Turns out the noise coming from the front end was bad spherical bearings. The right LCA rear bearing and both strut top bearings were loose. I ordered up some teflon tops from Burmeister, and have a spare LCA to toss in, so hopefully that fixes it up.

The good news is that I didn’t have to remove the struts from the spindles, so hopefully it will be easy to get it realigned.

Now to decide if I do the springs next, or the new transmission.

I ended up second in class, and second overall.

Here’s my sixth run, fastest of the “forward” runs.

Here’s my final run of the day, it likely would have been my best time if I hadn’t missed the shift to second.

Results:

wag-rallyx-11-16-2008

First I’d like to thank the organizers, workers, spectators, service crew, MaxAttack!, and everybody else who made this event possible. It was a great time, even if we almost never made it.

It started four weeks ago when I rolled the car at a local rallyx. I found a body shop willing to do the job as a favor, and entered the event without having a drivable car. I started getting nervous when Monday (the 13^th) rolled around and I still didn’t have a car. Luckily they finished the body work Tuesday afternoon, and I was able to bring it home with the paint still tacky. It took Tuesday night (thanks John for coming over to help), all day Wednesday, and a little Thursday morning to get the car ready, but we left for Houghton only needing stickers to get it ready to rally.

We showed up after tech had closed, but they did a quickie inspection so we could still practice. The car felt great around the first lap, but was smoking badly after the finish. I popped the hood (for the first time since leaving Milwaukee) and everything was covered in oil. Turns out when I was topping off the oil that morning I forgot to replace the cap. The cap was somehow still sitting on top of the engine, so after a long walk to the rig and a few quarts, we took another lap. Sounded good…no permanent damage. WHEW!

Friday started great. We took it easy on the GreenAcres spectator stage, then started increasing our pace on the next two.

On the transit into service, I saw a stopped rally car and slowed down to ask if they needed help, and my rear wheel locked up. We drug it 50 feet past the first car, pulled off the wheel and discovered that the rotor, caliper bracket, and brake line were broken. Good thing we were headed into service! Our service crew got the parts replaced, and were able to get most of the air out of the master cylinders and we were off to Passmore.

I did not drive so well on Passmore, and got passed by the Woodsides a few corners before the finish.

Then on Far Point, something (ball joint bolts) came loose in the front suspension and I had variable front toe. Our crew got that fixed at the next service, and I went into Passmore 2 looking for redemption. We got it, breaking 16 minutes, and driving much more in control than the first run (and taking one place back in MaxAttack!. We had a good run through Far Point 2, and took back the second spot we had lost with our first run through Passmore.

Final service of the night was quick and easy, and we were off to the final two stages. A mile into Herman, I saw Cizmas. I felt bad seeing him at the side of the road, but was happy that I’d picked up another MaxAttack! spot. Shortly after I drove over a rock, destroyed a rim, and had to drive the rest of the stage on a flat.

I was sure we’d lost the place we just gained, but fortunately Greenhouse had his own issues and after tying him on the last stage, we ended up 2^nd in the G2 regional and 7^th in MaxAttack.