News September 2002

30th September 2002

Good news, we finally started work on the new car last weekend.

The shell is completely stripped and is ready for the preparation to begin.  The new arches arrived from Rally Nuts at incredible high speed, in fact 4 days before their promised delivery date.  They are Escort group 4 arches and im not sure if they will look OK or not but we shall wait and see.

The old car is still waiting to be dismantled and sent to the scrapper to meet its final doom.  Once the parts have been stripped form the car they will be stripped, checked, cleaned, re-painted and re-assembled to be fitted to the new car as and when they are needed.

I will photograph and list in as much detail as I can for you to see how and why we are carrying out work for you to see, I hope to inspire some of you to build your own rally car.

12th September 2002

Well almost 5 days later and my shoulders are still killing me, I must invest in some padding for the belts.

Simon Clark from SC photography has kindly sent me some pics that he took of us on the Weekend, I must say that his work is regularly better than the professional shots you get after an event and he doesn't charge for them. Check out his website for more Rallying photos.

We are still currently planning the build for the new car and I expect work to begin in the next few weeks.

9th September 2002

oops, the Bomb Along stages turned out to be a rather bad event for Orbital Motorsport.  Not only did we have fuel starvation problems for the first 4 stages, I managed to roll the car on a sharp right hand turn after hitting a lorry tyre that was out on the race line.  To say I wasn't happy would be the understatement of the year.  Unfortunately the car is too damaged to bother rebuilding her and the roll cage appears to be bent.

Now we are planning the building of the new car a bit earlier than expected.  Our competition year is now over we will be detailing the building of the new car in step by step fashion.

6th September 2002

The dodgy wiring was traced to a broken wire, it has been replaced and everything works now. (fingers crossed)  The tracking was checked and a minor adjustment was made so the wheels are now running parallel.

so we are all ready to go to Oakington tomorrow.  I didn't receive the final reg's due to the Royal Mail being particularly slack in my area so I don't know what time noise and scruitineering will open.  I cant see us missing it though as we should all be there by 3pm.

On another note I have had great difficulty in obtaining another pair of Dunlop moulded slicks in the compound that I want to use.  Apparently Dunlop are moving their factory to Banbury and this has left a shortage of the tyre size that I use.  This means that i will have to use a softer compound that I want to so the tyre wear will be a lot higher.  Not good when a tyre costs £104 each and you have a very limited budget like us.

Check back after the weekend to see how we get on.

1st September 2002

I just got back from giving the car a shakedown test on my local roads and she performed faultlessly.  It must have shocked a few people on the M4 as I overtook them.  

Only one problem I had was a short on the headlamps so I had to run with sidelights and main beams only.  There is a loose wire somewhere so we will sort that later this week.