Rookie

Day 5: Vågårda Raceway We had Pretty high hopes going into the day, 2 PBs in 2 days will do that to you, so we got to thinking about suspension setup and how to improve the 60', which despite the faster time had been significantly slower than it had been previously. A bit of an AHA moment; Last year I setup a 2 step, and due to how a diesel works, ie fuel control, a 2 step works by cutting fuel, this in turn cuts power, so basically while the launch is much more consistant it is slower. With that disengaged and a bit more preload on the caltracs we queued up, the day was scorching hot, so we decided to try and get an early run in so we wouldn't have to wait in the heat all day. Also, maybe somewhat foolishly, I had the truck idling to warm up before giving it hell. I think I was the third car to run that day. It left hard but then fell on it's face, I quickly jumped into the logs while waiting for the return run, and nothing was really wrong, weird. Anyway, it was time to head back to the pits, so I started it up and low and behold there were some unwanted noises coming from the engine bay. BAD Noises, Bugger. Anyway, here we were a long way from home with a termanlly broken motor. So we grab a beer and have a think about how we fix this mess. We start scanning Market Place looking for another motor, we asked a few of the other racers, and came up empty handed, so we started figuring out plan B. I talked to Lennart, and he said we could stash the truck at his place, so we got on the blower to roadside assistance. They offered to deliver it to the nearest Chevrolet dealer, which I politely declined without trying to give the game away, but I offered that there was a local mechanic that was closer and potentially more suited to the job, they jumped at the offer to save money, so the tow truck was on its way, Phillip and I quickly packed up camp, ripped the stickers off and got to waiting. We loaded up the truck and headed to Gibb performance. With the truck unloaded at Gibb, we got to drowning our sorrows and planning our trip home. We were looking at a pretty reasonable train ride home, so with that in mind we crashed in the camper and decided to tackle it the next day. I let Lennart know that I would find another motor and be back in a couple of weeks to do a motor swap so I could get the truck out of his hair.

Day 4: Tansport Day Part 3 Check Point 3: The day was mint and the roads were good. Check Point 4: From here we headed to Gibb Performance, Lennart had extended the invite when I picked up the driveshaft cross, it was 15 minutes away from the race track so why not. After a beer and some yarns we made it to the race track and set up camp.

Day 4: Tansport Day Part 2 This day wasn't great to be honest, we were both very hungover and Philip just slept the whole way. Check point 1: While we there were there this sweet Big Block Impala showed up so I snapped a pic for @Bistro Check Point 2:

Day 4: Tansport Day Part 1 We woke up in a bit of a state to be honest, everything was a mess, but the truck worked so it was just a matter of survival. We got the Check points and planned our route, ie the quickest way to get between all of the check points...

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Day 3: Malmo Malmo Raceway was definitely the best track of the week, so expectations were high! Add to that and the fact that Malmo is basically my home track meant that a bunch of our mates from Copenhagen decided to come over have a day out watching drag racing. We had the camp setup from the night before so the morning was pretty chill, after the slipping tranny we decided to do a tranny flush, it had a reasonable amount of friction material in it but considering it had done 1.5 drag and drives and countless road miles I thought that was pretty well done. Between pinching the pan gasket and a crack in the dipstick tube I managed to pour about 1 litre of oil onto the enviromental mat. once that was cleaned up and having chats with the boys that showed up we queued up. The first pass was soft and slow, really weird after yesterdays effort, so I pulled up the log and there was crazy noise on the brake pedal channel, so of course my first instict was to remove it from the window, but after thinking about it I realised that the 2 step is triggered by the brake pedal so noise in the brake pedal channel meant that the 2 step was intermittently engaging as I went down the track. I went back to the pits and had a look at the brake switch, it is one of the self adjusting types like this: But the bit that it mounts in had worn a bit in the last 43 years so it was a bit sloppy, so I grabbed a ziptie to tighten it up and then queued again: Boom. New PB. 60' still sucks but the MPH is there. I look at the datalog and my Lambda was 1.47, and my emap was was down compaired to running 3.8bars of boost, so clearly the combo is loving less boost. I do a quick calculation and figure out I can give it 20% more fuel. So I get to dialing in the map, and at the last minute I have the bright idea to creep up on it so I dial it back to 10%. While I'm in the queue one of the boys asks me what's going to happen, my reply "It's either going to go real fast, or It'll break something." Thankfully this time I had planned ahead. The week before we left I had ordered a new driveshaft and got it on rush to be finished in time, I got Steffen to pick it up on their way over. A quick visit to Lennart again and I had the correct cross, because the guy who built it couldn't figure out the alphabet soup that is yankee doodle drivesaft parts. Replacing the driveshaft isn't a big deal right? so no need to stress, we'll have dinner and some drinks and then get stuck in afterwards. So whilst we were relaxing with the first of way too many Dirty Radlers (a Steffen trademark, a brezzer and a beer in one oversized cup) Dan decided we should add some grass to the risotto that he had just made for us. After dinner we got stuck into the Dirty Radlers and semi looked at the driveshaft. The 1 hour job took us 3.5 hours and we were a bit sloppy by the end of it. A celebratory burnout sealed the deal and then we decided to finish a bottle of Norsøolie before hitting the sack.

I also forgot, somewhere between checkpoint 2 and Malmo the tranny started slipping in 4th, so I jumped into the TCU and cranked the line pressure, this seems to have done the trick.

I completely understood what was going on and I stand by what I said. Judging by @zep photos they aren't off by 12mm, so you won't end up with a 6mm step, only half of what the difference is and having a small, say 3mm, step is totally acceptable and I would even go as far as saying, industry standard. You don't try and straighten an axle housing after the brackets have been welded on true and square, then the brackets won't be square anymore, and I can promise you that is much more important than the pride of not having a small step in the butt weld. But of course this opinion is all based on the assumption that brackets were actually done well and are straight and true.

You guys are all totally over thinking this. This is also the reason that when you buy an axle housing that it doesn't come with housing ends on it. Leave everything alone (especially if all of the bracketry is good relative to each other), cut the housing ends off, and re weld then back where they are square and true to the carrier bearings. Yes it is a fuck up, but nothing a little hard yakka can't fix. Otherwise, Great work @zep shit is looking ace.

Day 2: Emmaboda We were a little late but nothing too serious, got a pit spot, unloaded everything. I jacked it up and pulled the axle out, and tired to warm the lock collar up so I could drive it home, all this resuleted in was fucking the seal on the new bearing I just put on. I then had the bright idea to visit Lennart from Gibb performance, as he has a small semi truck that drives around with us and sets up shop at each track so we can get fluids and rear end stuff if we need it, he has a press in the trailer, so I roll over there and borrow that, and we press the whole lot home, all while he is laughing his arse of when I told the story about the night befores goings on. andy way I slam that all back together and I'm pretty sure I even made it to the drivers briefing. I have a look in the tune up and think I'll take a bit of boost out of it, as Emmaboda is a virgin airstrip, and everycar I saw was just doing 200m burnouts, I dropped it from 3.8 bar down to 3 bar, then queued up and let it rip: Shitty 60' but a PB and it picked up 4kph in the big end. Hot damn, one and done... Pack up and get ready, while waiting for the check points to get released, we snuck in a bit of spectating which was nice, and smokey. The drive went well, but we took it pretty casual, also we had Dan and Steffen with us in the Landy pulling a caravan so we were limited to around 80kph, we arrived at check point 1 for the day: Just as a percautionary I looked under the back end and say that it was pouring out with oil from the side that had caused the issues, I guess the oil seal wasnt that good after all... Anyway we got to jacking it up and changine the oil seal in the parking lot, thankfully when I was using Lennarts press I grabbed a couple of fresh seals, so it wasn't a crazy job, I borrowed a slide hammer and bought some diff oil off the guys who owned the checkpoint and within the hour we were back on the road. We hit check point 2: And then rolled into Malmo Raceway at around 2am without too much trouble.

Apparently there is something with the phot limits so I'll break it up a bit more... Day 1: Transport We gingerly set off from Mantorp, by this point we had decided the cowboy hats were bad luck so they were in the camper and I'm pretty sure we didn't have the radio on for the first leg of the trip, but everything seemed to be working so we cruised into the evening feeling a little broken, but not beaten, from our start to the event. We arrived to the first check point, and grabed a beer, things were looking up! e Stopped for a feed and coming out of the restaurant I was greeted with this sight, which I thought was preety sweet: Rolled on to check point 2: At this point it was getting late, around 12:30am or so and only 10km from the next track, everything seems like it was going swimingly, I was dog tired, I had done a bunch of the transport driving too, so I was half asleep in the passenger seat when I got woken by a huge BANG!!! I look across and see horror on Philips face, and sparks in the wing mirror, and within about 3 seconds we ground to a hault. We jump out and assess the damage, the drivers rear axle had walked off the bearing and lock ring, then the tyre got slashed on the fender lip, causing it to sit down on the caltrac bracket under the leaf spring. We were sitting ducks, in the middle of a pitch black country road in the middle of a forest. For those that don't know, I have 9" style axles that look like this: Some how the shrink fit lock ring that hold the bearin in place had given up the ghost, but hadn't cracked or broken, and the whole lot had walked out of the axle housing. So here we are pitch black, camper stuck in the middle road, immobile, with countless racecars driving past with unknown levels of visability, diff oil pouring all over the road, A shit show. Philip grabbed a torch and headed up the road to act as an early warning device, I started unloading the tools. After last years debarkle with the wheel bearing I had a fresh one in stock, so I jacked the truck up to stop the leaking and pull what was left of the axle and wheel out from under the car, got to hammering the new bearing on, and turned on the stove in the camper to warm up the lock ring, I got the bearing on all good, but I don't think there was enough chooch in the campers stove so when I went to drop the lockring on it shrunk down about 3mm short of where it should have been, but at this point we had 10km to the next track and it was good enough as far as I was concerned, so I check the axle seal, it seemed good enough, and I didn't have another one anyway so back it went together. Everything went smoothly but we didnt have a tyre, we had already made the plan that we were just going to sleep on the side of the road tonight, so I put one of the drag radials on to move the 50m to the parking place off the side of the road. I let the jack down and the damn thing just about sat on the ground! But it was enough to get us off the road. By this stage it had started raining and what we were now faced with was the fact that we had just put 2 litres of diff oil on to the road, and parked about 50m away, I had horrible visions of some Mario kart type event, so we stayed up and waved other racers around the oil slick, one of the swedish guys rang the road side clean up hotline for us and they promised to be there shortly. After waing 2 hours we were getting a little tired of waiting and when a truck driver stopped and asked what was going on, we explained and he had some gravel in the truck for when it get icy, so we threw a bunch of that down, put the warning triangle in the middle of the road, put the camper on jack stands and hit the sack. We woke the next morning to see that noone had crashed because of us, and the warning triangle was still in place, which was nice, but just as Philip was taking a piss on the side of the road, a half asleep commuter drove right through middle of everything completely obliterating the warning triangle... At this point we had a movable car, but I was deeply concerned about just how flat my Mickey Thompson looked under the weight of the camper. Fortunately we were meeting up with 2 friends at the next race track, as they were intending to be pro spectators for the next few days, so we got on the blower to them and they drove out to our camp site and we got to finding another tyre. I think we tried every tyre shop in a 150km raduis to find a 15" commercial tyre of any size, finally we found a pair of slightly smaller tyres, and got the one replaced and took the other one with us so we could get one of the others changed so we had two pairs of transport tyres, and headed back to the scene of the crime. We then did some tyre juggling, got one of the fronts on the back, and the new smaller tyre on the front, packed up and hit the road to the track, the last 10km were pretty nerve racking with the unknown lock ring status and the car on a lean from the mismatched tyres but we got there.

Day 1: Mantorp Park So with a distinct lack of sleep under our belts and a still questionable motor we took our morning coffees and went for a walk, I snapped these as inspiration for @Testament After we were propperly caffeinated we got to looking at the sorry state of affairs that was the truck, at this point we still had the big turbo and intake piping off, so we got to putting those back on, once they were installed we went to start it again and it hydrolocked again... Turns out the turbo had been puking oil for some time, another racer had loaned us a vacuum pump which we used to empty the intake manifold which revieled roughly a beer can worth of oil, so we made the call to pull the intercooler out and empty it, this negated a trip to Biltema for supplies, so we commendeered a fellow racers tow car and took the half hour drive, this ended up being around lunch time, so we fueled up, us, the car and the supply wagon and made our way back to the race track, by this stage racing was ment to have been underway for 2 hours, but there was some rain so it was delayed, but not so much that the day was rained off and cars had started running (this is what I was secretly hoping for as if less than 50% of the cars run then the day gets canceled and those times dont count for the average.) We go stuck in and its a good thing that we bought a case of degreeser because there was oil EVERYWHERE. After some time we managed to free the intercooler from its mounts and drain it to the tune of 4 litres... We reassembled everything and by this stage it was getting a bit late in the day and the chance for running a time was running out, so we made the call that we weould just line up and break the beams so that we would record a time for the day and stay in compettion. At this stage there were possiblly every running car lining up so it looked like we had a long wait ahead of us, luckily we go chatting to the head of scruitineering and he understood our pligt, and told us he would sort the 60 second slip for the day and we could head back to the pits and keep working on the truck. So with another few hours of cleaning and assembly we figured that we were as ready as we could be to tackle the days drive, tail between our legs we headed ove to the bus to pick up the days checkpoints, and see what the night had in stall for us.

StreetWeek 2025 Day 0. Summer has been super busy so I haven't had time to sit down and tell the tale, but now that it is snowing and miserable some reflection is probably worth while. Leading up to the event things were pressed as always but we managed to sort most things. as previously mentioned there were a few changes this yea, but nothing crasy, the only big physical change was the intercooler, so with that in mind it should be all good....right?!! 2025 was the Southern Swing, around the bottom of Sweden, but the starting point was Mantorp Park like last year. So the journey begain like last year with a pilgramage from Denmark to Sweden. I packed up the camper and tools and hit the road to Copenhagen to pick up my team mate, then head on up to Mantorp. Within the first 20 minutes it started raining and the wiper fell off, I joking messaged Philip that the repairs had been done for the trip and we would not require any more work from here on out. (Foreshaddowing Dave indicates that this was indeed premature and factually incorrect.) The weather cleared up and we had our cowboy hats on, Merle on the radio and spirits high. We arived without a hitch got all the paperwork sorted. While going through scruitineering, the guy pointed out the amount of oil splashed around the intake tubes and inner fender, we thought nothing of it and agreed to clean it before racing the next day, everything was under control, or so we thought... We found a spot in the pits, unloaded the camper and got out things setup ready for the morning. We decided we should go to the gas station and grab some fuel for the generator, so we grabbed the jerry can and headed off. The entrance road tor Mantorp Park looks a little like a shorter version of Rodneys Driveway, and as we were coming down the hill through the forest we completely smoke screened the whole lot, acknoledging that there was a problem we stopped just at the entrance and with the truck pouring out with white smoke, turned it off to figure out what the hell was going on. After inspection the oil in the engine bay had got even worse and upon attempting to restart the engine and being met with hydrolock, and I immediately jumped on the idea that the Holset had shit the bed, so I threw a post up in the streetweek facebook group and got to figuring out how to get the car back to the pits, as the was happening the event photographer drove past so I flagged him down and he agreed to tow us back to the pits, I didnt have a tow rope with me, and neither did he, but we tried with some undersized strops I had with me but no luck there. He drove me to the gas station to buy a tow rope (and fill the jerry can), and we tried again, this time success. With the truck already broken before the competition had started we had to figure out a plan, so we pulled the Holset off and inspected it. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortuately, it was fine. So I hooked up the small turbo to the oil lines and pulled the glow plugs out and cranked it over, this throughly rust proofed the enginebay. I put the glow plugs back in and started it up, and there was oil puking out of the compressor housing of the small turbo. This was bad, as it required getting hold of a stock 320cdi turbo from somewhere, and unlike the holset, which every Swedish Volvo dude has sitting on the shelf, are hard to come by. It was evening by this point and and we were trying to get the car together so we could race tomorow morning, so we decided to investigate what actually happened, we got to pulling it off and it appeared that the 4 screws that hole the compressor backing plate on had come loose, so we rtv them, and torqued them back up, and reassembled everything and fired it up at this point the turbo wasn't leaking and it was 3.00am so we packed up and went to bed.

I'll just leave this here for reference, I think it sums things up pretty well for newbies/old hats a-like. As for backlash, I have always worked with 10 thou, it hasn't failed me yet. I'm not sure I'm totally in agreeance about the re use of gears, I've never had trouble setting up used gearsets, damaged gearsets might be another thing though.

This hillbilly was easy for me to understand, probably some 10 bolt specific stuff but the principle is the same.