Again, the car had been stripped and another new gearbox installed and, following our Carfax disaster, we had decided to give the paddle shift a miss until we had a few stages under our belt. Take it easy, just try and get a finish, no heroics and all that. That was the plan....
Before we even lined up for Stage 1, we had a taste of what the weekend was going to be like when the engine revs started rising. By the time we got to the start line, we were 6000rpm at idle with soaring water temp and the dash alarms blinking all over the place. Of we went with the car surging forward each time I changed down and on tight corners I had to hold the car against the brakes - dipping the clutch meant instant engine explosion.
We had a small spin at one hairpin, putting the rear wheels onto the grass - we then dug two 9" trenches trying to get off wet grass with 6000rpm at our disposal!
By the end of the stage, moving air had calmed the situation a little although by the time we had stopped to record our stage time at the control and then driven to the service area control, max revs were on again. I cut the engine to rest my ears and the expansion tank promptly super-heated itself and exploded. Great way to start a rally, the engine bay filled with boiling water and steam billowing out from everywhere, even out of the roof vent! We looked like Thomas the Tank Engine on a bad day.
We pushed the car to the service crew who diagnosed a fan failure. Ok, so explain the engine revving up. Ah, well, says Steve Hurst from GWR Motorsport (our MoTeC man par excelance), when the teperature goes above 120 degrees, there are no values in the computer so the fly-by-wire throttle does its own thing - and the temperature won't come down, so it runs harder and harder. Great. Give me a throttle cable and less of this computer crap!
After a bit of Heath Robinson wiring, whereby Mike had to electrocute himself by sticking a fuse into a makeshift fusebox taped to the rollcage, we had operational cooling fans. During the rewire Scott gamely downloaded the map from the MoTeC and by miracle of the airwaves, reprogrammed the throttle values while Steve was doing his Saturday shopping in Tesco's 100 miles away. God knows what shoppers must have thought!
During our fraught first stage, I had smelt petrol but with all the other dramas going on, I just thought it was part of the same disaster. Now on Stage 2, we had no drama but I could still smell petrol and with an uneventful stage, it seemed stronger than ever.
An inspection at the next service revealed the cause. On top of the bag-tank, fuel was leaking from around one of the screws that holds the swirl pot into the tank. The whole assembly had been removed when the car was at the rolling road. When we mapped the car with MoTeC, we had needed a higher rate fuel pump to cope with the raised the rev-limit. After a failed attempt to reseal it, no-one had the inclination to be passenger (or driver!) in a mainly fibreglass bodied car with a leaking fuel tank just in front of an engine that touched 125 degrees on the previous stage.
We decided to retire from the main rally, return home and compete in the Trophy Rally the next day at the same venue - provided we were not conducting a large molotov cocktail.
By the time we got back, it was 7pm, dark and, even in the barn, freezing cold! Scott and Rupert spent two hours leaning into the engine bay, stripping several other spare tanks and making sealing washers out of cardboard, felt, rubber and anything else that might get us around the lack of the right part. I just decided I didn't want to play any more and longed for my bed.
By 9.30pm, the car was deemed leak free and by 8 am the next morning we were back at Rockingham for another go!
Seeding for the Trophy Rally was worked out on the stage times from the previous day and as a result of our first stage time being so slow, we were fed into the main field well down the field. Whilst that's a fair way to sort competitors, it does mean that we caught lots of slower cars once we were firing on all cylinders. Most of the cars we caught played the game and eased over to let us past but on Stage 2 we were badly baulked and eventually put on the grass by a Peugeot 205. Mike went and had a word at next service but to no avail. The whole thing was pretty dangerous in my book and quite what is achieved by a 120bhp car hoping to resist 300bhp of V6 is a mystery to me.
As the day progressed, we were running 3rd in the Trophy Rally (only 14 competitors!)but then the rain started and we were busy debating tyre choice when we realised that our electrical/overheating gremlins had returned. Running the cooling fans permanently was not what they were built for and they had now seized! End to a traumatic weekend.
Despite all these problems, we always learn at every event and this weekends bright idea was to run soft intermediates on the front, even in the dry, which worked a treat. I know that this is masking a suspension settings deficiency but we finally had grip at the front in cold weather!
