Nasty Man in a Shit Car: dc2100k's Fleet Thread

[dc2100k]

Just a little thread to keep you updated with general mingebaggery and the deteriorating state of my marriage.

Today I replaced a perfectly suitable set of 17" alloys in factory silver with nice performance tyres for a shite set of poverty spec steelies with some crappy old Michelin winter tyres. I figure summer is just around the corner so these should see me through to when I weigh the ZR in, roughly early autumn time I'd guess. The nice alloys with expensive tyres I was just going to leave in my garden where the neighbours can see them until about 2023, at which point the council will have ceased to do home collections of bulky objects and I'll have to take them to the dump myself.

[Noel Tidybeard]

track slag!

[vaughant]

I think im the only person on Autoshite that hates steel wheels but I get the logic of cheap running until scrapyard time. 

[dc2100k]

42 minutes ago, Noel Tidybeard said:

track slag!

30% Nursery Run

50% Targa Rally

20% Track/Hillclimb Slag

100% Idiotic 

[dc2100k]

40 minutes ago, vaughant said:

I think im the only person on Autoshite that hates steel wheels but I get the logic of cheap running until scrapyard time. 

? The 16” steelies are worth more than the 17” MG alloys for sure. Anyway first event is the Mull Classic in March so I might have her written off long before summer anyway!!

[dc2100k]

So the entry to the Mull Classic is in. Therefore we have a date with destiny: it's called 'scrutineering' and it occurs in Craignure on Friday 13th March.

Task List:

Oil & Filter Change – DONE

Air Filter - DONE

Fuel Filter – To Do

Coil Packs, Leads and Plugs - DONE

Coolant Change – To do

Remapped ECU - DONE

Secure Battery -  DONE

New exhaust – DONE, £50 stainless number from a scrappy. Slight concerns it won’t pass the noise level requirements.

Brake discs and pads – DONE

Winter tyres on steelies – DONE

Strut Brace - DONE

Harnesses – DONE.

Lights and stopwatches - DONE

Spare Wheels – DONE

Tool Kits – DONE

Graphics - DONE

 

[dc2100k]

Just a quick update:

Fitted the discs and pads. Great increase in stopping power, expecting bite to improve with a bit of bedding in. 

Remade the exhaust centre to rear joint using a custom swaged S/S reducer section and a couple of Mikalor clamps. Good strong joint now. Tested it with a dB meter and it measured under 90dB at 0.5m at 4500rpm so I think it should pass scrutineering ok, they might fail me for delinquent noises though.

[dc2100k]

UPDATE: Mull Classic Rally - 1 day

Car prep has gone ok in the end. I took the car out on a few hard runs over mixed broken/undulating surfaces to see how the suspension coped and the answer was not that well. The front shocks bottomed out pretty quickly on the bumpy stuff and ground clearance was limited. As I don't have a sump guard I reckoned the easiest (and cheapest) option in the circumstances was to replace the struts with a set of low mileage Rover Streetwise struts (£50 for the set!). These have raised the ride height by approx 50mm + a bit from the big winter tyres. Ride is much better, rides the bumps with easy and you could probably lie underneath the car now! It also gave me a chance to go over the suspension and the rest of it seems fine. Car looks ridiculous now, a bit like something from the base model misery thread. Perhaps I need to remove the side skirts, spoiler and badges to complete the effect.

Everything else has gone to plan so hopefully scrutineering will pass without incident.

 

 

[dome]

Excellent work. Enjoy Mull and keep us posted!

[dc2100k]

Safely home now, and just put the child seat back in!

First of all, a massive thanks to everyone on the organising team for putting on an exceptional event, and to all the marshalls that braved the rather moist weather! 

The car was brilliant, didn't falter once despite taking quite a pounding. The last minute suspension change made all the difference and the car didn't bottom out at all. I've got a loose exhaust heatshield (which I'll have to rip off) and one of the rear brakes was slightly binding yesterday morning so I freed off the caliper sliding pins in Oban and now it seems fine again. As everyone said beforehand in reality with M+S tyres on the wet forest tracks you can't really get the power down and actually a small 1.3 or 1.4 is probably optimal for FWD cars.

The rally itself was challenging but the route and navigation was fair and not likely to catch out the participants. The forest stages were awesome, with more grip around corners than I expected but less under braking. My biggest problem was inability to execute a proper handbrake turn around the 270 and 360 cones, especially the really tight ones. I'm going to do some autotests to work on this skill. The regularities actually went pretty well, I think we were about 3 minutes out over the 5 sections which was better than I expected and I think with another stopwatch, a more accurate trip meter and a bit of practice we could improve on that. Overall, I'm really pleased to get around the course with no navigational errors and doing every test without any maximum times.

The winners in their Rapier were very impressive, but they were too far away from us to see them in action. I did however see the 2nd place finishers in the MX5 in action and they were really, really quick. 
 

 

[dc2100k]

Decided the general world situation was quite dismal enough and that it was high time I burned some serious hydrocarbons whilst keeping a suitable distance from other folks. Went to the garage and found the 911 battery flat as a pancake. It was last started about 5 weeks ago so this isn’t a surprise, these cars are dreadful with batteries. I managed to jump-start the boot lock (no, really) and then found the battery was too flat for my charger to even select the right mode. I tried to jump start the car but the ZR wasn’t man enough to start it so I got the wife’s BMW involved and eventually got it started. Fitted the childseat and took my daughter for a 40 mile round trip to try and rejuice the battery. At least the charger now recognises it as a 12v battery and is on charge. Car is running very nicely although I’m getting a bit of a scraping noise from the rear brakes which i’d expected to clear by the time I got back but is still present so I may need to have a little look at these.

[Skut]

On 2/8/2020 at 12:54 PM, dc2100k said:

So the entry to the Mull Classic is in. Therefore we have a date with destiny: it's called 'scrutineering' and it occurs in Craignure on Friday 13th March.

Task List:

Oil & Filter Change – DONE

Air Filter - DONE

Fuel Filter – To Do

Coil Packs, Leads and Plugs - DONE

Coolant Change – To do

Remapped ECU - DONE

Secure Battery -  DONE

New exhaust – DONE, £50 stainless number from a scrappy. Slight concerns it won’t pass the noise level requirements.

Brake discs and pads – DONE

Winter tyres on steelies – DONE

Strut Brace - DONE

Harnesses – DONE.

Lights and stopwatches - DONE

Spare Wheels – DONE

Tool Kits – DONE

Graphics - DONE

You've done all this to a car your taking to the weighbridge in the Autumn. Is there something actually wrong with it or is it because it's cheap and therefore disposable.

[dc2100k]

Haha I'm not going to weigh it in unless it breaks in a spectacular fashion. Even then there is a long line of people breaking these in their front gardens so someone will probably give me a few hundred for it as a parts car anyway.

My intention was to keep this car for the year of 2020 and try to do as many motorsport events as possible, hence the fairly comprehensive servicing of a £500 banger. Total spend is about £1200 so far and I've got loads of spares  like three sets of wheels/tyres (road/rally/track). Unfortunately it looks like the season is going to be much curtailed this year so I will just use it as a run-around for the time being.

I rather like the old girl but we will reassess the situation after her next visit to the MOT tester. This is due mid-May so I can put it in for a test in about a month or so and keep the date. Now I've got the 911 out and the weather is cheering up a bit I will put the MG on stands in the garage and have a poke about underneath. I think it is mainly solid but the jacking points are looking a bit dodgy in a prescribed area so i'm going to try to reinforce with some Devcon plastic steel epoxy and then underseal. There is also a small hole in the spare wheel recess (a funny round plug fell out?) which I will again sheet and underseal. I also need to remake my exhaust centre joint after the rally knocked all of the exhaust paste out, and I want to have a look at my front ARB and drop links.