extremely rough! (have a look on youtube for in-car footage from Hillhouse, North West Stages 2010 and you will see what I mean).
3) Throttle bodies and management, I think we will be going for a DTA s40 ECU and Bandit 1400S throttle bodies on a custom manifold and using 8 injectors.

NEXT RALLY WILL BE AT ANGLESEY (TRAC MON) ON THE LAST SUNDAY OF FEBRUARY

[aw11rally]

http://www.imoc.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=129728

MartG came along to the rally for a look and has posted some great pictures and a few vids on the Motorsports and Trackday forum. Follow the link and have a look.

Thanks for coming along Mart, was nice to see an IMOC face giving us some support. Next time try not to video me cocking up a hairpin in such a depressing way

[MartG]

Next time try not to video me cocking up a hairpin in such a depressing way

Sod's law - the only time you cocked it up was when I was videoing it Anyway, even then you did better than some folk - one even ended up nearly pointing back the way he came

I also got the time you clipped the cone and knocked an arrow flying

[tonigmr2]

Good effort though, LOL that looks very much like the dirty end of motorsport.