Daddy, the $400 Rallycross 245

A local man has decided to create a series of rallycross events at the dirt circle track in our small town. We (swedishK, mrak, & I) are unwilling to commit any money to this endeavor for like nine different reasons. Fortunately, we had a lot of stuff laying around.

The things we had laying around:
- 1983 245
- b23f which may or may not have come out of this car originally
- m45
- carb setup from a boat motor
- K cam
- bilstein HDs (?)
- old snow tires
- sick rally lights

The things we bought:
- spartan locker
- gaskets
- dirty WRX seats

This is a picture I took in the first moment I pulled up and saw it with its stripes and lights and was staggered by its beauty and power.



We have tried to keep it very simple, both in the interest of reliability and so it's easy to take apart and crush it later.









It would have been cool if I thought to document any aspect of the assembly process, but I didn't. I'm very bad about thinking to take pictures or video. I am never the one with my phone out.

We had our first test day this weekend. I was very bad about thinking to take photos or video. We were only allowed to go half-speed, but we got on it enough to gain a lot of confidence in the bull**** car we slapped together and also to be reasonably impressed with its performance.

Here it is lined up to be the first-ever car on this course. This was the last time the car will ever be not dirty.




The series starts next weekend. Hopefully we'll be able to get you some mildly entertaining in-car footage or something. Thanks for your interest in our garbage rallycross car. I don't remember who named it Daddy.

This is rad.

Enjoy beating this mercilessly. Now pls send me the trim.

Hell yeah!

That electrical tape is semi-structural

Looks like a lot of fun!

Absolutely loving those stripes.

That's what you've been working on. Sweet!

Super coolio! We use an oval down here in BC for one of our venues and it?s blast keeping her matted on it!

Is there a grader on site? We use the infield for a technical course then pretty much leave the oval open for 100km/h sideways goodness

Superhans240 said:

Super coolio! We use an oval down here in BC for one of our venues and it?s blast keeping her matted on it!

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i got to take a late model around this track for a couple laps once and nagged them to let me take my turbo wagon around on that occasion, to no avail. very novel for us to take a 240 around the bank. i even went around in my fiesta on the test day.

Superhans240 said:

Is there a grader on site? We use the infield for a technical course then pretty much leave the oval open for 100km/h sideways goodness

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i'm not sure how they groom it, actually. i used to go to circle track races more, but only once or twice in the last couple of years. the infield is a mini oval for dollar stock, and that's smooth enough that i assume they must roll or grade it. for the full oval i think they just run the water truck around and then have race cars pack it on race days.

This is sweet, cant wait to hear how it works out for you. I really need to get to a rallycross event!

I love this car

A small detail that I enjoy, and forgot to note: Andy tinkered a throttle solution together by 3d printing a small pulley and pressing a skateboard bearing into it.

Neat!

okay, so i didn't update this because our inaugural race day was a small catastrophe. about two corners into the first lap of the first run, the throttle became audibly stuck wide open. i watched andy somehow turn a whole lap with 100% throttle and no rev limiter without crashing, spinning, or blowing up the engine. still pretty impressed with that. someone did take a video of this wherein you can hear it hit probably ~8000rpm a couple of times but unfortunately i do not know how to yank it off of facebook and get it to youtube. it's important to note that since he set a time, and we were alone in our class for the first event, we did technically win our class. **** you, parity.

here it is in the staging area, in more optimistic times.



when he came in, it became quickly apparent that a motor mount had basically fallen out of the car and let the motor flop over and break the throttle linkage apart. a small search party set out and found our hockey pucks, and we spent a while trying to reinstall them in a dirt parking lot to no avail.

as of today, the mounts are all back together, with nylock nuts, lock washers, and loctite. if they come out this time we will either make solid mounts and weld the engine into the car, or roll the whole thing into the gully and be done with it.

as a failsafe, and for fun, we also messed around with an old msd 6al box i've had forever so that we could have a rev limit if such an event should reoccur. here's a video, taken while testing the 6al, of a stock b23 hitting 7k in case you want to know what that sounds like.

what's the exhaust setup?

esmth said:

what's the exhaust setup?

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Its got no cat, a muffler in the forward location, and then straight back, over axle and out. There are also a few pin holes where the forward march of time has taken its toll on my poor welding/painting skills. This was the first thing I had "fabbed" for my car and has bounced around a couple vehicles in the last 6 years.

anyway, the next event went slightly better i guess. the car broke on mark almost instantly, turned out to be a quick fix but his set was over. andy turned some laps and that went fine. then it was my turn, and i was irritated and hot, so i kicked the **** out of the car and very much broke the throttle linkage on my last lap. we didn't figure it out until mark tried to start it for his laps, and once we realized what was happening mark got so mad he had to go stand in the woods for a while.

i think andy had a fine day, but mark and i spent most of it angry at the level of organization (which is semi-unfair as it was the first event with more than two working cars) and angry at our ****ty horrible car, and we did a lot of talking about which car to run at the next event, and why it wouldn't be this one, and if it really had to be a volvo at all. all of this conversation turned out to be moot, as the next several events would be rained out. bummer.

here's a video that an old lady posted on facebook, which i screencaptured, that being the reason for the very high quality. i don't know which one of us was driving but i assume it was me because of the oversteer.

but then: success. yesterday was the last scheduled event of the season and we ripped on the car for the whole day without breaking anything. we've introduced a decent oil leak from somewhere, and the starter isn't loving life. other than that, it didn't miss a beat.

the course was new because the endless rain has ruined the infield, but it evened the (small) field a lot more and i thought it was more fun. we also switched to our 15-year-old blizzaks, anticipating softer dirt. how these things haven't come apart yet is beyond me. they do feel grippier than the ipikes, though.

chunks of my laps:


some in-car:










two men very pleased with their car:



rinsed off and parked with the fleet.