STPR 2013

[Crazyswede]

STPR 2013 is taking place May 31 - June 1. http://www.stpr.org/

As of this point we are planning on entering but we have some work to do on the car. If we do enter I plan on going out earlier in the week and running recce and putting my own notes together. I have looked into renting a cabin or house but we will likely end up in a hotel due to the uncertainty of running at this point.

[burnsside42]

Well I will be home and not working that weekend. Anyone who needs some extra wrench in a pit I am available to help out. I will plan to head up there for the rally to watch. Is anyone else planning to go as a spectator? I've never been.

[Luke]

Well I will be home and not working that weekend. Anyone who needs some extra wrench in a pit I am available to help out. I will plan to head up there for the rally to watch. Is anyone else planning to go as a spectator? I've never been.

Well, it looks like with a little luck this weekend we should be in good shape for the teams 9th straight running of STPR!

The plan is to run the turbo car with a freshened up gearbox. Seth and I and maybe a few other will attack it this weekend.

Jeff S, you should definitely plan on spending some time at service area. Bring some basic junkyard hand tools! Jeff H and Paul came last year and were a HUGE help and I think they even sort of enjoyed the midnight run across the state to fetch a gearbox. We're bringing that gearbox as a backup again, but hopefully won't have to use it :)

[SwedeSport]

I will be there for sure. That is if you get the car back together.

[DeLorean]

Burnsside42, if you go, and assuming it's not needed for another midnight trans swap, can you grab the trans for me and stick it someplace at Fred Beans? I got to get down to Bill Mosers place when we get back from Sweden to grab a few 900 body panels from the recent "Incident" , and that's right on the way.

[Crazyswede]

We did a long weekend of working on Saabs at the farm this weekend. I arrived on Saturday afternoon and by that evening we had the red 87 turbo all back together so it could drive out of the bay under its own power. We then pulled the red rally car into the bay and while I yanked the engine Luke prepped the new gearbox. We also did a bunch of cleaning and pressure washing and found a lot of little things that needed to be addressed before STPR. We did do a compression test and found 130, 150, 180, 180 (1,2,3,4) psi on the cylinders. I seem to think that 150 is about the norm for a 16v turbo in stock configuration but what is a little worrying is the spread between cylinder 1 and 3 and 4. We did not pull the head off the engine.



reuniting the engine with the new transmission (gripper equipped).




Pulling the car out for a cleaning.

[gmreider]

I would not worry too much about the compression spread. If the motor has been sitting awhile things get gummy and sticky. I'd check it again after you fire it up for a few minutes and you might be pleasantly surprised to see things even out.
After I get all my race car stuff under control, I'd be proud to come and help out some time . That is you think a senior citizen could be useful and not slow you and Luke down.
HOPE YOU DO REAL WELL @STPR.

[Crazyswede]

I would not worry too much about the compression spread. If the motor has been sitting awhile things get gummy and sticky. I'd check it again after you fire it up for a few minutes and you might be pleasantly surprised to see things even out.
After I get all my race car stuff under control, I'd be proud to come and help out some time . That is you think a senior citizen could be useful and not slow you and Luke down.
HOPE YOU DO REAL WELL @STPR.

You are more than welcome to help. We still have a fair amount of small things that need to get done.

[gmreider]

Well, I won't have time before STPR. I am entered in 3 SCCA time trial events starting this weekend and then evry 2 weeks until June 21-22. That will be the test of the 2.1 litre T-5 turbo conversion. After that I have some time. Think of me when you can use a hand with anything.
I would like the opportunity to work with you and Luke sometime.

[matt]

I'll be sending you guys positive mojo from the land of "gotta work the weekend"

[Crazyswede]

New codriver seat installed

[321go]

First two stage times looked great. Then a lot slower. Guessing some kind of loss of power? Turbo maybe??
Good luck today.
Regional 2wd battle looks good with 2nd-4th only 4 sec. apart, and others not too far back either.

[Jordan]

Yeah.. no stage times were really as great as they should have been until maybe first stage Sat? I'll let Luke fill in the details, but basically it went from no power... to a lot of power....

[Luke]

Yeah.. no stage times were really as great as they should have been until maybe first stage Sat? I'll let Luke fill in the details, but basically it went from no power... to a lot of power....

Yep, there were no "clean" stages without any issue, but we had a fun time nonetheless.

We had a bad coolant temp sensor on the electromotive that took a while to diagnose friday. It was causing the engine to run so rich that it was fouling and extinguishing fresh plugs within minutes. we were running on 2 cylinders for most of friday and struggling to get up hills in 1st gear.

In the haste to get the car running correctly we had swapped in a spare electromotive ECU, new coolant temp sensor and coilpacks and plugs.

By Saturday, the car was running great. So great that we made a full minute on the car infront of us in about 6 miles and had to travel at their pace the rest of the stage and still had a respectable stage time.

On "painter" a stage we had set the grp5 record on in 2011, we were really flying! The car just seemed to have unreal power as we effortlessely topped out 4th gear and slid into 5th for a long steep climb up the mountainside. We were almost at the top, when suddenly the car lost power to the wheels. No bang, no smoke, just no go! We coasted to the of stage and realized that we could shift the car into any gear with the engine running. Seth ran the triangles out while I popped the hood. Within a few minutes we had discovered the problem.. a snapped clutch input shaft!
With no way to fix the car on stage we had no choice but to withdraw from the rest of the stages. While waiting for the crew to come rescue us, we started to reflect about what had happened and why the car seemed to have so much power. It was then that I remembered that we had swapped the ecu in the madness the night before, I thought about it and then in dawned on me, The ecu we had swapped in was the one that was used during the initial dyno-tuning of that motor configuration to determine what the motor was capable of, which had a program and boost maps for 285 HP to the wheels! We usually run a tune with greatly scaled back boost that's probably around 220 HP, no wonder the car had seemed so fast while it lasted....

[DeLorean]

sounds like a fun time! Wish I could have made it, but so far they have not found a way to allow me to be in 2 places at the same time. Shame about that input shaft snapping off, I have never seen that failure happen before, typically the too much torque failure in the front 1/2 of the trans happens in the case when the cog breaks off of the transmission, though on erricsons table at the saab festival, one of the parts he had sitting there was an input shaft that looked like it was made out of the same material as an impact socket, as well as a double bearing upper input shaft cog, which would prevent BOTH those failures.