Wow, making tons of progress! Do you plan on getting a dyno reading of this? I'd be interested to see what power you're making.
Yeah if I haven't been at work I have been working on the garage. No dyno yet - a few more tweaks and then I will be. I am curious too.
Remember this from about a year ago? Well I didn't realize at the time but look at the second place name...
Ryan Symancek... aka /drive aka the show My Life as a Rallyist, I never heard of the show or seen the show until about 2 weeks ago and its quite good! You could say we had a similar story - finding rally through video games until college where you would just get by enough to go racing and then pursue that passion...
However that day he was filming, but everyone has cameras at a race event so it would was hard to notice. so it turns out I am "That Guy" and I appear as the antagonist in an episode:
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LoginIt’s a pretty cool video and the series is very good and you should all check it out if you are interested in rally at any level.
Now that being said, it is almost 1 year later I am racing the same car again although completely different car once more and I managed to make it to a special weekend of rallycross with the Detroit region. Saturday afternoon was fun runs because this was our regions annual day/night rallycross - one heat in the day time and 1 heat at night so you can utilize your sweet rally lights so technically you can get 3 heats of racing in if you give 100% participation, and that’s not all - we had an event rained out and re-scheduled for the next day! so a maximum possibility of 5 heats of racing... but this time with a full roll cage, full re-wire, full EFI swap, full underbody protection, rust repair, seat mounts (sounds easy but you try being 6'4" in a sardine can like this) and all the other DOT legal stuff my car was lacking...
The clock starts ticking; I had worked from home that day to continuously finish my preparations for the tow rig and car itself. Its now 8PM Friday night before the race, 12pm the next day is the start of fun runs and registration closes at 1pm.
We began to work on tuning immediately afterwards, but before tuning is possible – running and idling was to be addressed first. Around 9:15pm that night we had sorted out my failed 02 sensor issue and re-cal'd the DLG-1
**NOTE** I have eaten a few 02 sensors in this whole recent process of getting megasquirt functioning properly, every time you go from OFF to ON it runs the heaters (gauge displays HTR for each sensor) to the 02 sensors. I managed to kill an 02 sensor without ever having ran a vehicle for more than 20 combined minutes. Other issues popped up and were delt with accordingly, nothing out of the ordinary for just having a rough base tune for an entirely different setup.
Last time we had successfully verified that the engine was timed 100% correctly and ignition was working properly. It was right after that moment we lost fuel. No pulse of the injectors. This time we had more luck but we didn't finish the tuning until about 2:00am. A few pulls and driving on the highway, getting fuel from a slow pump, various changes, talking with a police officer (hazards on at the side of the road, safety check kind of thing) but that didn’t stop us – we had finished and we had various 9000 RPMs of brrrrrraaaaaaaaappppppppppp and nothing exploded. It was just after this when I am getting ready to load the car on the trailer and call it a night – I lose 12v power to the passenger side dashboard which provides key on powers to my e-fan, lights, megasquirt and 02 sensor controllers/gauge etc. I had a failed relay and had to dig into the dash to replace and ultimately got the car on the trailer at 3am then proceeded to fall asleep after a hot shower.
With little sleep I wake up – finish packing and then head down about 2 hours south to the dreaded state of Ohio however with construction I missed my exit and have to drive about 5 miles out of the way (no big deal) HOWEVER around this time I notice that my volt gauge on the frankenburban is reading below 12v - my alternator was failing and I was still about 20 minutes away from the race site so kiss the fun runs goodbye . Great thing about an old chevy truck is that there are parts everywhere, so with an added 30 minute delay I changed the alternator in the parking lot and I was on my way again, it almost didn't start because of the lack of battery power but I did have jumper cables and a spare battery just in case... Nice thing about a truck that big is that you can literally carry everything you need and everything you don’t need. However this marks the 6th or 7th time I have driven a vehicle to Ohio and it breaks down…
Without entirely testing the car other than a few wot pulls in all gears my stage rally co-driver and I decided to get behind the wheel and give it 10/10ths. 7000 RPM launches and power for days! It was nice being able to spin the engine to 9000 RPM with the carb setup I had reached my limit on that carb through pressure and orifice adjustments so I could not fuel the engine fast enough so it would be too lean above 6500 RPM. Even with a full gravel spare in the trunk and an added roll cage, it feels faster than before. The goal was to beat the snot out of the car and we did for 2 days straight and nothing broke! As a driver I did pretty bad time wise but still put competitive clean timed runs down although I blew both the chances for trophies for both days due to a MAX run each day but the day as a whole was a success. I received a lot of compliments on the noises it made, and on that note… action shots.
I didn’t have enough time to clean it the dirt on the hood is from the year of sitting…