It's good to see MGMark back on CA.
It prompted me to wonder if there had been any recent Off Road Success, or indeed Off Road Failure, to report?
Thank you kind sir - I've just returned from a 3-week Grand Tour of France, Switzerland and Italy in the missus's MGF, with many motorsport milestones visited or driven on during the tour, hence the absence from posting for a while (more of that perhaps in another thread) and am now catching up with the important things in life back at work.... Life has been hectic this year one way or another, and I had quite forgotten to keep this thread up to date for any interested readers - apologies.
Work over last winter following on from the final round in '06 at Driffield saw us with a gearbox rebuild, doubling the fuel pumps, revising the turbo, air intake and intercooler layout, and doing all of the usual routine end-of-season strip down, inspect, fix and reassembly work on the chassis and suspension, topped off with re-mapping the ECU to capitalise on the bigger injectors. By the start of the season this year, all appeared to be well, apart from an irritating intermittent cutting out problem, whereby ignition power would just die, but would reset immediately.....
The first three rounds of this year's championship have come and gone, with a new venue in Staffordshire for Round One, mid-Wales near Radnor for Round Two and Scotland for Round Three, each of them bringing their own joys in one form or another..... A new control tyre is aimed at levelling the field, although as it now uses an All-Terrain rather than a Mud-Terrain tread pattern in the interests of minimising damage to the land on which we race, there were concerns over how well it would perform in the wet and in mud.
Round One was at a new venue for us, a disused Army Range at Baden Hall, for a dry, fast event over a relatively short 5-mile course on a mixture of tarmac, grass and woodland. The car ran like a dream, with shed loads of power, and we were putting in times that had us sitting around 10th overall, which given that the venue had less off-road and more rally stage about it, was good. The intermittent cutting out problem became less and less intermittent, although reset was immediate and we were able to restart on the move - not ideal, but we were only losing a few seconds a run as a consequence. Unfortunately, the intermittent nature became more permanent on our penultimate run, when we lost 3-4 minutes getting restarted in mid-run. Having traced the fault and fixed it (the ignition relay) we were heading up to the start area for the final run, when an intermittent knocking noise made itself heard. This was a diesel-knock, heralding a failed injector, so we withdrew from the run rather than risk terminal damage to the engine, and scored a maximum time for that last run, which dropped us way down the order to 34th overall....
Preparing for Round Two, we fixed the ignition issue properly by relocating the relay away from the engine bay (where heat had been causing it to malfunction) and rationalised wiring. The diesel knock had forced the removal of the injectors, all six of which (bar one) were revealed to be in what could be best described as a "state". This prompted the fitting of uprated (for uprated, read meatier, bigger and expensive) injectors, allowing us to remap the ECU and some local testing after that showed yet further power and torque increases. So with that all sorted, Round Two was at Bleddfa in Wales, again a new venue for us, over what promised to be a super 7-mile mixture of hills, grassland, hard tracks and some woodland. With rain during the previous week to pave the way for some good off-road action, the venue lived up to that promise. The car's performance was now, frankly, neck-snapping in terms of acceleration and top-end power, pullling well even uphill in fourth gear, which is an overdrive ratio. Times were great, running in 7th overall until, as we landed after a high-speed crest and put the power back on, a rather loud bang announced the rear differential noisinly lunching itself. The run finished with 2-wheel to the front and lots of loud clanking noises from the back, losing us around 2-3 minutes. Much butchery with a hammer and cold chisel was needed to extract the differential, as the failure had been the carrier bearing caps... Still, we got it out eventually, a new diff went in and off we went again, running well until suffering two punctures on successive runs put us back down the order into somwhere around 20th.. We worked out that the latter was through running the tyres with inner tubes (normal practice to prevent air loss if a wheel rim gets dented) and that with our increased power, the tyres were "shuffling" on the rim - once they reached a certain point, of course the valve ripped out and the air came out.. Dispensing with the inner tubes and adjusting the tyre pressures resolved that problem. At this point, you start to think "if it isn't one thing, then it's another", although the language used was a tad more colourful!
Round Three saw us well set for a return to the Scottish venue at Castle O'Er near Lockerbie on a traditionally fast (scarily so in parts) and open 9-mile course on gravel track, hills, woodland and a couple of real off-road sections. With the car now running completely reliably and with bags of power, we were happily sitting in 6th place with 3 of the 10 runs to go when, on the 7th run, my world in the left-hand seat quickly turned brown, green and wet, and that of my driver turned cloud-coloured (grey) as we slithered rapidly on our side, for about 100 yards along the bottom of a rather deep V-shaped drainage ditch that we had been pulled into on a high-speed right hander. Nothing had changed about the corner or how we had taken it from the previous runs. However, once the world had turned quiet and we had determined that we were both OK and worked out that we could not get the car out of the ditch ourselves, we extracted ourself from the car (which was effectively on its side) walked back up the course a little way, and then waited to warn following cars of the hazard and for the course recovery vehicle to get to us. Once it did and the car was out of the ditch, it was immediately apparent that we'd picked up a puncture. Although there was no way of telling definitively whether we had picked it up before the corner or in the ditch, we had entered an off-road section not far before it in a rather over-exuberant manner (driver missed the braking point...) and hit a rocky area off the track, so on balance it may have started to go down before the corner in question, and was flat as we entered it, which may be what had caused us to run wider than normal and get sucked into the ditch. Definitively something of a "Sh*t" moment, as we had been running so well otherwise. Recovery to the pits revealed a bust halfshaft as well as the puncture, which might have had something to do with it as well. Although nothing else appeared to be bent, there was really no way of telling what else may have been done to the car without a proper inspection back at home. After the ditch excursion at around 80mph, and with speeds getting well over the ton mark in other parts of the course in less benevolent surroundings, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and called time on that event. A bloody long way to go for a cr*p result, but at least we had been running well and competitively - a retrospective look at the times (assuming that we had carried on putting in the same good times for the last 3 runs) would have seen us finish 5th overall.
So, the story of this season so far is reallly one of unfulfilled promise. As I've been away for 3 weeks, I don't know what else has been done to the car yet, other than that the initial assessment post-Scotland was that nothing major had been deranged. We shall see in 2 weeks at Round 4 at the Sweet Lamb rally complex in Wales, whether the promising performance becomes a fulfilled reality at some point, and finally get to recapture some of our past achievements!
MG Mark
