Inboard lights are large Hella pencil beams, and I’m not sure what the outboard ones are. They are huge and say HID on the back of them. They don’t appear to be any sort of “name brand” but they work really well
Inboard lights are large Hella pencil beams, and I’m not sure what the outboard ones are. They are huge and say HID on the back of them. They don’t appear to be any sort of “name brand” but they work really well
The "HID" ones are a no name brand that was sold by FLAPS, O'rielly, Checker, and a few others. I have them on my 4runner. Actually damn decent lights.
Central UP Rally recap:
I was traveling for work until the evening before I was leaving, so car prep was done ahead of time. Loaded everything up on the trailer and was feeling good about heading up there. The drive up to the Upper Peninsula was beautiful, but just as we arrived for registration/tech inspection, it started raining. Hard. The rainfall inconveniencing us would become a theme for the weekend. Since I - rather brilliantly - only packed shorts and t-shirts expecting highs of 80 degrees, unloading the trailer and applying decals in 60 degree thunderstorms was not a great start.
Nonetheless, registration went smoothly and the car made it through tech without any issues at all. We headed back to the hotel with the crew, had some dinner, and bought some ponchos. The event wound up getting delayed due to the continuing rain and standing water in the roads.
Eventually, we were under way! Me being a novice driver and this being my codrivers first event, we decided to take it easy early on and try to pick up the pace later.
About 8 miles into the first stage, we hit a boulder that had been kicked up into the road, bending the rear beam and causing massive camber/toe-out conditions. This made for some interesting handling characteristics at speed. However, there wasn't really anything we could do about that, so we pressed on.
A few miles into stage 2, we came across the first properly huge water crossing of the event. There was already a saturn stopped in the water, so we proceeded with some caution. Unfortunately, there was so much water going into the engine bay that we eventually lost power.
The car still cranked, so I figured we hadn't hydrolocked, but it wouldn't fire. Knowing we were towards the back of the pack, our time was limited before the sweep vehicles came around. Sure enough, we see them come around the corner. Sweep stops to check on the saturn; all is well with them. I'm anxious now and try to start the car. Crank, crank, stumble, crank. It wants to start, its so close! The sweep crew comes up to the subaru, gets a strap hooked up, and slowly pulls them back out of the ditch. As they are unhooking, i decide to give it one last try. Crank, crank, stumble, and it fires! We gather our things, strap in, and we are back in the race!
Now we can't find our spot in the notes, and the medical sweep truck is right in my mirror since we are both just reading the road. Just as I put some distance between us, we come across another deep water crossing and once again lose power. This time, we weren't lucky enough to let everything dry out before they caught us, and we were officially out of the race. However, it is still early in the day, so we could go back to service, fix some things, and get back out for the second loop. We follow the sweep trucks to the spectator point, leave the rally route, and rush back to service.
I take the wheel off to assess the damage and realize that the tire is now rubbing on the fuel filler guard. Thanks for routing that through the wheel well VW!
Some of our crew is working on mounting lights and trying to insulate all electronics from water, but if we can't get the rear suspension fixed then we will be out o the race for good. The best solution we came up with was to strap the chassis to a nearby tree, strap the wheel to my jeep, and start pulling.
Unfortunately, no amount of pulling seemed to make a difference and we ran out of time before we were able to get it fixed. We are now out of the race.
Definitely not the way I wanted the race to go, but it was an amazing experience overall. Got to hang out with some rally people, learned a ton, and had a fun road trip with my lady. We even stopped for a dip in lake Michigan on the way home since the weather was finally nice.
Unfortunately, others in the Upper Peninsula had much more to complain about. The heavy rain caused a lot of flooding in the area. At last count, there were 60 sinkholes formed across the UP and our governer declared a state of disaster for two of the counties in the area. Houghton, which plays host to the Lake Superior Performance Rally, seems to have been hit the hardest:
My slightly tweaked rear suspension didn't seem so significant once I saw what was happening in Houghton.
So originally i was saddened to find that this post wasn't about a civic rally car (as i was thinking of turning my 94' civic ex coupe into one), but being into older vw's, i'm super thrilled to see you tearing it up out there. PA seems to have a much stronger following to these older vw's and this build/progress shows it in spades. I've had a couple late westy golfs and used to track those. I don't have any advice for you but to keep on keepin' on. This is an awesome thread to read.
In reply to bearbrian13 :
My 2000 Civic rally car.
You gonna haul up to NEFR (15 hours tow for us, not sure how far you are away)?
Wish I could, but I don't have the time/money to swing it right now. Google maps says 13 hours, probably closer to 15 with crossing the border twice and generally going slow because towing.
In other news, my mk3 rear beam and new stub axles/bearings should be arriving in the next couple of days.
Cleaned up the new rear beam a bit and threw some paint on it. Hopefully I can find some time in the next week to swap all the new parts in.
As is customary, it took way longer than expected to find time to swap rear beams.
Got the old beam out and decided this would be a good time to clean things up a bit. (can see where the tire was rubbing after bending the old beam)
Had a little of this laying around:
Works very well, but I strongly recommend wearing some sort of mask/respirator. I feel like I lost years of my life from just doing these two wheel wells.
Took some wrestling, but I managed to get the new beam in and mostly buttoned up!
Unfortunately I lost one of the little brake line retainer springs somewhere in the shuffle and it was getting late, so I wasn't able to finish everything today. Hopefully my local Advance-O'Reilly-Zone has one of those retainers so I can get everything bled and back on the ground tomorrow!
Rear brake lines are all sorted out. I think at this point I've replaced just about every brake line on this car over the last year. Got a wheel on and took a moment to admire the rear travel.
Finally got the car on the ground and took it for a quick test run on a nearby gravel road. All is well and we are ready for action yet again!
Now that everything is back to being fully operational, the Jetta is officially for sale. I feel that I've learned what I wanted to learn from it, and want to start a fresh rally build.
Selling it with all the spares and parts I have for it. Totally turn-key and ready to go rally tomorrow.
You'll need to log in to post.
