Departure of the Beast

Yes, it's gone. Finally drove it onto the transporter at 6pm on Wednesday after a day of frantic activity, culminating in the last minute discovery that the main fire extinguisher had been fired (by whom and when, I know not) and therefore needed to be refilled and re-armed at a cost of Dh 1000. Ouch. So...I borrowed Jason's instead! I also discovered that I had two square-ish front wheels (courtesy of the DC2010 prang) but no-one had thought to mention this to me. Funnily enough, it drove much better after I'd replaced the wheels with some round-ish ones. Stickers were stuck (rather hurriedly, by that time the transporter was waiting for me), tools and gear were loaded into every nook and cranny of the race car and now it's gone. Should have taken a photo really, but I was too stressed to remember the camera!

Looks like we could be the only Khawajas (white-faces) to participate in the rally. That'll be fun! And it's confirmed that Nasser Al Attiyeh will be competing in the Dakar-winning Toureg, so he's odd-on favourite to spoil Yazeed Al Rajhi's hopes of a hat-trick in the Hail Rally.

Tomorrow at 0730 we head off, hoping to get through the border before prayer-time (1240) and as far as Riyadh for an overnight halt. We plan to reach Hail mid-afternoon Sunday - inchallah!

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!

Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll!

Is it really that long since I last updated the blog? Has anything worthy of note happened in the interim? Are we going to be rallying this year?

I am happy to give you the answers to these pressing questions, which are yes, yes, and inshallah.

Well, the clutch got reassembled, but when road testing it made a horrid noise, so we had to drop the gearbox again and take it out, check it, not find anything wrong, carefully re-assemble it and it worked OK. Big sigh of relief – until it went out on the road with its new radiator. It returned from a quick trip to the traffic lights and back with the headers glowing red-hot, which is generally considered to be a Bad Thing. My first guess – subsequently borne out by my mate Kolby at Turnkey Engines – was an overly lean mixture. The big question is - why? We haven’t messed with the ECU or anything else, so maybe we’re short on fuel pressure, or the airflow sensor is under-reporting the amount of air going in. Or something.

Anyway, we needed to get the paintwork sorted and the dent in the rear door fixed, so as soon as it comes come out of the paintshop, we can concentrate on the mixture problem. Fortunately Mark Adams, Saluki Motorsport’s chief tuning guru, is about to arrive from UK, and we may need to call on his expertise. And time is running out.

And so to Hail. While marshalling at the Yas Marina F1, I had a fortuitous meeting with Richard Phillipson (photo attached), who has rallied extensively in saloon cars throughout Europe. I mentioned that I was looking for a co-driver for Hail, and (mad fool that he is) he immediately volunteered! Together we took on the job of course opening for the Dubai International Rally in the ‘00’ car last month, and managed to get through two days without coming to blows, so it’s settled. We plan to leave Dubai on 5th Feb, 8th Feb is the prologue, and the main event is Feb 9th-10th. Since the Saudis still refuse to allow Sheila to compete, the event is not part of the 2011 FIA Cross-Country World Championship, but it is still an FIA event. Sheila will once again be our indispensible Team Manager.

Now, if only we had a car…

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…