New Build up for suggestions and some head ups Or even Khuddo's
Posted by Pashka0788
Aaron Luptak Senior Moderator Location: SLC Join Date: 02/15/2008 Age: Midlife Crisis Posts: 776 Rally Car: Civic... |
as an illustration, check out Dave Coleman...
He's done a lot of interesting/weird shit: http://www.motoiq.com/projects/mazda/project_mazda_frankenmiata.aspx http://www.motoiq.com/projects/mazda/project_mazda_miatabusa.aspx http://www.motoiq.com/magazine_articles/id/2115/angry-hamster-evo-ii-holy-crap-i-drove-it-and-now-im-deaf.aspx Looking through those projects, it's clear to me that he's got access to a whole bunch of machining/fabrication skill, not to mention engineering know-how of both the seat-of-pants and book-learnin' varieties. You know what he used to rally? A Datsun 510, with all the important bits in basically the factory locations. You know what he was building as a new rally car, before he moved on to other stuff? A Mazda 3, with all the important bits in basically the factory locations. If a guy like Dave, who has a pretty good track record with crazy-ass cars, sticks to normal stuff for rally, that seems to me to be a big red flag. --- or, alternatively: --- suppose you're building some contraption to play on the track. want to do some honest-to-goodness, 10/10ths testing? pay $100-$200, haul it an hour or less, and get an hour or more of running it at a track day near you. want to see how fast it can go, and how it compares to others? pay $200-$300, haul it an hour or less, and run a time-trial/attack-the-time/whatever event at a track near you. now, in contrast, the rally-car-contraption: want to do some honest-to-goodness, 10/10ths testing? pay $400+ (entry fee), plus license fees, hotel, etc, haul it 4-8+ hours, and run a rally. want to see how fast it can go, and how it compares to others? pay $400+ (entry fee), plus license fees, hotel, etc, haul it 4-8+ hours, and run a rally. building a car like you're talking about, and having it be fast, driveable, and reliable, requires lots of development time. While some of it - basic reliability, will-the-wacked-out-suspension-geometry-try-to-kill-me-above-40mph - you can sort out driving at legal speeds on open public roads. But to actually make it a fast race car requires testing at 10/10ths, and development. If it's a track car, that's relatively cheap and easy. For a rally car, you can either do what I described above - 'develop' through competition - or spend even more of your time and $$$ to close a road for yourself properly. If you've got a huge plot of private land, with nice roads and neighbors that don't care, maybe that's easy. If you don't... --- bottom line --- all folks here are trying to point out is: rally, in the US, is hard to get into and hard to compete in sustainably - IF you choose the easy path and start with a Subaru/Golf/Volvo/whatever with stuff bolted in roughly the same places as it came off the boat. I'd guess that the percentage of folks that seriously start an 'easy' build that actually run a single event is probably 50%. The number of folks that run one event a year, for multiple years? Maybe 30-40% of that initial crowd? The number of folks running multiple events a year, for many years - maybe 25%... starting out with a complex project car, especially when viewed through the lens that most here are looking through (ie. "we don't know you, and don't know if you have any more mechanical ability than changing your own oil" ) , means we start evaluating your odds - I'd put you at a 5% chance of finishing the car and competing in an event. Many here want to rally - not necessarily build cars. That's why folks are making suggestions to improve your odds of actually competing. Now, if your primary interest is building a project car, feel free - nobody here will stop you, and I'm sure plenty would be interested to watch your progress. Hell, I'm pretty sure the teams out there running GTXs would be thrilled to know more about your secret sauce that will supposedly make the gearboxes indestructible. Just don't expect anybody here to say "this is a great way to get into rally and build a car that will last forever (or at least until you wrap it around a tree), you're a genius for coming up with some idea that no one ever before has thought about".  KF7RWG 
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