2002 Open Class WRX Rallycar

Well, the time has finally come to unveil the new car! If you have any interest in why I have a new rallycar, you can read this thread:

http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/the-rally-talon-of-awesome/40059/page1/

So, what exactly did I purchase? Here it is on the trailer home (terrible iphone pictures w/ poor lighting are da bes) EDIT- original photo gone, here it is at its first event:

Details? Oh, I'll give you details!

The car itself is a 2002 WRX. I actually know the original owner of the car (did a couple of road trips in it in fact). After a long life being driven all over to rallying events and being a recce car, the drivetrain was pretty worn out.

So, the car was bought by a driver I used to race with, who had it shipped out east for a complete rally buildup at SwapShop Racing in Quebec. It was built to their "base" level open class rallycar spec... which isn't very "basic" at all

In went a V8/9 JDM STi Spec C drivetrain (2.0L, the fancy VF36 titanium twin scroll turbo, 6 speed w/ dccd and aftermarket neetronics diff controller). Expect about 280whp due to the 34mm inlet restrictor, but close to 400wtq! The cage was built with safety in mind, so it isn't the lightest open class car around (3200 pounds wet). It has a little bit of seam welding done in crucial areas. Suspension wise, it is running the standard of rallying struts DMS 50mm. The hubs/uprights/struts are still WRX pieces, as the car was kept in a 5x100 bolt pattern due to the ease of finding spare parts.

The thread will entail less of building and more of repairing the car while I rip corners off it at rallies. More pictures are to come, as there is some prettying up to do of the car (cool decal package enroute). I'll also post event updates ala blog style for everyone to read about. First event coming up is October 12th, the 5th round of the Canadian Rally Championship, the Pacific Forest Rally in Merritt, BC. Not much time left and so much to do!

The list of what needs to get done to the car is small but critical:

-buy lightpods (already have lights)
-install new throttle body gasket
-download new VIPEC standalone software to get better transit driveability (currently, the car must either be accelerating aggressively or coasting)
-buy 5 new rims, get all my tires mounted

Cool.

Less expensive option might be to grab a utec instead of vipec. Allows you to run the software on your regular ecu, and can switch up to 6 different ecu programs. They are about $150, as they have fallen out of favor since everyone can just opensource tune their stock ecu, and have no real need to run multiple programs.

What brake setup are you running?

sachilles wrote: Cool. Less expensive option might be to grab a ute What brake setup are you running?

The car already has a vipec in it ;) it is currently tuned to operate best under race conditions, aka it hates part throttle. This makes transits suck. With the new throttle body gasket and the upgraded software installed, the driveability problems should be solved (information provided by the shop that originally did the work).

As for brakes, 4pot 2pots. Should be good enough for now considering I couldn't get my Talon brakes to fade.

Excellent! Way to get back in the saddle. I'll be following this one for sure...

Wow, it's been a long time since I even looked at this thread. Unfortunately, the first event out in the car (Pacific Forest Rally, 5th event of the Canadian Rally Championship, 4th event of the Western Canada Rally Championship) didn't go so hot.

After getting to the event late, we started recce late. During recce, I figured my crew-dude could take the rally car (only car available to him) to Canadian Tire to pick up a rivet gun/supplies to mount my fog light pods I had shipped to the hotel from the USA. Unfortunately, the car is temperamental (to say the least) and he roasted the clutch badly enough for it to weld itself to the flywheel. This really messed up our recce plans, and put us super far behind schedule. Luckily, the fix is to fire it up in gear and hammer the gas and let off quickly to break the clutch loose.

So, we get onto stage:

Super dusty, and on the 3rd/4th stage, SUPER rough. As you can see in the photo, I bent the front corner of the skid plate down by bouncing the schnoze of the car off a dip in the road hard enough to ricochet the front completely into the air. 3rd stage we had an off that luckily landed us in a bowl shaped drop, rather than a cliff, and 4th stage, we got a flat. Me Bob Costas footing it wasn't doing us too well, we were within the top 10 without the flat or off, but that's the way she goes.

Onto day 2, things were looking up. Killed the 1st stage with a 8th overall time (lots of lifting, wasn't comfortable with the car, and the steering/alignment was out of whack). Onto the 2nd stage of the day, giving her hell, and BOOM, clutch explodes. What followed was the most miserable recovery I've ever done (yes, WORSE than writing my talon off). Just the drive alone to get the car over 20kms of gravel that would shake the fillings out of your teeth (thought the trailer was going to break). And how do you load a car with no drive?

In as sketchy a manner as possible!

And with that, the car currently sits in my new garage/shop I am renting. Clutch (Exedy clutch of D00M!) goes in on Saturday, then off to the BigWhite WInter Rally near Kelowna, BC.

Oh, and a gratuitous picture of myself (somebody has gotta make this rallying E36 M3 look good) :

Hey adam,offer still stands for storing the car when you out to baie and defi

racerboy000 wrote: Hey adam,offer still stands for storing the car when you out to baie and defi

I'm definitely still looking into it, didn't want to get too far ahead of myself. I was actually looking at cutting back next season, paying my debt off, and buying a condo. Don't tempt me!

How do you get so much torque out of that motor ? (sounds like fun/wish i had that much in mine....down low of course :p )

lastsnare wrote: How do you get so much torque out of that motor ? (sounds like fun/wish i had that much in mine....down low of course :p )

Gratuitous amounts of boost, tons of timing (and a restrictor can actually HELP early torque numbers due to the increased airflow velocity through it), and the piece de resistance, 109 octane VP race fuel

Of course, care is needed, as stock STi motors (even the fancy schmansy JDM 2.0L motors) typically bend rods at anything over 400wtq.

^ ahhhh, timing and race fuel, that must help :)

What I wouldn't give (except for $$$ of course ) to have instantaneous power without risking the clutch and 1st gear !

lastsnare wrote: ^ ahhhh, timing and race fuel, that must help :) What I wouldn't give (except for $$$ of course ) to have instantaneous power without risking the clutch and 1st gear !

More like risking your clutch disc hub splines...

The splines 'dun sheered off!

Got everything back together, car is good to go for the race next weekend at the BigWhite ski resort near Kelowna. Last round of the WCRC. Might have to pull start it though, the car HATES cold weather with it's current tune...

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10151781110960715

The idle issue probably has something to do with the VIPEC cyclic idle settings, but once it's warm it's fine.

Before the FIRST stage event started, the car looked like this:

This was after throwing the car off the road backwards at 120km/h:

Wow! Be careful!

If you don't wreck stuff every now and then, you're not trying hard enough.

Car is currently getting worked on. Oioioi! The back end has seen better days, about $5k to fix everything. But I should be back for the first event of the season!

Another action shot:

You are going to make a small fortune racing. By starting with a big one!

Looks like fun though.

I think you're going to need more sponsors to cover all this damage

Teh E36 M3 wrote: You are going to make a small fortune racing. By starting with a big one! Looks like fun though.

irish44j wrote: I think you're going to need more sponsors to cover all this damage

Did somebody mention fortune? Sponsors? Where is this money you speak of? I'm a 24 year old guy who went to school, got a decent job, and hopes to get my addiction out of my system (I'd like to be a "functional" rallyist by the time I'm 30, rather than the current dysfunctional one that I am). The final bill to fix the car was $6800, had to sell my 2002 WRX to fund it and keep rallying this year! The frame damage was almost significant enough to warrant writing the car off, luckily, she's all back together:

It's actually in better shape then before the event I crashed it at. I would have liked to have done a lot of the work, but I like racing more than wrenching in a -20*C garage. Only things for myself to do are get an honest alignment, install the pods light mounting pins (properly this time!), and throw on a WRC wing as the back trunk was off a 2.5RS.

I'd like to say this has taught me to take it easier, but I'd be lying if I did. It'll be maximum attack from the word go at the next event (unsure if I'll be at the 1st event in March, but definitely the 2nd event in May).

Awesome thread, will keep my eyes on this one.

Thanks SBF. As a certain rally driver has said before, I'm just tryin' to live the dream.

And the new shop that the rallycar will be going into (would have done all of the work myself if I had this place!) Not mine, but my father's. He only has a 2002 Camaro SS to stick in it, so I might as well take up some space

It's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaccccccccccccccck

Next event won't be until October (missed the first event last weekend), which is sad, but it allows me to focus on my life a bit more (as well as building up the war chest). The building of the war chest is a necessary evil though, as there is then one event a month (October, November, December) so it will be a busy end of the year. I've also been offered a national Canadian co-driving gig again, so I am working on that!

I am saddened by the fact that most of the pictures in this thread have stopped working I may come back when I have additional time to rectify that, damn you facecrack!

In the meantime, some updates!

I took a chunk of rim out at Cochrane, the OZ's are getting pretty beat up so it may be time to get new rims this season.

Speaking of Cochrane :o

So the Cochrane rally happened back in March. The short story is that one of the rad caps failed open, causing me to lose a lot of coolant. This was an issue as soon as we left the start, which REALLY put a damper on the start of the rally. We did the first 4 stages with me freaking out about a temp gauge at 3/4 temp reading and coolant steam billowing out the hood :'(

Luckily as long as I kept coolant in the system, I could hammer down, so after the first two stages I started running at my usual pace. After 7 stages and a nice battle for 3rd place, I realized that I had the "braking diff-lock" switch in the wrong position, which was why I couldn't get the car to rotate worth crap while left-foot-braking. I can honestly say it was probably my most frustrating experience in a rally car, as the car handles beautifully normally.

We ran on gravels from the get go, but it dropped below freezing as we pulled into the final service and started to snow. Knowing the final two stages had significantly more ice and snow on them then the first 8, Jeff and I decided to swap to studded Arctic Altimaxs (I'd like to point out that I've ran 4 rallies on them now, never had a flat, get great traction, have finished very well, and they still have tons of tread! I love them)! And then this happened:

The nuts decided they didn't want to come off, so I twisted them off with a breaker bar and a whole bunch of Adam fury! We made it out of service with one minute to spare as twisting the nuts off required enough torque to spread my sockets apart, with the nuts getting stuck in them.

So, then we got to the final stages, overheating, three studs on the front wheel, and uckyfay brakes. Since I'd been hammering on the brakes so much trying to get the car to turn against it's will, I ran out of pad at the end of the 3rd last stage. So I ran stage 9 and 10 with no brakes... and by no brakes, I mean only backing pads. I know everyone backed off on the final stage, but it was still nice to drop 17 seconds on the way back out and win the stage!

So overall, a success! After that, we came home, unloaded the car, and it sat muddy for almost two months while I did some work up north, lost the keys to the rally car (thanks Subaru for cutting one based off the VIN!) and finally washed it on Saturday:

Now that the car is clean, it only needs motor mounts, rotors and pads all around, wheel studs replaced (doing all 5 on the driver's front, over the long summer break I think the car is getting rebuilt wheel bearings/hubs all around and ARP wheel studs), rad caps, and did I mention it hit 93dB during scrutineering and it needs to be 86? So yea... yay 4 day long weekend! :'(

Nice job Adam. Yikes 93 dB! That is more than a little loud! Running just the turbo and the cat?

Thanks! And yes, 93dB is a tad loud.

In my defence, the car runs a JDM driveline, which is still drive-by-cable. As such, the car doesn't really like the whole "idle at 3500rpm" testing procedure... it basically engages anti-lag in every sense except for the additional fuel, so I make about 1psi of boost at 3500rpm with the anti-lag off vs 10psi.

I honestly don't know if I'll be able to get it to pass as it sits. I've requested CARS send me detailed instructions on their testing regime so I can duplicate it this weekend.

Well, that would partially explain the poor brakes...

is right