So the new rally tires and rims are making a big difference. Two events ago went well, but I ran into power problems. It turns out that the wiring harness for the air flow meter got chafed and wires were shorting. My results were good, I was once again running even with my rival in the FF class until mechanicals took him out. In the time between, I taped up the wires and then discovered one of the CV boots had a tear. Since the shafts are now custom it took some work finding a boot, but eventually found one and got that taken care of.
It was time to rally on Saturday and we once again had use of the higher speed dirt oval, awesome! This time the track was not watered at all so it was pretty dusty, but the underlying base was pretty firm so the rutting was not severe, pretty good conditions. For the morning, our class had the advantage of going in second heat so the course was cleaned off. It was pretty sweet once we got on course. The first half was tight and technical like usual, but then we crossed over to the oval. This event it was cut in half into a figure eight and I was worried it would make it less fun because you wouldn’t be able to hold the throttle longer through the sweeping oval. It ended up being pretty cool in that the turns into and out of the center of the eight were wide enough to allow pretty fun power slides with momentum and throttle pounding the exit while still in the slide.
The FX was just loving this stuff and it showed. Everyone was stunned by the times I was posting. My rival was almost speechless as I was beating him by five seconds. The one thing I have to work on is keeping the runs “clean”, I tend to hit cones and that kills my results, but my second run was clean and fast that held FTD (fastest time of the day) until the last run of the morning.
Unfortunately after my third run when I pulled back into grid and got out of the car I immediately saw the rear wheel was in bad sorts. There was definitely something wrong and the FX was not going to continue the event. It was quite disappointing. I finished the event in a beastly STi, but it wasn’t the same, and also invalidates the result ranking within my class. My FTD was also beaten in the last run of the morning by the 1st place driver.
Well, I’m going to have to figure out a fix. I’ll have to get a plate fabricated and weld it onto the rear strut to replace the stock tabs that tore. You might recall from a ways back that these rear struts are actually out of a different year Corolla and I had to have the mounting holes modified to fit. At the time I was wondering if there was enough metal left around the holes, I guess not! I want to keep these struts because the cartridges are quite good Koni’s. Anyway, I pulled it out this evening and will need to figure something out before the next event.
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