Summer-time (and the living is easy)

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.

The alternator has landed

Yes, I finally got my hands on it this morning and rushed it round to A2B - and it fits. Huge sigh of relief. So hopefuly they can nail it into place this afternoon and tomorrow I can take it to Rob at Bin Sulayem Garage for testing, and then to the TRA for registration. The door is re-painted, the few odd jobs they had to do are done and who knows, we might even have the chance to take it for The Final Shakedown before the DC.

Tyres for the trailer have had to be sourced from UK, because none that are here have the right load rating. And the supplier in UK couldn't ship outside the EU. So I ordered them for delivery to my Dad in Kingsbridge, who then had to individually wrap them (why?) before TNT would pick them up on Friday. As long as they arrive sometime this week that'll do, because I don't need the trailer till this Friday.

Lots of information has now been posted on the ADDC website, including the start list where I am seeded at 214, ahead of Fadi Melki (who beat me last year) and behind Dave Mabbs (who I beat last year) - go figure. But who cares, once we get going the numbers are academic. It looks a strong field - maybe another top 10 finish isn't on the cards.

I've reached the point where excitement and panic are pretty equally balanced. Last year's cooling problems and this year's disaster at Hail are still too fresh in my mind. I just want to get Day 1 out of the way without any dramas, then I can settle down.

Long Way Out

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. My business partner and part-time blog-napper knows a few people. People who know…people. A certain celebrity was visiting, and would like to go out in a race car. So when he asked if the Beast would be ready, I naturally lied and said yes. This was before I realized that the pump would take two days to fit and that the oil line had been sabotaged.

But by dint of ignoring anything vaguely work-related for a week or so, it all came together, and on Wednesday we were out in the desert with that star of stage, screen and TV – Charley Boorman! He and his sidekick, Billy ‘Biketruck’ Ward were out for an appearance at the Dubai Literary Festival, and had a day free. So Dave Mabbs (Team FJ), Mark Powell (Team Saluki) and I shared the arduous task of blatting round the desert for the best part of a day with them, which was great fun.

Well, most of it – except the bit where I managed to prop the car up on a damn great rock near the Saddle, and the bit where the alternator packed up and the battery went flat, and we had to be towed. Both times with Billy ‘the Jinx’ on board. So I explained that they’d actually been on a shakedown, and as bikers accustomed to things going horribly wrong, they took it in their stride. And a nicer couple of blokes you couldn’t wish to meet.

We ended up seeing their show on Friday, which was great fun, and then meeting up again on Saturday at a charity fundraiser for Tony Jordan, a biker involved in a horrendous crash at Dubai Autodrome in November.

Anyway, the race car is back at the Al Quoz Hospital for Poorly Race-cars, the alternator is allegedly being fixed elsewhere and I’m starting to panic because the DC looms ever closer.

Stepping back from the edge

The Beast has spent the day in intensive care at the Al Quoz Hospital for Sick Race-Cars(a.k.a. A2B Garage).

The problem, they discovered, was not the rear diff but the front one. When it had been rebuilt after our 2009 DC disaster, it would appear that the bolts holding the ring-gear to the ARB diff flange were not Loctited in and/or correctly tightened. They chose yesterday to part company with the assembly, and their remains were in the diff housing. Fortunately, the only real damage is to the flange. Unfortunately, this is an ARB part and the ARB dealer here doesn't believe in keeping spares in stock, or even being able to tell you how much they might cost or when they might get here. (Their South African dealer is much more helpful, and will therefore be getting my business.)

However that doesn't solve the problem of having it working right now, so they've borrowed the front diff out of the old race car. This means we won't have a locking front diff lock for Hail, but I can live with that.

The really good news is that the engine temperature didn't get above 85c even in 2nd gear in the dunes - until one of the electric fans packed up, but that too has been fixed. There were a number of other trivial matters to be sorted, and they have been - so once again A2B have scored major points with me. Thanks to Gareth, Jason, Maynard and all the crew there, I was able to drive it back home tonight.

Other than that I've got the ATC carnet and Police permit for the car to visit the Magic Kingdom, and sent out a press release to anyone who might be interested - which will apparently appear in Thursday's Gulf News. All fans who would like their copies autographed should form an orderly queue...

Tomorrow is for cleaning, stickering, fitting shiny new wheels and tyres (same BFG 275/70R16s) and getting it onto the transporter in the evening.

Now, finally, I can believe we're actually going.

Living slightly over the edge

...staring into the abyss.

Got the car back last night, and spent till 1.00am doing stuff, like improving the jack mount and making the steering wheel point straight ahead when the wheels do. But the serpentine belt (which drives pretty much everything) was knackered so the first job this morning was to find a six-rib belt 2020mm long, how hard can that be? Well, it took all morning but eventually I returned triumphant to fit the belt and finally take the car out for a blat (oops, I mean shakedown). This was around 2.00pm.

All started well. The water temperature, even in some tricky 2nd-gear dunes, was getting only up to 85c and everything felt good. Then the 16" fan stopped working and the temp started to rise. I nursed it back out of the dunes and onto a gatch track - when suddenly the rear end made a very unhealthy noise and I ground to a halt. (That was the car's rear end, by the way, not mine. Just thought I should make that clear.) After some phone calls to Gareth, I decided to remove the rear prop shaft (in the middle of a sandstorm) and see if that made any difference, which it didn't. 'It's the diff', says Gareth. Anyway, to cut a very long story short, Gareth and Katrina dragged my trailer out into the desert behind his F150 and, after a few dramas, stucks, and a shredded trailer tyre, got the Patrol back to the blacktop where it was picked up by a recovery truck about 8.00pm this evening.

So now we only have to:
- sort out the diff
- sort out the fan
- make various lights and the firex system work
- weld a 24mm 1/2" drive socket onto the nut which holds the jack down (to create my patented quick-release mechanism, using the rattle-gun)
- apply all the stickers (did I mention they arrived - and half of them were wrong? Don't ask..)
- get the carnet from ATC and the police permission for the car to go to Saudi
- pay Saeed for the transport
- change the wheels and tyres
- fix a leaking spare tyre
- fix the new air tank valve which leaks
- and shakedown the finished product? Yeah, right...in my dreams.

By my calculations we (i.e. mainly Gareth) have about 40 hours to achieve these miracles. So no pressure, then.

On the plus side, Mark and Fadi have given up the unequal struggle with Saudi beaurocracy to get visas, and will now concentrate on the DC. So that's two cars we won't be behind in Hail.

The other day, I put out a call to Al Thika Packaging's service engineers, asking if anyone was interested in joining us for the DC adventure. This involves long hours of boredom whilst camping in the desert, interspersed with periods of panic-stricken activity which can go on all night, whilst being sand-blasted and periodically deafened by the testing of other competitors' vehicles. So far only one engineer has decided that he's sufficiently desperate to escape from fixing packaging machines for a week to volunteer. So - welcome to the crew, Fred Santiago! Fred normally services our customers' machines in Oman, and clearly has no idea whatsoever what he's let himself in for. Maybe I should keep it that way...

Stay tuned for the next nail-biting instalment of 'The Race to Hail'.

Living on the edge

Well, Saturday came and went, A2B didn't get the power steer pump back till just short of closing time, and then found that the damned machine shop had pressed the pulley on too far - meaning it's out of line with the fanbelt. Brilliant - they only had to copy the position of the old one, but clearly that was beyond their wit. So rather than send it back to the idiots at the machine shop, Gareth is going to make up some shims to space it off the engine block and bring it back to alignment. However, they have managed to complete a list of other jobs, like making a new mounting for the trolley jack, and lock-wiring the hub bolts, so the pump is the last item. Potentially, some time tomorrow (now our weekend is over) I might have it. I'll just have to bunk off work to do a shakedown.

Meanwhile, I can leave you with some links to videos featuring NewTrix Racing!

This one shows us on the prologue for the Hail Baja 2010, at about 3min 30.

Yet another link to the same event, showing the start of Day 1, again we're about 3min 30 into the video.

Finally, this one shows us starting Day 2 at about 7min 50.

This one contains some in-car footage from DC 2010, and was kindly edited by Rick Carless, my Technical Manager. Watching this is about as close as I can get to driving a rally car at the moment, which is a bit sad!

Further news of the Hail Rally is that the Toyota Team are planning to run two Toyota FJs, including the V8-engined prototype which Abdullah Bakhashab (absent from the 2011 crew) piloted last year. They've asked for help in shipping 1200L of AvGas from Dubai to Hail - yet another team with problems!

Rumour has it that Nasser Al Attiyeh, fresh from victory in the Dakar, may compete in one of the VW Touregs. Yazeed Al Rajhi will be trying for 3rd straight victory in the event, driving an Overdrive Nissan Navara.

In the continuing absence of any worthwhile website from the Hail Rally organisers, you may be able to find updates at Neil Perkins' NDP Publicity website.

Still no car - AAARGH!

Well it's good news/bad news back at A2B garage. The best bit of good news is that they reckon they've found the cause of the overheating headers and the backfiring - seems that the camshaft position sensor was never connected. And I mean NEVER, as in it wasn't connected for Hail 2010 or DC2010! So that fact that we did as well as we did is a minor miracle. Funnily enough, Gareth reports that it 'runs much better' now it's connected - there's a surprise! Could this have been contributing to our earlier overheating problems?? I suspect so.

Bad news is that the new power steer pump wasn't a simple drop-in replacement, the fittings are wrong and the pulley needs a spcial tool to press onto the pump - so it didn't get finished yesterday. Now we're shooting for a shakedown on Saturday afternoon. Nothing beats the excitement of leaving it all till the last minute, does it?

There are still various tidying-up jobs to finish off but, if it runs tomorrow, I'll feel a whole lot happier. And by Sunday, all three of us will have Saudi visas in our passports, which is another step closer to Hail.

Some consolation is the fact that most of my fellow-competitors from the UAE are in at least as bad a state as us. Mabbsy's FJ is still not finished, Team Saluki have visa problems, and work is still in progress on the two Predator Buggies Mark and Fadi Melky plan to drive. His old Honda-powered Fast & Speed buggy has been re-engined with a Nissan 4L V6, and now belongs to Nazer Shanfari, but so far it's not been tested.

My old friend Saeed Al Hameli has decided to rent a complete car transporter, so I've bought a slot on that. I've decided that Dh4500 to save towing the race car 3500km is money well spent, although it does mean that the car has to be ready to pick up Wednesday evening, rather than next Saturday - which is when we plan to head off in Sheila's Prado.

Weather in Hail is a chilly 8 deg.c. at night and only 22 at midday, so I think we'll be needing the thermal underwear more than the sunscreen. At least the engine has no excuse to overheat this time!

Two steps forward, one step back..

So, dear readers, you may rightly wonder why such an aeon has elapsed since my last foray into the blogosphere. It’s not so much that nothing has actually happened – it’s just that a blow-by-blow account of the rather turgid pace of progress would have sent the average reader into a coma. However, let me briefly reveal the ‘two steps forward, one step back’ kind of progress we have made.

Having taken off the bent front axle and stripped its (functioning) innards out, it went to Trinity Engineering, whom I was unreliably informed were able to straighten the bent axle casing. Well, it turns out they weren’t willing to take the chance of knackering the axle casing further with their 200-ton press, which is a bit daft as it’s clearly knackered already. So the only alternative was to throw some more cash at the problem and buy a new axle casing – which then of course had to be reinforced, hopefully to a higher standard than the old one.

Then the engine and gearbox were to be re-assembled with the new clutch and thrust bearing. First job is to get the old thrust bearing out of the adaptor plate casting, which sits between the engine and gearbox. Four bolts hold the thrust bearing assembly into the ‘spider’ of the adaptor, and once removed, the adaptor plate casting promptly disintegrated. Bugger! Turns out it was only the bolts that were holding it together. This is another part of the Marks 4WD conversion kit from Australia, so guess what? Give the credit card another good spanking and get a new adaptor plate. Of course, if I’d known it was going to fall apart, I could have got it at the same time as the clutch. Such is life.

Are there any more repairs in store that can go disastrously and expensively wrong? I wouldn’t bet against it. Can Gareth, for example, reinforce the chassis without setting the entire vehicle on fire? Well, actually yes he did, but you get my point.

What we need now is a new radiator, because those of you who have been paying attention will know that cooling is a Big Issue. So I’d been recommended to get an original aluminium V8 Cruiser radiator, but that would have plastic tanks, which would have to be replaced with aluminium for strength, and then we’d have to fabricate a shroud to house the fans, and mountings to attach it to the Patrol. So rather than faff around with that, why not get a proper custom-made race radiator that can solve the problem once and for all? Then we can get a double pass unit with the inlet and outlet on the same end of the rad, such that our hose runs to and from the engine are minimized, which is a Good Thing.

Have you ever read BillaVista’s tech pages on Pirate 4x4? He does go on a bit, so probably best if you put the coffee on first, but you get the feeling that he knows whereof he speaks. And he speaks highly of Griffin Radiators in the USA, and by chance has fitted one of their custom rads to his project off-road vehicle – which just happens to have the same LS2 engine from Turnkey that lurks under The Beast’s bonnet. (The only difference is that he probably got his rad for free, in exchange for giving it a massive thumbs-up. But I digress.) So I dropped them a line, together with a drawing of what I wanted, and they came back by return with a four-figure price. Ouch. I thought it was expensive – until I got another offer from a UK supplier which worked out at nearly double the money. In the immortal words of Griffin’s Benji ‘If this doesn't do it, there's nothing else on the planet that will!’ Time to give the plastic another spanking, I think…

So once we get this rad in, and all the other tedious but necessary jobs are done (like making sure the exhaust doesn’t fall off, and the engine mounts stay where they belong), we’ll be able to take it for a blat – sorry, ‘shakedown’. And assuming it all works as planned, then I need to find a cheap but relatively competent paint shop to remove the massive dent the bastard Frenchies put in my rear doors, and re-spray all the bits that we’ve replaced. In all probability, they won’t do it for free, either.

Then it’ll be ready to race, won’t it? Well, actually, no. Because the FIA, in their infinite wisdom, have decided once again to change the mandatory inlet restrictor size from 2011 from 37mm to 35mm. So I’ll have to get a new one made, and I know from experience that no-one in the UAE can make one the way I want it, so I’ll have to get it made elsewhere.

Somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of a credit card being spanked to death…

On the mend

Polimar have worked their magic on the Car-o-Liner. We needed a new radiator panel, wing and headlight, and a new bumper and its support frame to complete the rebuild of the front end, but as good as their word, they’ve brought the entire chassis back to the shape Nissan intended.

Having separated the engine from the gearbox, the reason for the reluctant gear-changing became apparent. The diaphragm spring has about a dozen ‘fingers’ which disengage the clutch when pushed in by the release bearing. Or at least it would, except that most of these ‘fingers’ were lying in the bottom of the bell-housing, and the release bearing was shot. Unfortunately, Marks 4WD (who supplied the original conversion parts) are unable now to supply an identical 12” clutch, unless I’m prepared to wait a few months and accept buying it with a new flywheel – which I don’t need! So I’ve had to opt for the same design of 11” clutch, with the same clamping force, which will hopefully do the same job.

The car is now back at A2B for the engine, gearbox and new clutch to be fitted. Their job list comprises:
• remove and straighten the front axle
• drill out and replace the hub bolts
• cut the new wing for the snorkel to be re-fitted
• fit the bonnet fan
• improve the engine mountings

With the engine and axle out, it’s the ideal opportunity to make any modifications that can improve reliability, and Gareth has carte-blanche to use his initiative in that area. We’re hoping to have the work finished by the end of the month, assuming Trinity Engineering can succeed in straightening the axle. Then we can move on to testing, and some further work on the cooling system.

One week to go…

…so it’s manic as usual. Had The Beast out last weekend with the reinforced wings and the new fans, and the Camaro water pump – the original one was leaking. It was running too hot – however, I hadn’t used Water Wetter in the radiator. This is pretty amazing stuff which reduces the water temperature significantly (10c or so) because it improves the transfer of heat from the water to the radiator. And unlike most of the snake-oil remedies – it actually does what it says on the tin (OK- bottle). So why didn’t I use it? Well, because I was pretty sure the rad would have to come out again, and I didn’t want to waste a bottle of the stuff. Then I found that the connection to one of the fans was loose as well, so the jury is still out on whether I have enough cooling. Weather forecast shows a maximum of 38c in Liwa next week, which is damn hot, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Gareth at A2B has got The Beast back to sort out a few minor problems, and discovered that the annoying whine from under the hood is the alternator bearings on their way out. So we’ll put a new one in and (when we have time) re-con the old one as a spare – no point in trying to ignore it and hoping for the best.

Arabian Automobiles, the Nissan distributor, has very kindly come to the party with a consignment of expensive spares on sale-or-return. So we’ll have spare front and rear diffs, full set of spare half-shafts, spare front hub – basically everything we broke last year and then some.

Al Thika’s trusty VW Transporter is once again being pressed into service as the support truck, and I’ve replaced a dodgy section of the deck with a shiny new section of ¾” ply. I’ve decided that, for once, it would be nice if we could actually find the tools and parts we need, so I’ve splashed out on a proper tool chest with drawers. Trouble is, I can’t lift it once it’s filled with tools, so we’ll have to load it on the truck and then put the gear in. Once it’s there, it stays there.

Today, we’re in the Gulf News – fame at last! Shame they can’t write for toffee, but that’s PR agencies for you.

According the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge website, there are 40 cars, 4 trucks and 75 bikes/quads on the entry list this year – but no works teams, which is good for us privateers. We’re number 224 (24th), which reflects our poor showing in the 2009 event, Dave Mabbs is at 204 and Team Saluki are 209. Novitsky in the BMW X3 is top seed, and the only other female competitor in the autos is our old friend Andrea Meyer, co-driving a T4 truck.

Now I need to go and finish refurbishing the support truck...

3 weeks to the Desert Challenge

Since the demise of Carwise, I’ve been doing more of the work on the race car myself. This weekend I pulled out the radiator and fan-box assembly, replaced the fans with the 16” units, re-sealed the fan-box to the radiator and refitted it. The top hose was also replaced with one that gives a better routing as well. It would have been nice to do some real ‘hot-weather’ testing of the new system, but the weather didn’t co-operate. At 23c it was hardly a test, but I took it out for a blat anyway.

Anyway I did some other jobs that needed doing – replaced the temporary exhaust hanger with something more robust, fitted new mudflaps, and repaired the plastic rear bumper. I then decided to remove the front wheel arch liners which had come loose, with a view to replacing them.

Unfortunately this revealed some extensive damage to the inner wings. The inner wing includes a welded section running across the top of the arch, diagonally braced to a vertical member behind the arch. Where the vertical and horizontal members meet is ‘the weakest link’, and repeated hard landings cause the horizontal member to bend, ripping the inner wing and breaking the weld to the diagonal brace. This is a common problem in rally Patrols, and one theory is that the front body mounts may be too soft (and/or too short), allowing the front end of the bodyshell to flex downwards relative to the passenger compartment. We had the same problem on the old T2 Patrol, exacerbated there by the weight of the battery which hangs off the inner wing. (Since the new Patrol has the battery relocated to the back, at least this is not contributing to the problem.)

So it’s booked into A2B Garage later this week for some reconstructive surgery and reinforcement. Let’s see what solution they can come up with.

With only 3 weeks left to the ADDC I could have done without this...