Round 4 of the WA Championships was run last weekend at Mogumber. With Mal away with the Navy and Mitchell occupied with Cricket Trails only Dave attended the event. I didn't take the baja but was lucky enough to navigate in Car 146 for the Renton's. It was a brand new car but we were able to finish third in Class 1 after experiencing gearbox and clutch problems. A great weekend and thanks to the Renton family .
It has been decided to give the Baja a transplant for next season and we are just starting the process of putting in a Nissan SR20 engine. This will be fuel injected and computer controlled and we expect to get at least 30% more power than the old faithful Nissan L20B. We still may even turbo charge it. Hopefully this will give us a great run at the championship next year and with Mal back we will plan to run the entire WA Season.
Once again I have been a bit tardy with the website. It was two weekends ago that we competed at Harvey for the Short Course Event. Once again Dave was driving with Mitch navigating, Mal being at sea with work.The event comprises of four heats of three laps with your three best heat times counting towards your total time. With 8 Class 4 entries in the field of 25 cars it would take a good effort to get a result. After the recon and prologue we started the first heat up against a Harleigh Uren in his 4.5 litre V8 Pathfinder. As expected it had a little too much horsepower for the 2 litre 4 cylinder Datto motor but we recorded a respectable time of 5 min 17 secs. The second heat saw us up against Bill Mackintosh in his Class 9 Buggy. This was a closer race but he just got over the top of us in his two litre buggy as we recorded a time of 5 min 16. The third heat saw us up against Bill again and once again he was slightly quicker than us as we took 5 min 11 secs for the three laps. Our final heat saw us record a victory as we got as much out the car as possible to finish in 4 mins 57 secs and finally record a win over Bill.
We finished the night 18th outright and fourth in Class 4. It was a good Class result. The cars that beat us were Jeremy Beck in his supercharged V6 stadium truck and the Leatherbarrows (both father and son) in their fully worked Ford F150. Another bonus was that the only damage we did was the starter motor. So all is looking good for Mogumber in August.
Belated news from Brookton. This was Mitchell's first race in the car as navigator and he did a great job (didn't guide us into anything). The car was running well and with the front end re done (again) we did a reasonable prologue. Into the race proper we were running well and had completed four laps (out of six) of the 20km track when the distributor decided to fall to bits. It broke the rotor and bought an end to the racing for the morning race. We managed to find another rotor. Out a farm shed (Thanks Greg) and we cable tied the distributor back together to start the afternoons race. Once again electrical gremlins slipped in with the ballast resistor giving way just before we completed the third lap. The good news from the weekend was that it appears we have finally solved the problems with the front shockie mounts. So we are now looking forward to the Harvey Short Course in July.
Well the good news is that we managed to finish the event at Hyden. Unfortunately we only managed to finish fourth as we once again experienced problems with the front suspension. After a reasonable prolougue (48th out of 61) we set out on the race into Hyden with all going well until about 5km in when the front shockie mount on the passengers side snapped. After a quick stop to remove to shockie we continued into Hyden and then completed the return journey to finish day one sitting sixth out of twelve starters in Class 4. After rebuilding the shockie mount Saturday night we headed off again to complete the three laps of 50km each on Sunday morning. After a great start we had completed one and half laps when the same shockie came loose having snapped the bolt. Once again a quick stop to remove the shockie and off we went. We replaced the shockie in the pits at the end of lap two but once again the bolt failed so we had to limp the car over the line to finish 4th in Class 4 and 28th Outright(43 starters at State Level).
We have already taken the front arms of the Baja and given them to an engineering firm to rebuild. The rest of the car emerged unscathed so apart from maintanence we look good for the next race at Brookton over the June long week-end.
After missing Round 1 due to work committments this weekend sees us off to Hyden for the second round of the WA State Championships. The car is ready to go after we got new bilstein shockies for the front of the car and spent a fair amount of time rebuilding the mounts and bump stops. We also fixed the steering rack and had the starter motor rebuilt. The car even starts now. Colin Doney has refurbished the carbies so they no longer stick open which should be a bonus going into those tight corners.