Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :
I used to buy used tires from someone who competed in the Spec Focus subclass (back when Hankook had contingency in the US) and his opinion was that entering a rally was too expensive to not start with new tires every time.
OTOH he was also running Hankooks, which my personal opinion is that they were hockey pucks with a tread pattern, but at least they wore quickly.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard... Rally doesn't really wear down tires all that much If you have a low power car. I've used the same set for the last two STPRs And most of SOFR and they are still 75% or so.
People who buy brand new tires for every rally either have high power cars that actually wear down the tires quickly, are using soft compounds that wear down quickly, or just have a bunch of cash. Or are at the point the end of the spear were a couple seconds here or there decides everything for them.
On the regional end of the field I would say far less than half of competitors show up to every rally with new tires if even that.
Underbody damage seems limited to one broken bolt and some gravel blast so repainted and reassembled:
Reinstalled stock intake, the snorkel had another hidden partially collapsed section inside the bumper too so I definitely need to rethink that thing if we do another splashy rally:
Replaced the very exploded Yoshimura with a tiny stainless packed muffler:
More clearance and sounds pretty decent for a $30 muffler:
Re: Intake extension
You're going to want to use something along these lines. The industrial stuff is rated for 24 inHg, and is pretty much uncollapsible...
Wasn't sure what size you needed, so the link is to 4" diameter...
What are you using for underbody protection? This is very relevant to my interests now.
In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :
*shrug* being based in Columbus, everything was a long tow for him. And Hankooks wore extremely fast for rally tires. I shredded a set using them on the front of the RX-7 rallycrossing.
From what I remember of his setup, tires were not a significant expense compared to all the stuff he was not allowed to upgrade and stay in class. Been a while.
Oil and air filter changed, went for a brief test drive- it was definitely lacking power with the partially collapsed snorkel, feels great now!
In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :
What's that muffler? I think I could use one on my spec Miata exhaust to make it less neighbor annoying.
In reply to Stampie :
This one from Amazon, there are a bunch of options for diameter and at least one other body size too if you click around.
Finally got that tire dismounted:
Also marked the wheels that got gouged up enough not to trust for a big rally and shuffled tires around to put the worst ones on those to burn up in testing/rallyx:
Got a mysterious package:
Tim from team Vertical Disambiguation decided to send me some stuff- since he has fancy brakes on his BRZ now this stuff was apparently just collecting dust, so now I've got some spare rear calipers and legit DirtFish wheel scrapers:
They bolted right up, just needed a little grinder work and some new HDPE bits since they weren't designed for VW wheels:
This saved me a ton of time vs having to fab something from scratch, rally people are the best.
irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:
Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :
I used to buy used tires from someone who competed in the Spec Focus subclass (back when Hankook had contingency in the US) and his opinion was that entering a rally was too expensive to not start with new tires every time.
OTOH he was also running Hankooks, which my personal opinion is that they were hockey pucks with a tread pattern, but at least they wore quickly.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard... Rally doesn't really wear down tires all that much If you have a low power car. I've used the same set for the last two STPRs And most of SOFR and they are still 75% or so.
People who buy brand new tires for every rally either have high power cars that actually wear down the tires quickly, are using soft compounds that wear down quickly, or just have a bunch of cash. Or are at the point the end of the spear were a couple seconds here or there decides everything for them.
On the regional end of the field I would say far less than half of competitors show up to every rally with new tires if even that.
I buy a set of tires every few years, I haven't bought winter tires in several years actually. light weight low & power is easy on fancy consumables.
fidelity101 said:
irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:
Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :
I used to buy used tires from someone who competed in the Spec Focus subclass (back when Hankook had contingency in the US) and his opinion was that entering a rally was too expensive to not start with new tires every time.
OTOH he was also running Hankooks, which my personal opinion is that they were hockey pucks with a tread pattern, but at least they wore quickly.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard... Rally doesn't really wear down tires all that much If you have a low power car. I've used the same set for the last two STPRs And most of SOFR and they are still 75% or so.
People who buy brand new tires for every rally either have high power cars that actually wear down the tires quickly, are using soft compounds that wear down quickly, or just have a bunch of cash. Or are at the point the end of the spear were a couple seconds here or there decides everything for them.
On the regional end of the field I would say far less than half of competitors show up to every rally with new tires if even that.
I buy a set of tires every few years, I haven't bought winter tires in several years actually. light weight low & power is easy on fancy consumables.
Yep, I think I have 2 full rallies and a season of rallycross on the ones currently on my car, which don't show a lot of wear.
though I've seen you drive, I figured your rears at least would wear down fast lol.
Mostly worked on the Tundra this weekend, new Bilsteins and some minor modifications for dog crates and stuff. Nothing exciting.
DC RallySprint Panthera Test Day
We got up early for the 4.5hr drive down to Panthera for DC Region's first rallysprint- apologies since I'm light on photos here. The plan was to run the rallysprint test day and the rallycross the following day.
We ran the oldest and worst set of tires we had on the rear, and the second worst up front to start- all I wanted was to put in lap after lap and get my confidence in braking late and being sideways back, and the Panthera course was perfect for that. Apart from a little rock hit on one lap, the entire morning was just slidey fun with the cooked tires on the back, and after doing a few runs of notes in our car Sara ran around and codrove for other people who either didn't have a codriver or were running for the first time.
Feeling good about the car, we started off the afternoon on the same tires and did a few more runs that way before rotating the fronts to the rear and putting some less-cooked front tires on. After that I began hotlapping the course since many of the other cars had called it quits for the day, so I could just do run after run with less than a minute's break in between.
After a few of these back to back laps, Adam Moore at the start line told me my car was making a weird sound and I drove back to the paddock to investigate- it sounded like there was a tiny little firecracker under the intake on throttle tip-in. I changed the air filter and reset the ECU just to see if anything changed but it persisted; no codes, nothing weird on the live data, ran fine, but this nasty little pop occasionally when giving it gas. My best guess was direct injector seals, since I know that's a thing on the FA20, so we opted to skip the rallycross the next day and head 4.5hrs back home to get a jump on repairs. Josh (irish44j) offered a codrive in his e30 for the next day, which was tempting, and we really wanted to hang out and camp with everyone, but with Bristol rapidly approaching it didn't seem smart to let the car sit broken for a day so we loaded up:
Heading home and reflecting a bit, we did get what we wanted out of the test day- the car felt great right up until the scary noise appeared, notes were good, and I got to push a bunch in a repeatable environment. Hopefully that translates to faster driving in future rallies.
After a night of sleep and unpacking the truck, I pulled the intake off the car- it was annoying but not as bad as the internet makes it sound. No matter how much you clean a rally car it's always dirty:
When I pulled the DI stuff, the injector for cylinder 2 basically just fell out. Huh.
Looking closely, the seal on that one is completely missing:
So that's our smoking gun, at least it's an obvious problem and not a head scratcher... unless replacing the seals doesn't fix it. Today I'll have to see what the lead time is at dealers, and with any luck I'll be able to get Xero-Limit to do the actual seal replacement since they have the SST and know what they're looking at- in a pinch though, the direct injectors on my parts engine have the same part number on them so I can mix and match and put the best four in the rally car if I am out of time and options.
Sometimes this box under my workbench is less funny than usual.
A local Subaru dealer will have the seals and various o-rings tomorrow, so that's nice.
Happy to hear the likely issue is pretty obvious. So, with the seal "missing" does that mean someone just didn't put it on at all, or that it just disintegrated and got burned up or something?
I think it burned up, a couple of the others don't look great either- the consequences of rallying a junkyard engine I guess.
On the bright side, you didn't need a cherrypicker lifting the front of the car off the ground by the injector to get it out of the head. (I wish I were exaggerating)
The seal SST is kinda weird, there is a spreader cone to get the new seal over the injector tip, then a sizing cone to moosh it back down to the correct diameter. I bothered to buy it, most people just reuse the old seal rather than fight a new one. Or are installing new injectors that come with new seals anyway.
Have these motors always been "fragile" ? Back when I was following Colin McRae and Petter Solberg in WRC it never seemed as thou these bulletts where an issue...or maybe I wasn't following the DNF reports closely.
In reply to 759NRNG :
Both the previous EJ series engines and the current FA series like what's in the BRZ are known for having a number of design oversights which can take them out- they're not the worst things ever made but they've rightly earned Subaru a reputation for having less robust engines than many other Japanese manufacturers.
The old WRC teams and current high level racing teams running these engines do a LOT to make them more reliable and powerful.
They are certainly well engineered for the power levels they are expected to make.
Unfortunately, people who played with overbuilt engines like 3SGTEs and 2JZs and 4G63s have an assumption that you have a right to be able to double or triple a Japanese turbo engine's power without opening it, or care in tuning beyond "add fuel and boost". A 500hp EJ20 isn't going to last very long.
There is a great TV documentary available on YouTube called "Engineering the World Rally" or somesuch. It is about 6 hours long in total, they followed Prodrive during, IIRC, the 2006 season. Which was a really bad season for Subaru with respect to chasing problems and getting DNFs. They had a couple engine failures, although at least one of them was due to external causes (oil cooler end tanks failed due to pressure oscillations stemming from the regulator design)
A photo Josh took at the rallysprint:
Those wheels with the X on them held up fine despite having enough damage that I marked them- still probably going to only use them as spares/rallycross/testing wheels though. Probably.
In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :
You'll definitely use them as spares/rallycross/testing 
Hey how does this compare to the Merkur......night and day?
759NRNG said:
Hey how does this compare to the Merkur......night and day?
I've driven both on a couple rallycross runs so I'll give you a quick outsider's take before Chris gives you the real deal:
The Merkur felt like a heavier, laggier (and junkier) version of an e30, but had similar overall driving characteristics, if not as quick on its feet. IDK how Chris and Sara managed to be competitive in it, much less complete rallies in it
The BRZ by comparison feels tight, instant and direct on throttle/brake/steering, and more powerful than I'd expect. On the one or two rallycross runs I took in it I felt it was predictable and pretty easy to drive, and felt a lot lighter than my e30 (though it's actually about the same weight in rally trim).
From a strictly cool point of view, the Merkur is super-cool. The BRZ is pretty cool as well, but will be cooler in 20 years :)
In reply to 759NRNG :
Josh pretty much summed it up- the BRZ is better in just about every way, although it doesn't have the 80s rally cred of the Merkur. The steering is great, the interior is a much nicer place to be, the transmission effectively has two more usable gears, the brakes are amazing... the list goes on. Think of the BRZ as rallying a modern sportscar, and the Merkur as more of an ailing GT car and you sort of get the picture.
That said, now that Perry has the Merkur making like twice as much power I'd bet it's really fun- that car's strong suit was always just keeping the hammer down through the straighter sections.
