About summer (2) - The first hillclimb

As summer reached it's mid point the hill climb event was approaching. The car had the same old tires and the same damaged gearbox. I was also lacking a critical safety equipment...  A race suit.

I managed to find a suit that still had valid homologation, but it was quite expensive. With race day fast approaching, in the end I bit the bullet and bought it.

My good friend Artan, who helps me with the mechanical side of things managed to extract a few more horse power out of the 210 000 km old engine. But this meant that we had no more time to change the gearbox.

I was going to complete in what was the most competitive class 1.6 to 2 liters 2 wheel drive mostly against hot hatches. So in order to at least keep up with the competition we decided to change the diff to a shorter ratio one. I managed to find a rare 4.44 ratio one and I promptly welded it up and installed it. It was late at night when we finished installing the diff... Next day was race day

With all the suspension settings done I headed out to the local touge. The car felt good, when I was accelerating the car was oversteering just a bit, in a very controllable manner.

Race day came... So I packed my stuff and went out to the hillclimb event. I was all alone so I started chatting with the other competitors. I told them about my mods and because I welded the diff they all said that I would be oversteering all over and that I will be slow.

And they were right I was all over the place... I was oversteering in every corner whatever the gear I was in. On two occasions I actually went offcourse. So I let some air out of the rear tires and that solved only 20% of the oversteering problem.

But I was not slow... Not at all... In my class there were two 200 hp + cars and the rest of the front wheel drive were all at least 250 kg lighter and had around the same power I had.  I did more than keeping up to them... I managed to beat all but the 200 hp cars...

I was competing in the debutant class where one of my adversaries was a 300 hp 4wd Subaru. I ended up being just. 0.02 seconds behind him with my 150 odd horse power BMW, earning second place.

I was amazed that not only I could keep up with the fwd competition but even beat them if we had similar power.

Next up will be the Covasna winter rally, a 90 km or so rally held on snow and that will be quite a challenge for me with no rally experience and no real snow driving experience...