SO I thought I might pull together a bit of an event report for you guys.
In the leadup to the event, I'd made the decision to only run the car with the headers. The ITB's are sitting there on the spare motor, but I thought it's best to go with little steps.
Tony very kindly loaned me the DMS again, which without them we wouldn't have got very far. He also made me the 45mm thermostat cover.
So it was going to be a test of the enlarged bottom hose and a test of the new headers.
Turns out a bottom hose from a common Australian ute fits perfectly with some cutting and hacking.
5km into the first stage I knew the cooling problem had been solved. The car didn't budge over halfway which was fantastic. And in between stages, it sat nicely at a sensible temperature although a thermostat would help.
We were consistently running up to about 6500rpm (I'm guessing without a working tacho) and it sat there for a long time. The longest stage we did competitively was about 16km, and it was perfect. The headers got hot near my legs though, so I'm going to be fitting some heat shielding under the transmission tunnel to keep the header heat away.
The heater core split on the second stage. That was a bummer, as without that, we would have been a top 5 contender. When it split, the first thing that happened is the windscreen went opaque. Hard to see out of when you're travelling at 150km/h. So we had to pull over. We then realised the toolkit hadn't made it into the car, so we had to run back to the specator point and borrow a screw driver. We then used some dodginess with some sticks jammed into the ends of the hoses to get to the next road closure point where we borrowed about 5 litres of water and then got going again.
We couldn't get any proper hose to fix the problem, so my 1/2 inch drive socket extensions replaced the sticks (who knew that under pressure, pine sticks leak?) and cable tied them down tightly.
By that point we were out of the rally but were allowed to keep going last on the road. Unfortunately this means we started the last few stages behind a very slow Corolla.
On the third stage we caught him quite early in the piece, and he would'nt move out of the way. I was half tempted to test out the 5mph crash front bumper by giving him a bit of a nudge, but I didn't.
In the next two stages, we did some pretty good times. The car started to feel a lot better, and my skills started to come back.
AFter the 5th stage, we had another service break and found it had been using a bit of water, it also showed signs of a blown head gasket, so rather than risk getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a blown motor, we pulled the pin and drove it home.
You can see the results here...we set some 8th place times which I'm pretty happy with.
http://shannons-safari.rallytiming.com/
The next rally is in July. From there, I'm hoping to have the good motor in (heads, cams and ITB's) and a few other cooling system changes and give it another read hot go.
Matt