It's Fixed!

Well, Nanjgel came up trumps. 

By the time I got to see it (1.00pm) they had the old diff out and were busy fitting new bushes to the pitman arms and new hub seals.  By 4.00pm there were four of them beavering away and soon after 7.00pm it was back on the road.  I drove it round the block, pronounced it fit for purpoose and wrote them an enormous cheque.

Tomorrow we race!

A week's a long time in Motorsport

One step forward…..

Sunday I was back from a week’s travel and Richard was free in the evening, so we had a productive session on the Beast. Shiny new windows were carefully drilled and riveted to the frames, with a thick layer of black silicone to try and keep the occasional rain out. Exclusive Acrylic had used some rather sexy fasteners to fix the rails for the sliding section to the main window – but they weren’t really suitable, and we decided that some button-head screws and locknuts would be more secure. These were duly added to the shopping list, alongside a new hub stud for the front wheel and a new battery. (Yes, the battery had decided to pack up.)

Richard (bless him) produced some very fetching red insulating sleeves for the HT leads, which really add a touch of class to the engine department, and hide my previously described HT lead surgery.

And what a joy it is to be able to see through the side windows for a change!

..and a giant leap backward

Sunday night I put a spare battery on charge and by Monday evening it appeared to have its full quota of ergs, so I slapped it on the Beast and gave it a quick spin round the block. Clunk…clunk…clunk it went. (The Beast, that is, not the battery. The battery hardly made any noise at all.) The sound appeared to come from the front axle, it hadn’t made its presence felt the other week at UAQ, and it sounded expensive. Bugger. Back on the trailer with it, and by first thing Tuesday the Beast was back in its second home, Saluki Motorsport. Tuesday came and went, and by midday Wednesday Robbie admitted that they weren’t going to get a round tuit this week. Bugger, and more bugger. A day and a half left till Friday and a race I really need to run. What to do? WHAT TO DO?

…followed by a lurch forward (we hope)

Find another garage, you hopeless plonker!
Oh yes! I almost forgot. Al Quoz probably has more garages per square km than anywhere else on earth. And the one two doors from my office had just done a rather stonking bit of cosmetic surgery on my Merc, and were clearly angling for more work. So when they said they could look at it straightaway, I rushed back home, picked up the trailer, rushed round to Saluki, picked up the Beast, and rushed back. (After all, I was in a bit of a rush.)

The verdict as of this evening is that it needs a new diff, which is painful but not entirely surprising. More surprising is that they will have one in the morning and have pledged to fit it before close of play Thursday. Oh, and they’ll replace a couple of bushes that they’ve discovered have crapped out as well. This in itself shows that they are reasonably switched-on, because I hadn’t asked them to give it a once-over, but they clearly did it anyway. So a big-up to Nangjel Garage so far, but let’s see if we have a working Beast in time for Friday’s bunfight in UAQ before we get too excited.

Watch (as they say) this space…

Ongoing Maintenance

Part of the reason for doing the short-course races up at UAQ is to identify and resolve issues with the car, before we launch into the DC.  (The other 95% of the reason is, of course, just to have fun.)  So the first issue is to replace the flexible elbow with something more rigid.

The solution Robbie at Saluki Motorsport came up with is a rectangular air-box, with stub pipes for inlet and outlet on adjacent sides.  We haven’t yet put it to the test, but I’m confident this will solve the air-starvation issue.

Richard came over the other night and we pulled out the near-opaque side windows, which are now at Exclusive Acrylic to be copied.  We also drained and flushed the clutch fluid, which has become a disgusting brown colour because the master cylinder lives close to the exhaust.  We also pulled out the thermostat to check the dimensions against the one I'm ordering to replace it.  The new one will be a high-flow 160f (72c) unit, which should reduce the water temperature from is current 92c

He was also able to find the cause of the backfire – there’s a clean break in one branch of the Y-piece which leads to the main exhaust, which was replaced last year for the same reason.  The car is booked into Fox Exhausts on Monday, and a flexible section will be inserted to (hopefully) prevent this happening again.

Another ongoing problem has been the proximity of one of the front HT leads to the exhaust manifold, which toasts the insulation until it eventually fails.  My last attempt at a solution was to wrap the HT lead in exhaust wrap, but upon unwrapping it, it fell apart.  No worries – I bought a set of 8, so I have 7 left to play with.  The problem is that the semi-rigid moulded insulator is just too long, and practically touches the manifold.  So I decided to remodel it.  By slicing through the insulator I was able to pull the HT lead 20mm further back, enabling me to cut 20mm off the plug end of the insulator.  After re-contouring it to fit, and wrapping it in tape, I also cut down the tubular aluminium protector which sleeves over the insulator.  The result is that the HT lead now emerges from the insulator well clear of the exhaust, like the other 7, which have no such problems. Time will tell, but I think it will be a permanent solution.  The pix show the original (left) and modified (right) plug leads, and the plug lead in situ.

Finally I have relieved the engine compartment of various items of non-functional hardware, and blagged a gallon of white Smoothrite from David ‘Streaky’ Chambers.  The current under-bonnet colour scheme is blue, white and rust, so the next job is to give the engine compartment a serious spring-clean, and then coat it in Smoothrite which is like Hammerite – but smoother. 

Forthcoming Events Update

See below the list of events in which NewTrix Racing plans to participate over the coming months:

22/02/2013:       Umm Al Quwain Solo Race

08/03/2013:       Umm Al Quwain Solo Race

29/03/2013:       Umm Al Quwain Solo Race

05-12/04/2013:  Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge (ADDC)
                           05: Documentation
                           06: Scrutineering
                           07: Prologue
                           08-12: Rally

21-26/04/2013:  Qatar Sealine Rally
                           21-22: Documentation and Scrutineering
                           23-26: Rally

There is a plan for three additional 'Pro Race' events at UAQ, but the dates for these are not yet confirmed.

The Hail Rally (Saudi Arabia) is understood to be scheduled for 22-29/03/2013.  However, due to its proximity to the ADDC, we will unfortunately have to give this one a miss.

 

UAQ Pro-Race Jan 24

Thursday dawned bright and clear, confounding weather prophets who’d forecast more fog, and we headed out to see what Umm Al Quwain had in store for us.  The answer was a newly-established 8.5km sand track, starting inside the Motorplex compound and heading out to the wild world beyond.  It was rather more challenging than the old course, with soft sand and a number of steep drops.

  After a convoy lap for familiarization, the quads and Barracudas set off at 30 sec intervals and completed their 4 laps, and then it was the turn of the Buggies and 4x4s.

I managed to miss a turn at the end of the first lap, resulting in a significant short-cut.  Fortunately, around 90% of the field made the same mistake, so no real harm was done.  Next time round, Sheila (bless her!) was waving her arms wildly from the trackside to prevent me from erring again.  The drama continued when one of the buggies broke down at the worst possible point – right in the gateway heading back into the compound – and the red Pro-truck got bogged down on the final turn and caught fire!  Next, Monish’s buggy broke down, and someone had a puncture.  It was all happening.

Unfortunately, the black-and-red Desert Force SWB Patrol pickup with a V8 Land Cruiser engine was having no such problems, and was gaining on me every lap.  His chance came when, on the final lap, my GoPro camera mount made a bid for freedom from the dashboard and ended up wedged under the pedals. To retrieve it I had to stop, unbuckle the harness, find it and then re-do the harness – which takes more time that you’d imagine.  He came past and gained a well-deserved victory, and I had to be content with 2^nd place.

The good news is that we seem to have cured the problem of running out of steam around 5000rpm.  After some serious head-scratching, Richard Bailey and I decided that we were not getting enough air through the intake.  So I replaced the restrictor with a straight pipe (this being a non-FIA event), treated the air cleaner to a new filter, and as an afterthought, wrapped some tiewraps round the flexible elbow leading into the throttle body.  The idea was that maybe this was collapsing under vacuum, and the tiewraps might prevent that happening.  Well, we seemed to have got it right because there were no such problems this time out, and I’m pretty sure that the elbow is collapsing when the restrictor is fitted.  So Robbie at Saluki has been charged with engineering a permanent solution, which will be a rigid elbow.

Thanks to Grumpy Goat for photographic support, Sheila for lunch, photos and directing traffic, and to Richard Bailey for coming along with his family and (as usual) getting his hands dirty!  More Goat-pix are here: https://picasaweb.google.com/110895353364127218017/UAQRally24Jan2013.

Next race will be at UAQ on 8^th March – I think.  Watch this space!

UAQ Tomorrow

For what it's worth - this is what we THINK is happening tomorrow.  I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this information!

Loction: out the back of the Motorplex somewhere - entry is usually from the LH side gate.  Rather than the short circuit inside the Motorplex boundary, this will be a longer circuit outside the boundary.

Format: One hour racing - one hour service - one hour racing.

Timing: Buggies start at 0900hrs, 4x4s start at 1000hours (when the buggies come in for service).  However...if this is a 20km circuit, the last vehicle could finish (say) 20 minutes after the hour, so the timings could easily end up a lot longer....who knows?

And if it starts on time, it will be the first time in history.

But it should be fun!

A Grand Day Out

Take three off-road race cars, a bunch of assorted petrolheads, add friends and family to taste and sprinkle liberally with sand, and what do you get?  A Grand Day Out, that's what, and if there's Wensleydale in the packed lunch, so much the better.

Some call it a shakedown, some call it testing, but let's face it, we're actually out for a blat. Mark Powell in the white Predator Buggy, Monish in the black one and myself in the Beast met up at Awir, zipped across to Fossil Rock, zoomed along to Big Red, had an icecream and then retraced our tracks to Awir.  Sounds like a quick one, but as we had to wait for the camp followers at various points it actually took most of the day.  But as it was a nice day for hanging around, that was no great hardship.

Particular thanks to Craig McAteer for providing photographic support, he's the one in the rather fetching pink shirt, seen here getting a much-needed sunshine fix in between stints in the frozen north of Canada, where it's about -40c at the moment.

So apart from having a Grand Day Out, what did we achieve?  Well, I was able to more accurately document the loss of power at around 5000rpm, which I now think may be due to lack of air rather than fuel.  Sometimes easing off the throttle will cause the engine to pick up again, and there is a lot of backfire on the over-run.  I await Mark Adams' opinion on this, but meanwhile I'll take out the FIA restrictor and throw in a new air filter and see if that changes anything.  The alternator, which curiously seems to output more volts on tickeover than at high revs, behaved itself and seems unlikely to be the culprit.

And believe it or not, we have a rally to look forward to on Thursday!  Allegedly, this will consist of eight laps of a 27km offroad circuit somewhere in Umm Al Quwain, with a service stop halfway through. If that is indeed the case, we're looking at over 200km, which is close to the length of a Desert Challenge stage, and far longer than any other local rally.  As usual in UAQ (cue for a song) I heard it through the grapevine and the precise details are shrouded in mystery.  Do we need co-drivers?  Are there any rules?  When's it starting?  Will there be cake?  These questions, dear reader, and many others besides, remain unanswerable.  If I find out anything at all before then, I'll let you know - otherwise you could just pop along to the Motorplex in UAQ on Thursday and see what's happening.... 

....because that's probably what we'll end up doing.