carl

Up to this point we had been using a 1/8" primitive plate with a 3/16" sheet welded down the middle and down to the transmission crossmember. This plate took some good abuse but it was time to go to something much stronger.

Graham Evans helped us design and fabricate the new plate
We started with a piece of 1/4" 5052 and drew our design onto it


It was cut ...

I put together some storage boxes to mount to the tire rack - this should keep us a bit more organized in service






We also began to put the car on a diet. The rear doors were gutted and lexan windows ...

pressure testing manifold


bent diff protector


burnt radiator fan


you can see how rich the car was running while we were troubleshooting it
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Ziptie Rally Team (ZRT) went into the Rally in the 100 Acre Wood coming off a strong showing at Sno*Drift (including a podium finish in open class). This was to be ZRT's first gravel rally in the new open class car and the team was very excited to test out the car's abilities.

The trip started off on a bad note when the entire exhaust was torn off the car loading it onto the trailer. We later discovered that this was because we had smaller tires on the car than normal which reduced ...

Luckily there wasn't much to be done between Sno*drift and 100AW since there wasn't a lot of time. The car went up on stands, we inspected the suspension and underbody and dropped the skidplate. Changed the oil and transmission fluid. put the front swaybar back on and swapped the rear 13mm out for the stocker, cleaned and lubed the struts, and installed Hawk HP Plus brake pads.

We ziptied up the front bumper that we cracked somewhere on stage
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