Once again summer (and indeed Ramadan) is upon us. Unsurprisingly, there has been little to report on the rally car front, but here’s a quick update anyway.
The car has been in A2B Garage since the Desert Challenge. They have stripped out the inner front wings and replaced them with custom fabrication which will hopefully be more resistant to tearing. The Front bumper has been removed, the chassis trimmed by 100mm and a new front bumper fabricated and installed. This provides much better clearance on the approach angle, as you can see from the photos. The rear bumper is going to be modified in a similar way.
All six Ohlin shocks have been removed, and are being reconditioned/repaired by Ivan Ingrilli at Powertec. The top rear shock mount which fractured has been re-fabricated, and awaits welding onto the chassis.
The exhaust will be removed, and rebuilt with some flexible sections to avoid the stress on such a long rigid system, which resulted in the stainless steel pipes shearing in two places. Then, once the vehicle is back on its wheels, we can look further into the low oil-pressure and oil loss which we experienced during the DC. Initial investigation shows good compression on all cylinders.
There will be a Qatar Baja this year, to be held 24-26th November, and we are planning to take part. This is one day plus a prologue, and appears to be in a similar format to the last event held around 2007, using only road books and no GPS.
Whether there will be an Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in 2012 is still unknown. I understand that provisional dates have been put in the FIA calendar, but Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (the major sponsor in 2010-11) have not yet confirmed that sponsorship will be forthcoming. However, since it appears that there will not be a round of the WRC in Abu Dhabi, (ADTA having rejected the FIA’s offer of a candidate round) we can only hope that the budget can be found for the Desert Challenge. As they say – watch this space.
I’m off to Spain for 4 weeks now, so hopefully there will be further vehicular progress to report once I’m back.
