My Track Toy

[Cossie1]

I wonder how many briskodians at £25 each it would take to enter Cossie1 in the 2015 BTCC ? Just a thought.

 

I'm game (but doubt they would give me a licence)

[group1rs]

I'm game (but doubt they would give me a licence)

Yeah they would for sure

[Romo]

Very interesting thread, weird handling issue! I might be able to help with one aspect, recently I had a water leak through the pollen filter, left a wet patch (lake) on the right side of the passenger footwell, after some investigation I found the gutter on the inside of the plastic lower window/wiper surround had fallen off (it's like plastic welded on....) this allows water to drip straight off the bottom of the windsreen into the filter. mine got stuck back on with araldite, all fixed 

[Cossie1]

Ok so after breaking the car (again) at Oulton Park it has sat since 21st Feb, until last Tuesday where I drove it just over a 1/4 mile away to a mates garage so they could get it on a ramp and have a look over it for me.

 

Amazingly the car started first time

 

However I did notice that both LCD displays in the speedo cluster were blank and no longer working, but everything else worked so I wasn't too bothered.

 

Anyway I have absolutely no idea how I got home from Oulton Park without dieing (120ish miles), as just driving a quarter of a mile, I wasn't sure it was going to make it.

It just felt like the front end wasn't connected to the rest of the car, and that at any moment the wheels were going to fall off, but it somehow made it there.

 

The garage were too busy to look at it until today though :(

 

So this morning I got a message on facebook to give them a call, only to be told it was fixed

 

Turned out the o/s/f ball joint had come loose, as once on the ramp the wheel moved so easily they thought there was no wheel bolts in there

 

I jacked the car up at Oulton Park just after the issue appeared and again before I left at the end of the day, and there was no obvious movement in anything, and I was properly shaking the car to the point I thought I was going to pull it off the jack, so I guess at the time it broke, the heat in the arm / ball joint had caused it to expand and therefore it was only moving with weight on it, and the long drive home had made things worse and now it was cold and in the air, it was moving freely.

 

Anyway they did the 3 bolts up on the ball joint (I have LCR ball joints), and took it for a drive, the tracking was out, but everything felt normal. They said the bolts were not thread locked and that is prob why they came loose (they had been adjusted a few times when I had the wheel alignment done after the last time I broke the car

 

So I told them to loosen the ball joint off, and pull the wheel fully out (max camber at the wishbone) and then the wheel alignment would be spot on (as that is how it was set), as soon as he went to undo the bolts, 2 of the studs snapped off, and when he removed the ball joint from the car, the 3rd stud had stretched

 

So £20 later and it was all fixed with a nice new (cheap ****) ball joint.

 

I've now ordered a pair of Lemforders for it as i'm sure the other will fail pretty soon now (as it's usually the n/s/f that breaks on this car).

 

So the car is now up and running again.

 

I got home and removed the speedo cluster, stripped it down and pulled the lcd displays apart, gave the rubber strips a wipe over with my finger (magic fingers ), and bent the metal cage that holds the lcds in place to put more pressure on the displays, and refitted it in the car, and now both displays are working again

 

Hopefully will have the 2 new Lemforder ball joints before the end of the week, then I can get them fitted and have the wheel alignment done again, i'm also going to see if I can get some bolts that will fit in the slots next to the ball joints so if they fail in a similar way in future, it won't be able to move too much and will be safer to drive home on

 

I am also planning to vent my cv joints, in the hope this will help stop them failing again in future (the brake cooling ducts have definately helped but not cured it completely).

 

Also the car seems to have remained pretty much dry since the heavy rain fooked off

[Cossie1]

Ok went out to the car today and both LCD screens are dead again.

 

So time to find a set of LCR dials I think (and an LCR steering wheel)

[Cossie1]

Ok Saturday morning I replaced both ball joints with new Lemforder items, a nice simple job and it's really made a difference, the car feels much better now and no vague feeling in the steering anymore.

 

I also managed to "finally" get hold of a Cupra R 225 steering wheel, it's not in the best of conditions, but it's not fitted to a show car either, so it's plenty good enough for what I need it for (have to say it looks a bit odd with a Skoda airbag fitted).

 

Anyway to complete the look I picked up a set of LCR dials too

 

Managed to code them to the car without too much of an issue, however it seems that when the LCR dials are fitted, my CCM no longer works (no electric windows, central locking not working correctly etc etc), so there must be an incompatibility somewhere, as the CCM works just find as soon as I plug the vRS dials back in.

[JoshH]

Get a leon CCM

[Cossie1]

Get a leon CCM

I managed to get it working earlier so I thought all my problems were solved.

 

Sadly I then realised that the cluster will not fit in an octy (I thought i'd get away with swapping the front covers over, but it wasn't going to work :(

 

So in the end I gave up, and went back to fixing the 2 lcd's again (there working at the moment but for how long I don't know).

 

Anyway the vrs cluster is now refitted, but....

 

The CCM won't work now with the orignial cluster and there is now canbus fault codes in the instrument cluster and on the can gateway controller that I can not clear.

 

So I don't know if I have damaged the CCM or if it is just confused as to what is going on.

 

I will disconnect the battery later and leave it over night without power and see if that cures it

[JoshH]

You may need to recode the CCM through vagcom. Find a standard octy hatch soft coding if it's lost it!

[Cossie1]

You may need to recode the CCM through vagcom. Find a standard octy hatch soft coding if it's lost it!

 

It doesn't communicate with anything, so vagcom is of no use atm.

[Cossie1]

All fixed, turned out that the original cluster was fubar.

 

When I disconnected the k-line signal (green plug) the lcd displays worked fine, but obviously the car wouldn't start and the ccm wouldn't connect.

 

Plug the green plug back in, car would run but the ccm wouldn't respond and after a few hours the lcd's would stop working again.

 

The LCR cluster just doesn't seem to be compatible and it won't fit correctly anyway.

 

So managed to grab a 2nd hand cluster from a member on here, plugged it in and the ccm works

 

Vagcom was being a tw@ and saying channel 50 was unavailable when I tried to code in the new cluster, so I just hacked the cluster eeprom with some of the data from my old original cluster and now it's all working fine with the original mileage, both keys and adapted just fine, vagcom wasn't needed for any of it

 

No faults found, so job done

[Cossie1]

So last thursday I had the wheel alignment done ready for Combe on Saturday.

 

Well it was out a little (although it drove straight enough) after replacing the n/s driveshaft at oulton and then having to replace both ball joints the other week.

 

Anyway he set it all as it should be, I paid my monies and left.

 

2 miles down the road I nearly put it in a ditch as it tried to drag me off the road as soon as I put my foot down (ring any bells ?).

 

So I promptly turned around and went back.

 

He checked it all over again and said it's all set correct, I simply said, something is no right it's dangourous.

 

He had moved the ball joints, as I had 1 fully in and 1 fully out before, and he set them both fully in, so he agreed that maybe it was an issue with the "track" of the car, and adjusted the n/s/f ball joint fully out and left the o/s fully in.

We then moved the adjustable top mounts around, to allow more camber adjustment and set the camber bang on 1.5° per side and corrected the toe again.

 

I left and this time it was even worse, so once again I had to go back, I took him down the road in it, and as soon as I put my foot down in 2nd, he **** himself as we started to head for the parked cars at the side of the road lol.

 

So back on the ramp, I said just set the ball joints exactly as they were, n/s fully in, o/s fully out, I said I noticed last year when it played up the o/s/r wheel was showing a slight toe in of 0.06 and when it did that, I had the same issue's as it has now, but when it drives straight, the o/s/r toe is 0.00, he checked the sheets for both alignments done on that day, and both had a toe in on the o/s/r of around 0.05 / 0.06. But there is no adjustment for toe on the rear of a mk1 octy and he said well even if there was it's so minor it wouldn't cause this problem.

 

Anyway in the end he agreed to set the ball joints as they were, correct the toe and camber again and see how it goes (he also checked tyre pressures, which were fine).

So with the ball joints back as they were, the toe set to 0.00 - 0.00 and the camber set to 1.5° this then set the o/s/r toe to 0.00 also and when I left the car drove much better (not 100% perfect, but it wasn't trying to kill me).

 

So it seems with full black series poly bushes, and solid rear wishbone bushes, solid subframe bushes etc, makes the car hyper sensitive to geometry setup, and the slightest inaccuracy when having it setup, is exaggerated on the road.

 

Atleast now when I have the wheel alignment done, it seems that if the o/s/r shows a toe in, then I will know it's not setup correctly.

 

Friday I went and collected my freshly painted track wheels, and fitted my brand new Federal 595 RS-R's ready for Combe and as I had the wheels painted for a very VERY reasonable cost, I agreed to let them put some stickers on the car

 

I didn't get a chance to scrub the tyres in on the way home as it was chucking it down.

 

Saturday morning, on the way to Castle Combe, I had pretty much no grip, the roads were wet and the slightest throttle caused wheel spin.

 

Anyway the first session at Combe was great, I was really worried about the lack of grip I would have with the 595's and also worried about the car letting me down again as i'm off to the Ring on Friday and won't have much time to fix anything that broke.

 

As it happened the tyres were pretty good, they scrubbed in pretty quickly, I managed to get plenty of heat into them (considering it wasn't the warmest of days and it had been wet very early in the morning). All was going well until the 2nd to last lap, when I couldn't slow it down coming upto Avon Rise, and locked the left front brake, the pedal went rock hard too. I had to keep pumping the pedal, but it just kept locking up and not slowing me down, I did think at 1 point i'm going to have to aim for the grass, but at the last minute I managed to scrub enough speed to make it round Quarry

 

Back on the stand, I checked the tyre pressures and they had risen from 30psi to 42psi on the fronts, and from 30psi - 36psi on the rears.

 

So I dropped the pressures back down to around 28psi all round, and the 2nd session I had no problems.

 

The car felt good and.......................................................................

 

For the first time in about a year, I managed to get the car on track, and not break anything :rock: :party: :whew:

 

Some pics:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Cossie1]

The video's:

 

 

 

[Dark_Hero]

This was impressive going round Combe. Flew past me on both sessions

[Cossie1]

This was impressive going round Combe. Flew past me on both sessions

 

Thanks, I wish I could say that it was all me, but sadly I can't.

 

I simply just hang onto the wheel and let the car do the rest

[devonutopia]

 

 

For the first time in about a year, I managed to get the car on track, and not break anything :rock: :party: :whew:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was a little disappointed you weren't fitting that driveshaft on the clubstand! :P

[Cossie1]

I was a little disappointed you weren't fitting that driveshaft on the clubstand! :p

 

Yeh thanks Jason lol

 

I'm kinda glad I didn't have to, as I think both me and the car would have sank into the grass

 

It did feel very odd though not having to try and limp the car home, before something failed big time, causing me to sit around for hours waiting for recovery

[Cossie1]

Well my first ever Nürburgring trip is now done and dusted.

 

Left the meeting point at 11.45am on Friday morning, and arrived at Hotel Zürburg which is about 1/4 mile from the Nürburgring at just about midnight (there time).

 

Bloody longggggggggggggggggggggggggggg drive in a car with no interior lol, my feet were hurting, my knee was hurting and I couldn't hear very much either lol.

 

Anyway we all got there safely despite it chucking it down with rain from the moment we crossed the boarder from Belgium into Germany.

 

Got some a couple of hours sleep and woke up early on Saturday morning.

We had some breakfast (there were 8 of us btw) and then headed off to the track, expecting big ques, we didn't want to get on there too early as it had been raining all the night before, and we felt it would be better to let the locals test out the grip levels before we braved it, even though it was already 15°c by the time we got there at around 9.35am.

 

Anyway as it turned out, the route from our hotel carpark, took it stright to the roundabout that you need to navigate to get into the ring carpark. We managed to take the wrong exit off this roundabout and found ourselves at the barrier to get onto the ring

Luckily we had all bought a lap card in advance (not sure what they do if you don't have a lap card when you get to the barrier), so we ended up completely unprepared for our first ever lap of the ring, and none of us had time to turn on camera's or anything (I didn't even get my harness's on, let alone a camera), no time to check wheel nuts, tyre pressure's or even fully warm the cars up.

 

Anyway luckily the track was dry in most places.

 

We started off slow and tried to keep together but I wasn't getting any heat into my tyres, so when I couple of cars that seemed to know there way about, fly past us, I set off in pursuit

 

I managed to follow a few Porches and M3's through some corners (no idea of the names, no idea of the speeds, I just followed there lines and brakes a few meters earlier than they did in the hope it would be enough to get me through).

 

As it happened I got through it, when I got to the carousel I just dived in there, not sure what to expect, but I really did feel the diff doing it's thing going through it.

 

At the end of the lap (which felt like I had done it in 5 mins flat if i'm honest) we all parked up (managed to find the car park on the opposite side of the roundabout from the exit we took lol) with HUGE grins on our faces.

 

We had a chat for 10 mins, and then headed into the paddock to see what cars were about and also to see about a ring taxi ride.

 

By the time we made it from the carpark (closest to the paddock) they announced the track was closed and a police car turned up, so we had timed it pretty well.

 

As it turned out, the track was closed all day, from just after 10am until around 5.30pm (we saw 2 ADAC trucks leave around 5.15pm 1 with a 1series and 1 with a bike on it, so can only guess it was closed all day due to something nasty happening with the bike rider).

 

We spent most of the day, hanging around in 1 of the car parks near to devils corner (or to give it it's real name Brünnchen) but as nothing was coming around, other than the odd ring taxi we decided we needed to find something else to do, and managed to blag our way into the GP circuit to wonder around the paddock and watch a bit of the action there, to pass a little time.

 

They reopened the ring around 5.30, but it was so busy we wouldn't have got out there before they finished for the day at 6.30pm

 

So we just watched a little of the action.

 

Sunday morning, we left for the track a little later, around 10.30am, but this time, we had the camera's ready and I had my harness's on

 

10.40am we were on track, and this time it was bone dry, so we were a little more confident.

 

Anyway I started to have a play with a Subaru that seemed to know his way around the track, obviously I still didn't know the track at all so I wasn't going to push things any further than I felt comfortable with, the car felt good, but I started to get a little brake fade and then a little brake judder for good measure.

 

So I had to take it a little easier than I had intended.

 

I had a Yellow Seat Leon trying to stop me going past, an E92 Bmw M3 try to take the front end off my car despite me almost stopping to give him space to go past and a couple of other minor hold up's, I am well happy with my 9.59 laptime for my 2nd ever lap.

 

I did plan to do more, but with the brake fade (and lets just say my bright green wheels were now black), I felt I would be pushing my luck to try and get another lap out of the car, and still drive it home.

 

I think I need better brakes now, the Brembo's are upto the job of stopping me, but they retain so much heat, they don't have a chance to cool down, and I end up cooking the fluid or the pads or both.

 

Other than that, the car was great. No cv joint / driveshaft failures

 

We all left it at that, 2 laps done and all safe and sound.

 

The track was closed again about 20 mins after we came off, so once again no que and perfectly timed to get on there.

 

We tried to get a ring taxi, but as they had to close the track, there wasn't any hope (maybe next year).

 

We left the hotel at 8.50am Monday morning, and stopped off at Spa for a quick look around as it isn't far away, there were a few nice cars on track, but it was a driver instruction day, so they were not really giving it full beans lol.

 

We left Spa around 11.30am and headed for Calais, all was good, until I noticed had a bit of a vibration through the steering, somewhere around the Belgium / France boarder. but it settled down after a few miles.

 

We got to Calais and to the Euro Tunnel and then I noticed that when going over large bumps (or those mini speed bumps) slowly, there is a nasty knock / clonk from the front somewhere, so something is broken, just not sure what yet, also when sat in the sun (it was around 22°c) in traffic waiting for boarder control, I noticed the water temp gauge started to rise, first time it's ever done it, so had to put the heaters on to drop the temp back down. Had a good look about whilst waiting to get on the train, but no loss of coolant and no bubbles in the header tank, so hopefully just a 1 off as it was bloody hot.

 

Once back in the uk, the car drove home fine, other than the odd knock / clonk when going over bumps, water temps were 100% stable at 90°c on the gauge. and I even managed to get 400 miles out of a tank of fuel yesterday

 

I managed to average 44.6mpg over the 500 miles I did yesterday and 38.9mpg over the whole weekend and 1063miles including the 2 laps of the ring

 

Anyway enough waffling on, here are the 3 pictures I purchased from Frozenspeed on my way out of the Pistenklause restaurant on Sunday evening (great Argentinian Steak on a stone in there btw) and my video of the 2nd lap (sadly the gopro didn't record the lap as I forgot that when I manually start Harry's Laptimer it doesn't start the gopro).

 

 

 

 

[group1rs]

Awesome. That is all !

[skud vrs]

Agreed awesome.

Would love to go again.

[Cossie1]

Agreed awesome.

Would love to go again.

 

Yep me too, although next time, I might have to get someone to drive the car over for me, and i'll fly over (my knee's, feet and ears are only just starting to recover now) lol.

[skud vrs]

Told you to put the carpet back in.

There roads are much louder than ours.

[devonutopia]

I really want to go at the end of September!  How many people would be up for a group booking?

[Cossie1]

I really want to go at the end of September!  How many people would be up for a group booking?

 

I'd love to go back again, but I don't think it will be this year lol

 

I'm 99% sure I need better brakes for the ring (well if I want to do more than 2 laps anyway) and now i've had a taste for it, I deffo want to do more than 2 laps next time

[andy68]

Just a quick thought with all the suspension and alignment problems your having, the driveshaft problem is like the one I had which was caused by the TT six spoke wheels you have fitted, I had these on while my spiders while they were getting re-furbed, once I put the spiders back on car ran fine again, I think the main problem is caused by the weight of the TT wheels 13.2 KG compared to Spiders 9.3kg,  the extra weight to rotate can't be doing the drive train any good. Only an idea might worth trying a different set of rims.