Hi All,
It’s been awhile since we updated the Project thread for our car, mainly because there hasn’t been much progress to report, we’ve kept her MOT’ed and clocked up some road miles but the 2013 “Not the boxing day Rally” remains the most recent competitive outing, some 14 months ago now. The last major progress was the Jag back end conversion, that’s now near 2 years ago.
Gavin and I have had a bit of a “project meeting” about this, we’ve been developing the car now since the summer of 09, soon to be 6 years, it’s been fun turning a rather ungainly and some would say wholly inappropriate car into a truly competitive, certainly within class, Historic Road rally car. So where do we go from here? :?:
As we see it we have 2 simple choices, keep going or give up, neither of us what to give up so I guess it’s keep going!!! So the call is to keep going, we’ve entered the TDC Irish Classic Rally which runs from 24th-26th April. Retro rallying has suffered over the past few years, like a lot of things do when money gets tight, with cancelled or trimmed down events (3 day “classics” being run as one day events) and those that run having small entries, the TDC event (hopefully) seems to mark a bit of a return to the glory days. The event has over 50 entries, with all the big names in Irish historic rallying turning up, it’s also hold firm to its 3 day format so compared to anything run for the last few years this is going to be a true epic. It looks very much like Gav., will again have to do this one without me (work, kids etc.... all the usual!!), he’ll do his usual sterling job of driving the tests but as he can’t do both the driving and the navigating a stand-in will need to be found.
Anyway what about the car then, for some time now we’ve been unhappy with the steady decline in the car, it has been a hard 6 years of competition and the stresses are more than beginning to show, and we’re getting tired of explaining that the car is in fact very good below the tatty bodywork, our times bear this out but Oh the car looks bad!!! Time for a make-over.
Some of the body work is truly remedial and some is cosmetic. There are some localised areas of rot, driverside jacking point been a case in point, I hit this on some rocks early on in our ownership of the car, that damage combined with time have not been kind, more of that later. So the plan is for the car to get prettier but we also want it to be faster as well. :shock:
The availability of good tyres in 14” has always been an issue, as have the limits placed upon size caused mainly by the rear arches, we’re correcting this by moving to 15” and doing a bit of cutting and reshaping of the lower D post, also more on that in the coming weeks. Added grip is one thing but we’d also like a bit more go…. so we’re back working on getting the 4.6 running, we’re a tad worried that his will give the old LT77 a bit of a going over so that will need looked at as well as it’s got a bit noisy over the years. The LSD also needs tightened as it doesn’t lock quick enough meaning you have to be pretty brutal in the tests to get the back end moving about, this we are told is standard stuff and easy to go.
It is not lost on us that the event is not really that far in the future and there is still a lot to do so progress needs to be rapid, we may need to trim our expectation ie maybe the engine will have to wait but we’ll push for it all and see how we get on.
Progress was made over the weekend on the aforementioned jacking point, see pictures. Our car was extensively welded upon by the previous owner and although the work seems well enough done, it was done some 15 years ago so it has if nothing else stood the test of time; it’s a little hard to go back into the same areas for a second time. The jacking point is now solid but I’m a little unsure of how it’s supposed to look, I’ll use my best judgement there. We’ve skinned the back driverside door, the frame was rotten, if I’d have had access to a better one that definitely would have been the way to go but I’ve now welded up the one I have and I’m happy that it will look fine when painted. The front driverside door is also getting a new bottom, it’s nowhere near as bad as the back one so that should be OK. We have our fingers crossed the passenger side will be more straight forward, we believe it to be much more solid but I will have a good poke about before paint, as a minimum the back door will be skinned and the front one will get the same treatment as the driverside one.
So I’ll try and keep this thread updated as we go but progress is also tracked on our blog
https://p6v8.wordpress.com/
Thanks, Tim
