Right - here goes with an update, having got a few spare minutes after getting back off holiday and caught up at work.
We had a very frustrating second round at Ellesmere back at the beginning of June a coupe of weeks before Le Mans, with the car's engine seemingly running well (but still cutting out randomly occasionally). However, we appeared to be very short on gearing, whereby the only gear that resulted in anything like acceleration before running out of revs was fourth, and the top speed from that was pretty lamentable. And drastically over-fuelled. Still managed some half credible times, but only just on our pace of last year, so something was wrong. The something became even worse when we lost drive to 2 of the wheels on one run (a sheared halfshaft) and the
competitor wa*ker driving the vehicle running behind us caught us up, and couldn't be ar*ed to wait as we pulled over to let him through. Result - he punted us up the rear end - no damage to him, but a severely bent radius arm and cracked chassis mount to us put paid to anything else for that weekend. So not a good weekend.
Once we got back to the workshop and stripped things down, the source of the gearing issue became apparent, once we had worked out that our gearing ratios should have been giving us the right sort of speeds - although the gearbox internals had been seriously strengthened, we suspected that the culprit was the torque convertor (untouched) not being able to handle the extra power and torque. True enough once it had been split, every single impeller fin was bent over virtually flat. The acceleration in fourth was only there because, unable to get drive any other way, when it got into fourth, the top gear lock up came into play, hence getting decent drive only in fourth.
With that re-done, and the repairs to rear end (which once we had stripped it also revealed that the axle casing had been bent as well, so that was a complete strip and replace job!) and the remaining fuelling/ECU issues, we decided that although it was running (after a fashion) we would give the Scotland round a miss - a heck of a long way to travel only to be non-competitive again, particularly as having blown two rounds, we would not be in with a shout for anything this year), but would concentrate on getting the thing fixed and running properly in time for the Welsh rounds. That has now been achieved, with the ECU issue resolved properly and it niether cuts out nor over-fuels. Running tests last weekend reveal that we are now back to the earliest scalded cat promise shown at the start of the first round.
So, the next round is on 9/10 September at Radnor forest in Wales
http://www.offroadrally.com/Information/Venues/RadnorForest/tabid/198/Default.aspx. Hopefully, we should be a damn sight quicker there than so far this year! See you there if anyone fancies coming along.
MG Mark
