After a few dramas in the build-up to this event, I’m happy
to report that The Beast acquitted itself well in the second round of the
Emirates Motorsport Club’s UAE Rally Championship.
Since the rebuild, we’ve been promising to get the Beast
back to Mebar for Rashad to work his magic on the suspension. Having shed some 250kg, mainly from the back
end, the settings were now far too hard.
Rashad changed to softer springs and tweaked the dampers to give a much
better ride. However, in the process the
front diff started to disintegrate – the end result of the front axle tube
being bent long ago. So on Thursday
night, they worked till gone midnight to cannibalise parts from an existing axle
they had, to get the Beast back on its feet.
That is customer service!
Friday morning we were out with the latest conscript to Newtrix
Racing, Tom Bell, to recce the gravel stages out near Shawka, where two stages were
run either side of the Kalba Road.
Saturday morning, the three of us headed out to Sharjah
Corniche for the ceremonial start, from which Tom took the trailer to the service
park at Shawka. At the invitation of Sk
Abdullah Al Qassimi, Mohd Ben Sulayem took to the wheel of his 20-year old Ford
Escort with Ronan Morgan as co-driver.
Neither had competed for over 13 years, but despite a few problems with
the car, they came in a close 2nd to Abdullah, and actually beat him
on 4 of the 6 stages!
So while they were battling it out at the top of the field
with two Omani Subarus, the T1 4x4s occupied the next five places, from 5th
to 9th. Our time for the first
(fast) stage came down progressively from 8:09 to 8:00 over the three repeats,
and on the 2nd (more technical) stage from 9:43 to 9:27, before
making two errors on the final stage to end up at 9:38.
In T1, we were beaten into 3rd place by both
Ibrahim Al Mohana and Ali Al Ketbi. However,
we were happy to be ahead of Ali Al Shawi (4th) and Nooh Buhumaid (5th),
both of whom beat us in the previous round.
Overall this leaves us still 3rd in the T1 championship after
two rounds.
There is a persistent backfire on the over-run which we need
to investigate, and the axle needs to be replaced to avoid further
problems. I’d also like to upgrade the
intake system to incorporate a superior restrictor design which I now have, so
we’ll see if Mebar can fit this in before the DC – which is now only 26 days
away!
Once again, many thanks to Tim Ansell for some excellent pix
of the event, and to Tom for all his help - and a short video of us in action!
1 comment:
Glad to be in support of the Newtrix team! Tom
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