TeamD Adventures

Up here in the Northwest corner of the United States, June hosts the No Alibi rally, put on by the Rainier Auto Sports Club, to which a good number of TeamD members belong.  Some of us participated in the rally while others were involved in the organization/running of the event.  I will leave it to others to talk about keeping on time and on route as I was the designated scoring chauffeur(1).  We also worked a few checkpoints each day, when our schedule allowed us to leapfrog the competitors and I took  a few photos (Day 1 and Day 2).

Near the end of Day two, mother nature provided us with a grand water splash.  The route book kept the speeds down but even so, some of the more “adventurous” cars got a good soaking and, in a few instances, the cars (mostly Subarus in a trend reminiscent of the water problems experienced by the Subaru WRC team in 2006).  My excuse is that my passenger was very busy dealing with the scoring (trying to keep the wait at the end to a minimum) and as such I didn’t get the benefit of the stated CAST or the warning that a water crossing was coming up.  The end result was a surprised driver, water over the hood and roof, a “rather loud bash” and a much slower WRX exiting the other side of the water.

A few hundred yards past the water we encountered the first of a few sadly disabled cars.  The Impreza radiator sits on plastic (?) mounts in the front of the engine compartment.  The mounts are fully strong enough to take normal driving but aren’t really up to the task of holding things together when bombarded with thousands of pounds of water.  And so in at least three cases they failed which caused the radiator to spew water out the bottom hose.  Aaak.

A few years ago, when I started involving my shiny new WRX in this amateur “sport”, I decided to take some precautions.  I skipped the stone guard (witness the many rock chips the next time you see me) and instead went for some underbody protection.  I reached out to Paul Eklund at Primitive Enterprises for both a front and rear skid plate.  The skid plates easily bolt on and I can attest to their resilience and protection every time I look under the car and see the myriad of scrapes and dents from rocks that looked shorter than I thought at the time (nothing says park it here like a hole in your sump or a cracked differential).

We finished the rally at the Moses Lake State Park.  As Steve worked on the scoring, I popped the hood to see if I could find the source of the scraping sound that had followed us from the water splash (it turned out to be the wheel well guard that had ripped out at bit and was rubbing the tire but that was easily solved with a Leatherman saw and some elbow grease).  It took me a while to realize why the engine bay looked odd, and then I realized what it was:  I could see the ground.  Under the engine.  Where was the skid plate?

The “rather loud bash” was the sound of the skid plate removing itself from the car.  Removing itself and then twisting into a piece of scrap aluminum (according to someone who found it later at the water splash).

The front of the skid plate is attached to the frame using four  bolts and the stock bolt holes that are normally used to attach the stock plastic undershield.  The force of the water splash pulled the bolt holes completely out of the frame.  The back of the skid plate is attached to a connecting plate near the back of the transmission with two bolts that go into stock holes.  One of the bolts had already suffered a direct hit by a rock and was lost.  The water splash made pretty quick work of the other bolt.

So now I am in the position of having to replace the crumpled up metal (now sitting near a water hole somewhere in Eastern Washington) with a new skid plate(2) but since the mounting holes are now no longer usable, I also have to figure out a way to replace the holes.

Enter Dave of DaveSport in North Bend.  Dave does performance tuning and fabrication.  He is going to see about welding some plates with tapped holed onto.over the blown out holes in the frame.  He is also going to look at the rear mounting area and see what can be done.

I am heading over there next week for a look/see and hopefully the project will get started by mid-July (as the next Rally, Crestline Trail, is the first weekend in August and I really want this done by then).

I will update here during the process.

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(1)  I drove Steve around the weekend so he could concentrate on gathering the scores and keeping the running totals up to date.  He did a great job and once again Rainier was able to keep the scoring time to a minimum.

(2)  I’ve ordered another skid plate from Paul at Primitive Enterprises and this time I am going for the more substantial 3/16” thick model instead of the 1/8” I originally got.  I am sure that if the exact same thing happens again, the extra thickness will not prevent bolts from pulling out of the frame but I will have a bit more strike protection.