At the Ft. Meade RallyCross, we noticed that the car felt very doggy at lower RPMs on the rally tires. We weren’t quite sure what was going on, as it seemed to happen as we were turning tightly in second gear. Our initial thought was some extreme tire rubbing, but then we realized that it was just happening on the rally tires because they were taller, which meant that turns that are normally taken at a certain speed in second gear were now much lower in the RPM band. It turns out that at 1500 rpm or less, the car wasn’t responding well at all, and in fact, stumbling badly.
We traced this back to some holes that we cut in the airbox. Our idea was to move the air intake from the inner fender (where there’s lots of mud, dirt and water being flung up) into the engine compartment. Our 2.2 liter engine didn’t like that very much and we blocked the additional holes with duct tape. We’ll be visiting our local junkyard this weekend to source another air box and the intake pieces/resonator chamber that our car is missing.
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