Duncan's Race Car - The Most Overdue Build Thread On Sau

[Neil]

Hey's another one,,,I have it full length on my c drive as well,,,but it was easier just to steal it off your youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLPeMr3MDds

Cheers

Neil

[Neil]

Here's a classic I have from Oran Park GP,,,Check out the Start,,,I was stoked and I'll bet the Handley Household was too.

Can't quite remember what happened but I do know I sent hours fixing all sorts of water hose problems. I think in the end we gave up with a head gasket blown. From memory I made like 4 of us remove cams and all that shit so I could check the head bolts were tight enough,,,pity was they were and then we gave Duncan all his bits in a box,,,pushed the bitch onto the trailer and went home.

If you wondered what car I hate more than a Commodore it's bloody evo's,,,.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEcqwjHBCB0

[toppertee]

^^^^^

Please tell me when you won.... You called all of them a pack of a$$holes...... Just like gentalman Jim....

Looks like good racing, lots of ex comiedoor cup cars?

[Duncan]

haha they are some old vids, eh? That oran park one was from the endure where we ran out of fuel, and the eastern creek is the same one where I won the state round

Nigel it is all production cars, its just that around then 6l commodores were the thing to have. I was the only skyline on the grid and the evos and wrxs were towards the back. And yes, I got up and said "you are all a pack of very nice people". I thought I was funny.

[Duncan]

From there I went on an invasion of Victoria for 3 events in 4 weeks.

First up was Mt Buller Sprint in mid Nov-09. Prior to Targa stealing the event, the Mountain Motorsport guys ran Mt Buller as a series of runs up the same stage with about an 8 minute run.

The event really suited me because while it was a driver + navigator event (yep, Kel loaned herself back to me), the multiple runs really let me get a hang of the track. It was a bit of a painful weekend because the car had a water leak somewhere that I just could not find; at the start of each run we would fill the radiator with nice cold water from the river and it would only start getting really hot in the last minute or so.the hottest I saw was 130 degrees but the engine survived OK.

For once..

2 weeks later the National Supersprint championships were held at Phillip Island, and I won the Production Car class..adding a National Championship to the state round win...Stu Inwood was also there with his 33 and won his class which meant SAU took out both touring car classes, awesome weekend.

Here's a cheesy trophy pic

And then the week later, Glenn Ridge organised for Targa cars to be a support race at the v8 supertaxi round at Phillip Island. It was great racing in front of such a big crowd, but unfortunately my run of mechanical luck ran out. I got a great start, but it was only when I went to grab 2nd that I discovered the clutch was welded to the flywheel and wouldnt release. I finished the race without the clutch but lost a lot of time, sadly its not the last time Ive had that trouble, even with different clutch setups.

I was inspired by Skaifey's start in 91 (although I got away with it, he got a drive thru...)

Also its a great example of how well Nissan's good old ATTESSA system compares with an Evo 9.

And here's Neil and Neil rubbing shoulders, presumably swapping skyline racing stories

[Duncan]

Over xmas I sorted the clutch, and headed out to Oran Park for a sad weekend. It was 16-Jan-2010, and Irace were running the last race meet at the track. The car ran faultlessly all weekend and I won the last Production Car race held at Oran Park; the bulldozers literally arrived on the following Monday to tear the track up and replace it with much needed treeless suburbs that could not have been built anywhere else.

And then, at a track day a couple of weeks laterI blew an engine.

[CEF33Y]

This threads a good read mate, and how good was oran park? Still miss the drift days I used to do there.

[Duncan]

yeah man that my favourite track for sure....launching the car over the curbs at suttons, heading blind over the flip flop....ahhh.....kids these days don't know what they are missing

anyway, back to the story......

[Duncan]

Which is where it all got a bit painful for a while.

A workshop built a new engine and installed it for me, but within 30klm it failed. I was really impressed when, with no bullshit at all, the workshop organised for the work to be redone at their cost. Unfortunately the second engine also failed again (this time it made 70klm) and I decided to take it elsewhere.

So I took it to a shop Id known for years, who had made all sorts of guarantees about how they could sort all the problems that all

these other dodgy places had been causing me. $22k and 3 days racing later that engine failed too.

The shop had removed the filter gauze in the custom oil pick up, overtightened and broken a cam cover bolt, and the oil pump had sucked the bolt head in.

The shop, and their insurers lawyer team told me clearly that in their opinion a bolt in the oil pump would not cause an engine failure, and that the issue was undoubtedly in the design of the custom sump that I supplied and they bolted on to the engine. After spending all the money on the engine, and with building a house at the same time, I made a decision not to spend thousands more on legal costs to recover the money

Instead, I took an engine from a half cut I imported with Pete, and chucked in unopened in the race car, took about 1 days effort. Took it to the SAU Sutton Rd day in 2012 and did the fastest runs of the day.

Unfortunately while the unopened engine ran fine, it turned out the block was cracked where the water pump bolted on, so I decided to build another engine; that engine is still in the car today.

[Duncan]

It took some time while we were finishing the house to get all that sorted, in the meantime the race car was in it’s usual resting place of a paddock up north. In about June this year (2 years later…..) I finally rescued the car, tidied it up and headed out to some more events.

I was asked to be part of the SAU team for the Nulon Nationals rd1, which was the hill climb at Bulahdelah. Unfortunately I was not able to get the engine run in on time, and Neil made the very generous offer for me to drive Cheryl for the weekend.

Which I did; she ran great and I can confirm borrowed cars do great burnouts 

The next event was the Nulon Nationals day at Wakefield, this time the race car was ready to go and I set a PB at Wakefield, a 1.06.9 which I am very happy with considering the tyre size (235) and power (300kw) that the car makes. The car again ran well all day.

[Whoa Black Boaty]

It would be so good to have an awd race car for the launch alone.

[Duncan]

Which brings me to the most recent event, Kel and I headed down to Targa High Country last month with Neil and Mark as an excellent support crew.

Day 1:

Kel is a very experienced navigator and dragged me into recce for the day 1 courses. There is no doubt when we got out there that it had been very helpful. We went along really well before lunch except for my rookie error in going full pace when the stages were easy to clear. Still, at the end of the day we were 8th in early modern, 1.02 behind the leaders. The car was awesome and poor old Neil and Mark had nothing to keep them awake all night (except the snoring)

Day 2:

The morning was excellent and the car was still going great. Come lunchtime we were 6th and getting into the rhythm. Stuff if I know how but Kel had read the squiggles she calls pace notes and not made a single mistake (and that continued for the weekend).

Unfortunately on the stage after lunch the brakes departed..they worked properly about 1 in 3 times, but I would never know which would work and which would not leading to lots of pedal pumping well before any big stop which really slowed us down. We were still 6th at the end of the day but heading down the timesheets not up.

Neil and Mark worked most of the night on the brakes, changing pads, bleeding brakes, bleeding brakes, bleeding brakes but it was not getting better. For some reason (that I still dont really understand), the ABS kept delivering air bubbles over and over.

At about 1am we decided to change the master cylinder as a last resort (I brought a spare because I had not been happy with the pedal feel even before the event). The only issue was we had no flare nut spanner to get the lines off the old cylinder and nothing else was working. Facebook delivered the offer of a spanner down in Mansfield at 2am but we decided to start again at 6 and see if we could find one on the mountain. Luckily we did and the cylinder was changed and bled in record time (those guys are good!) and we were ready to go.

Day 3:

Which was all good, except that none of it had fixed the brake issue..so we spent the day going as quick as I was happy to without brakes, and bleeding the ABS after every stage. We were down to 8th on the stage after lunch with everything except the brakes going well (umm except for the little remodelling of the rear quarter against a bank on Big River)....however one of Kels (billion) rally mates asked how the front tyres were holding up.......and the answer was they were destroyed.

Both fronts had delaminated and would certainly have failed if we had continued. So we changed one tyre for the spare we had on board and rolled through the next 2 stages at the rear of the field. Neil and Mark changed the other front for our final spare before the last stage and we enjoyed the last hoon up the hill, finishing 15th overall. Id decided to only take 4 new tyres and 2 very old spares to save $1k and that decision had bitten.

[Neil]

So that brings us up to date does it Mr Handley,,,I think not.

[Duncan]

uh-oh

[fatz]

but why did the rubber chop put old son?

[Duncan]

too much hooning around with a heavy car in 40 degree heat on too soft tyres I assumed. I checked the wheel alignment after, except for the bent left rear it was still OK so that wasn't the issue.

There was obviously lots of camber wear but I don't see that was the underlying problem

[Neil]

Here's a little story that still makes me laugh.

One beautiful summers afternoon we were all happily working away out at Marks property on both the GTR's. Kel had volunteered to help and was happily sitting on a stool I think cleaning parts or something. Duncan was working inside the car drilling god only knows what into the floor. Kel says "hey boys I can smell fuel" ,,,the poor girl looks down and she is surrounded by a massive pool of fuel. Someone with a drill has drilled a hole straight through the supply line. It's very hard to stop fuel from draining the tank but we did manage to stop it in the end. Everybody survived and to this day if you stick your head under the car,,,just in front of the right rear wheel you can see the hose and clamp patch. Now he's not the only one to do something like that,,,another gent I know decided to drill a hole after removing his back seat to mount a fire extinguisher with almost the same result.

I'll teach you to post pics of me looking like an idiot in your engine bay tiger and if you drag out me sitting on a particular fast foods prop I'll type more.

Cheers

Neil.

[Duncan]

hahaha so at least you know what I still have to post up, just in case you have any other good stories....

[tweety bird]

Post for the lols?

[Neil]

Post for the lols?

He hasn't got the balls mate.