911 Carrera RallyCross Project

Hey, it’s nearly 12 months since our last update. Lets’ see what’s happened with the 911 rally car.

Well, big news, it got a new home. We moved into our new building last Fall. It’s got carpet!



Here’s a pano/overview with all its roommates:



You can see the whole album here, if you really do have no life: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmRa8Boy

We spent most of last winter fixing up the new showroom but come spring we started the usual round of cars and coffee type events where the car, as always, was warmly received, despite winter lingering.



We even got invited to an event at the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn. Look, no snow!.



We did do some work on the car though. We raised the fog light brackets for one thing. We really like the look of the car with these on but our original brackets were too low so we made some new ones and tidied up the wiring a bit.







Inspired by our success with fog lights we bit the bullet and ordered up a set of Rennline’s LED replacement headlights.







We’ve decided to paint the bezels satin black as matching the white has proven difficult in the past. We like the contrast.

Staying in tune with our electrical theme we installed a new horn. You’ll never guess what tune it plays.



Just this past week was the Woodward Dream Cruise which takes place a mile from our new showroom. We took that opportunity to try two new things. First we inaugurated the Woodward Rally Cruise (WRC) over three days where we gathered as many rally cars together as we could and went cruising together.





And over the weekend we attended the first annual Woodward Dream Show at the M1 Concourse consisting of a track day and car show with the some of the region’s top cars and builders. We even won an award and it wasn’t for Most Lights!







So what’s next for the car? Well, we are once again entered for the Empire Hill Climb which looks like it might actually happen this year and next week we are gathering some more old rally cars together and attending the Northern Worthersee show in Frankenmuth. Should be good times.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

At the risk of making you feel special here’s another update! In our defense, the car has been quite busy this last few weeks so we have quite a bit to share with you all.

In early September we took the car (complete with the whole dog and pony show) to Frankenmuth, Michigan for the annual Northern Worthersee (NOWO) European car show. Part of the incentive, apart from it always being a great event in a beautiful riverside setting, was the opportunity to for the car to hang out with its rally mates again.





It even won an award, something it’s becoming quite adept at.!



It’s interesting how popular these old rally cars are becoming lately.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

EMPIRE HILL CLIMB
We’ve sponsored this event and used the 911 as a course car since it was revived about six years ago. We’ve since fell in love with it, the town of Empire that hosts it and the people that put it on, compete in it, volunteer to work and spectate. They’ve become like a family. So in 2022 we decided to take the big step and actually run the race! Well that didn’t work out as it was cancelled due to COVID but this year we managed to secure a spot. Of course we also took the dog and pony show up there as we forked over a fair sum in sponsorship money.

Though it threatened rain the evening before that didn’t materialize and Saturday was perfect. Nice and sunny with temperatures in the 70s.We were a little nervous as this was our first “Nomex” event. By that we mean we had never done anything with the care that required this degree of safety gear. The car was basically legal and just needed the typical prepping and an alignment at Munk’s, but we needed the aforementioned Nomex race suit, socks and gloves, a Hans device and arm restraints in addition to our usual helmet and lack of speed. Our goal was never to win but to “have fun and try not to suck”, as is friend’s motto. Well we managed that finishing 10th of 13 in our class. OK, we may have sucked a little but we did have lots of fun. A better, less sucky result was 6th out of 7 in the Vintage class. We were only about 3-4 seconds off the pace which, unfortunately, means we have to up our speed by about 15%!

PICS









RESULTS,(if you’re interested)
https://dl.motorsportreg.com/195308b7-2f59-4596-8cd2-d4aab4f90509/

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

We somehow managed to get thew car invited to the inaugural American Speed Festval, a Goodwod Festival of Speed type event held at the M1 Concourse in Pontiac, Michigan. We immediately felt out of our depth in such company as these class acts:







Some people drove hundreds of miles to see these cars. Us; 1.5!

Fortunately they parked us next to a couple of hyper horse power time attack cars to make us feel more at home!



Halfway through the first day we felt we needed to get grounded so went to snuggle up to the RALIVAN for a parking lot comfort break.



The event schedule called for two days of exhibition laps on the track and a car show Sunday. Unfortunately Sunday was rained off but we had a great time on the track:

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We did come away with a great souvenir too.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

OMG, Can’t believe it’s been 5 months since we did a 911 rally car update. I guess that will happen when it’s freezing cold outside.

After our adventures at the American Speed Festival in October the car sat for a while in the showroom. We did try to take it out a couple of weeks later but a fuel line decided to take a leak so we parked it most of the winter. We finally got around to fixing it at the beginning of February during a warm spell as we thought spring was upon us. Yes, we can be pretty naïve sometimes. The leak was at the front of the engine, near the bulkhead and, after struggling a little to remove the offending line we realized it was a much earlier repair that had failed.







Fortunately we had some braided fuel line in stock so it was an easy repair once it was out of the car.



Once assured it was not leaking anymore we dashed off to the local gas station to fill the tank with ethanol free recreation gas, our preferred fuel for storage. Needless to say the car got some stares which is always a pleasant surprise in the winter.



However, a few weeks later we were taking it all out again!



See, the car got invited to Autorama by the Eurotics car club. This is a fairly prestigious hotrod show in downtown Detroit’s convention center and one of the venues’s rules was for no more than 1/8 tank of gas in the car. There were quite a few other little rules we had to adhere to as well, none of which were in and SCCA rule book, as you can imagine. We had a set time to install the car on Thursday night so we trailerd the car down and set it up in its space.





The rules stipulated a 10” x 20” floor covering and some sort of barrier around the display so we got creative:



Unfortunately the show took place during a particularly busy period for sales so we basically dropped of the car on Thursday and picked it up Sunday night. It did get on TV though.



Driving out through the gathered crowd was fun though and we did get to drive the car home, after replacing the gas of course.



What’s next for the car. Well on April 23rd we are hosting a Woodward Rally Cars (WRC) and in June the car is scheduled to be zero car at a tarmac rally in Kentucky! That should be interesting.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

Since displaying the car at Autorama last April, we haven’t done much with or to it except for a few mods, fixes and taking pictures of it in various parking lots parked next to various interesting cars.

Of course, we changed the oil as it hadn’t been done for 12 months which probably equates to about 1000 miles. This seemed to precipitate a new or perhaps increased oil leak from some place yet to be determined. There has always been an oil stain on the underside of the engine around the area of the oil cooler that was never really wet. Now it’s wet. It’s not serious enough that we need to find the source and fix it immediately but is serious enough that we need to place a piece of cardboard under the car when we park it in the showroom.







As the car is scheduled to be used as zero car in an upcoming tarmac rally in Kentucky, we bought some Terratrip headsets as we will have an experienced codriver in the car. They worked great but we soon realized the intercom needed to be moved so we could reach it while strapped in.





We also replaced the faded TIM decal on the frunk as we were installing the livery on the new RALIVAN at the time. Looks a lot better.



We then adjusted the heater fan cable as it was beginning to not give us full blast all the time. This required some creating mechanicing:



We then tried to replace the upper steering column bushing with a sleeve designed to be retrofitted but found someone, probably us, had installed one already! We backed out of there and will address it later. Not before we did this though... Double fail!



In between these fixes and tweeks the car got a younger sibling:



A 2005 Cayenne S that we will be doing some interesting things with. You can read about it here: https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/timsyberia

Meanwhile we took the car to various events including a couple of Woodward Rally Car (WRC) meets at our building. Yes, the car has reached a new low in that it only drives a few yards to cars and coffee events now.





At least the events at M1 Concourse are a mile away!





On a lighter note, and for no particular reason, we did capture this moment of creative branding:



Not very exciting stuff but we hope to change that by the next update so stay tuned.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

Summer In The City: More preparation for the Plenty of Tarmac Rally in Kentucky: Organized the frunk, mostly so we could put two helmets in there. Never had to do that before.





Of course, we forgot to take pictures with the actual helmets in there. But we did get a picture of the relocated jack!



Then the rally got canceled due to lack of entries. Which actually proved to be good luck as the town that was to host it got washed away in a flood on the very weekend of the event! We hope everyone is OK.

So, we carried on with our plan B of displaying the car at various (very) local meets, the major ones of which were orchestrated around the Woodward Dream Cruise. If you’ve not heard of it, Google it. It’s a week-long car circus in August that culminates in a massive cruise along 15 miles of Woodward Avenue in Detroit and is just mad. We organized a series of Woodward Rally Cruises (WRC) with the Woodward Rally Cars (WRC) and then took them en masse to M1 Concourse’s Woodward Dream Show where we parked as a club. We also got to cruise Woodward together which was really special. Of course, the pictures don’t do it justice but if you get chance to attend one year do so; you won’t be disappointed.









For our next outing we plan on taking the car way further than a mile and in the trailer too! You won’t want to miss this.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

We’ve always loved the Michelin TB5 and TB15 classic tarmac rally tires and we have a good track record of rationalizing otherwise half-brained ideas. These two things recently came together around our 911 rally car.

As you may know, we are the US distributor for BRAID wheels and, as such, sell many 15x9/11 Fuchs replica wheels for so called 911 RSR clones. These builds almost exclusively utilize the TB15 tires and we have always wanted to have a set ourselves but never seemed to have a project they would work on. Then we discovered that Audi used them back in the day on their A1 Quattro rally cars so we quickly ordered a set and the appropriate BRAID wheels in the period correct sizes for our Quattro build. That was 2018 and they have been quietly aging out in the warehouse ever since, as that build is taking forever. It’s also the second set of wheels and tires we’ve bought for the car so it seems we like to buy tires like we vote; early and often.



Rather than let them expire we thought we might use them on our 911 rally car. The tires are size 23/59-16 which translates to about 265/40-15 in new money. That’s more tire than we have ever seen on the back of a 911 Carrera such as ours and way more than you can stuff in the front of even a 911 Turbo. Still, we thought it would be a worthwhile public service, no, our duty, to see if we could make them work, On our Quattro they sit on 15x10 wheels but Michelin say they work well on rim widths of 8.5” to 10.5” so we thought we’d try them on a 9”. Trouble is, we didn’t have a suitable 15x9 wheel lying around in a reasonable offset so we did what we do best; we rationalized something. We looked around the showroom and realized we didn’t have any wheels on display in bronze color. So we looked through BRAID’s catalog for their least expensive 15x9 wheel and ordered a Fulrace Maxlight in bronze for display. Simple no? But what offset to order? We’d previously had a 255/40-17 on the car mounted on a 17x9 at ET17 so that was our benchmark. We didn’t know where this tire might rub but knew it would be tight. We did have a bunch of 5x130 spacers and, as this setup would never be driven on, a lot of big fender washers. Also we had long studs on the car so we could stack a lot of washers and still be able to bolt it on, sorta. We ordered our new display wheel in ET35 and waited patiently for it to arrive.

Once it showed up we wasted not time in whipping a TB15 of our Qauttro wheels and slipping it onto our new Maxlight.



With a few minutes of juggling various spacers and washer we quickly concluded that ET18 was the sweet spot. For this tire on a Carrera. Yes, it would work! It sits about 10mm from the oil lines and control arm adjusting nuts and just inside the fender and certainly dominates the space.









OK, now that we know it works how do we justify buying four new wheels and narrower TB5s for the front when we have perfectly good wheels already and some not very old Toyos RA1 tires on the car now? With expert rationalization of course. We remembered that a friend of ours always coveted our 15” setup for his SC but could never justify the cost of new wheels and tires when he had a perfectly good set of 16s already. If we could let ours go for a reasonable price we might have a way forward. There was one big issue though. Our wheels were white! However, we had a cunning plan, when we originally bought them. We realized that nobody but us would ever want a set of white Fuchs replica wheels, even if they were the best available. So we ordered them in the standard finish of black centers with silver anodized outer rims and then Plastidipped them white. Yes, you read that correctly, we Plastidipped them.They had held up remarkably well over the years but now it was time to attempt to remove the Plastidip and see what the original finish underneath looked like. It was easy to remove most of the coating but some parts fought us. However, the wheels underneath looked practically brand new! We would certainly be doing this with our new ones.



Deal done. Now we needed new wheels and two new front tires. But what size. There was really only one available that might work, a 18/50-15 which translates to a 225/50-15. We’d had 225s on the car at et30 so suspected this would be the magic number again but we wanted to make sure. We looked around for a suitable surrogate and soon spotted our gravel rally wheels in the storeroom with, you guessed it, an offset of et30. Now 7” is not an ideal size for a 225 width tire but it will go on.so we ordered a pair of TB5s in that size and waited patiently again. We busied ourselves remove the incalcitrant Plastidip from the remaining three wheels we’d now agreed to sell along with their tires. When the tires arrived we slapped one on a rally wheel almost immediately and eagerly installed it on the car. It fit perfectly. Now we just needed wheels. We quickly ordered a set of BZ in standard finish and six cans of white Plastidip. And again we waited.







Five weeks later everything came together and this is the result. We couldn’t be happier. Yes, we Plastidipped them. Now we just need to drive the thing. Is it Spring yet?

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

Now we need some tire exercise vidjayos. With lots of Bibendum roasting.

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Andrew Steere
Lyndeborough, NH
KB1PJY

Of course, the 911 has been running great, as usual but it did have a couple of issues, we wanted to take care of before the season got under way.

We noticed a while ago, when swapping our wheels and tires, that the front anti-roll bar bushings were looking a little tired. Not really surprising considering the were OE and the thrashing they must have seen during all the rallycrosses we previously did with the car. The swap looked straightforward enough so we ordered stock replacement bushings from our friends at Pelican Parts and started to remove the anti-roll bar. It looked as if we could remove the two brackets and bushings on the lateral part of the bar and the bar would just slide out of its control are bushings. It wouldn’t. We found we had to remove the control arms as well making the job bigger because this meant removing the torsion bars as well. We hadn’t ordered new control arm bushings but, fortunately, ours looked OK. We plan on a full suspension refurb in the future so were happy to put these back in for now. With everything now off the car all that was left was to replace the four ARB bushings and bolt it back together. We tried really hard to mark the locations of everything before we took it apart so we hopefully wouldn’t have to realign the car. That didn’t work. When we got it all back together and took it for a test drive, we found the steering wheel off center by about5 degrees. Off to Munk’s Motors for an alignment.















We wish we could report that handling and performance were improved to some earth-shattering degree but, alas, our butt dyno did not concur. We’re sure it’s better but we can’t tell. Guess we’re not the sensitive types.

After getting the valve covers back on and taking the car on an extensive test drive, we realised it was no longer leaking! We doubt the previous leak had been from the valve covers and have concluded that the vacuum hose must have caused the oil system to become pressurized in some way and blew oil out of somewhere. Regardless, it doesn’t leek now and that’s good enough for us.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

OIL LEAK

About the same time as our last oil change the car developed a small oil leek that would congregate on the bottom of the engine block and then drip on the showroom floor. It was of a concerning amount but quite annoying sort of level. The problem was we couldn’t figure where it was coming from.







The interweb suggested two dire possibilities that we thought we had to investigate: broken head bolts and/or leaking rocker shaft seals. Both require removing the valve covers so we put the car on the hoist and did just that.





Fortunately, all our head bolts were intact and, the rocker shafts, though not bone dry were not exactly wet. This was great news but not very helpful. The decision was made to put the valve covers back on (with new gaskets and hardware of course) and live with the leak till we could take the car out of circulation and give it a good going through, hopefully next year. While we were in there, we did find a vacuum hose that had become dislodged and reconnected that to the valve on the side of the oil tank.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

Summer in the car parks

Summer has just flown by this year. They seem to go by faster and faster. Looking through our Flickr album it seems we spent this one taking pictures of the car parked next to other cars, some of which were ours. I’m sure we did more than that though.

Here’s one next to an 85 Carrera, with BRAID wheels, of course.



Here’s one parked next to a Ford RS200 replica, again, with BRAID wheels.



our Cayenne “Timsyberia” TSD rally car



our Mercedes Sprinter “RALIVAN”.



and an actual 911 Dakar! Unfortunately, not with BRAID wheels.



But surely that’s not all we did this summer. Well, to celebrate Porsche’s 75th birthday we got all our Porsches together for a group hug. Yes, they all have BRAID wheels.







We also took the car to three pretty significant events but more on those later.

The Big Three - No, not the Detroit car makers; events we went to:

DeutscheMarques at the Gillmore Car Museum, the largest all-German car show in America! https://www.deutschemarquesag.com/





#properwheels and #properboots





Woodward Rally Cruise (WRC) Part of the largest free car event in the world: The Woodward Dream Cruise (Google it)!













And just a couple weekends ago at the Empire Hill Climb











Hopefully this is not all for our plucky 911 this year.

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com

TEAM ILLUMINATA MOTORSPORT 2023 FLEET REVIEW

84 911 RALLY CAR: https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/84-porsche-911

Not a lot of work on the 911 rally car this year but we got to drive it quite a bit. The year started out with some new wheels and tires as we upped our game with tire width. Then we replaced the front anti roll bar bushings and fixed an oil leak. We took the car to plenty of cars and coffee events but the standouts were our attendance at the Woodward Dream Show at M1 Concourse with around 15 other rally cars as part of the Woodward Rally Cars (WRC) Group. We were also invited back to the American Speed Festival at M1 where we demonstrated the car’s track capabilities and the Empire Hill climb again. Not a bad year for the little car that can.



83 QUATTRO RALLY BUILD: https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/quattro-rally-build

We are closing in on finishing the dry build phase of this project. Once we get the wiring done, we can disassemble the car and prep the shell for paint. Hi-lights this year include, power steering pump mount, hood pins, A-pillar gussets, handbrake lever delete, radiator ducting, cold air intake, spare tire, intercom, fire extinguishers, map light, dash cover, power wiring and the bumper and hood slot mesh.



85 QUATTRO: https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/85-ur-quattro

This year we got to drive and show the 85 Quattro a few times. We are still chasing some minor drivability issues and the passenger side window regulator is awaiting its third fix attempt but we can now enjoy the car. We got it fully detailed, paint corrected and ceramic coated at Auto Europe early in the year and it has never been cleaner. We really enjoyed showing the car at the DeutscheMarques show at the Gilmore Museum and a concours in Northville as well as numerous cars and coffee events.



89 944 TURBO: https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/89-944-turbo

Early in the year we got a new addition to the fleet. A 1989 Porsche 944 Turbo (951) fully built race car and all its spares. We are not sure what we’ll do with this one yet or how it will fit into our marketing plans but it does look good in the showroom. As it’s not even close to being street legal we haven’t driven it much but we did shake it down at a local autocross in the summer where, despite its wide Hoosier R7 tires, it performed very well and was very easy to drive. The only real mechanical work we have performed on the car is to give it some proper BRAID wheels and more autocross and track day friendly tires. Hopefully we’ll have some opportunities to get this beast out on a track during 2024 so we can see what it can really do in the environment it was built for.



2005 CAYENNE (TIMSYBERIA): https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/timsyberia

The Timsyberia Cayenne continues to fulfill its daily driver and TSD rally roles admirably while keeping us on our toes mechanically. No Cayenne nightmares have appeared and it has never let us down but we have had to fix a small oil leak, and replace the hatch struts during 2023. We gave it some 17” BRAID wheels and Blizzak winter tires recently and some rust protection from Krown as it’s just so clean. We took the car up the actual Sno*rift rally and also used the car to discover Northern Michigan’s trails on two separate occasions. We also participated in the Son of Sno*Drift TSD rally in what passes for winter these days. We were entered for the Press On Regardless TSD rally in the Fall but a back injury saw us withdraw a couple of days before. We’ll be back to conquer that one in 2024 however.



2015 SPRINTER (RALIVAN): https://teamilluminata.com/blogs/ralivan2

Of all our vehicles that actually drive this might me the one we’ve used the least this year. About the only proper road trip we’ve used it for was when we dragged our 911 up to the Empire Hill Climb again. Before we could do that, we had to address the cooling issues it had exhibited the last time we did this. To be sure we didn’t have any more issues about a month before the event we replaced the radiator and viscous cooling fan and give it some new coolant and a transmission service. Other work on the van involved wiring the heating elements of our amazingly comfortable Scheel-Mann seats and installing a bulkhead to separate the cargo area from the cabin. We also took the van to the Mercedes dealer in Novi for a recall and to have the 70mph governor deleted from the ECU. We now can rip at around 85 if we want to!

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Paul Eddleston
BRAID Wheels USA www.BRAIDUSA.com
Team Illuminata Motorsport www.teamilluminata.com