My Rally Car - A long term project
My rally car is a 1981 Toyota KE-55S
Corolla, and I bought it from a guy called Edwin Heatherington back in
1986, as a rolling shell only with no engine or gearbox. It was exactly
what I was after, as a couple of months earlier I had crashed my KE-30
Corolla and written off the body, but the mechanicals were fine.
The car had excellent suspension and brakes,
so I think it was a good deal.
This is how it looked when I first picked up up (Apologies for the poor quality of the pic, but it's the only one I have) And on the right is how it looks after the new paint job. - |
The car is collecting dust at the moment, as I don't have enough time to get anything done on it, but hopefully by the end of 2005 or so, there will be some progress..
I was planning on using a Toyota 3T-GTE turbo 1800cc engine in it for some time in the car and getting a lot more power from it, but something came up that I couldn't pass by ...
I am lucky enough to have a friend that is a Japanese parts & engine importer, and one day he brought back a rather odd engine, one that I've never seen before or since. It's a Toyota 1G-GZTE, which means it's a 2 litre, twin cam, four valves-per-cylinder, 6 cylinder, supercharged AND turbocharged 450hp monster! Take a look at a couple of pictures of it -
HOWEVER!!
I changed my mind yet again, and have given
that engine back to the importer
I bought if off, and I am shortly to
receive a Toyota/Lexus 1UZFE, four litres with quad camshafts and an
alloy block. This means that they're a lot lighter than the 1GGZTE
above, and also a lot shorter. With the larger capacity it should still
make around the same total power as the smaller engine and even though
it won't turbo's the top end power should still be quite good. Pics to
come ...
HOWEVER PART TWO!!!
I changed my mind yet again, and am now going to fit it
with a 2.7 litre Suzuki V-6 as after some careful measurements it was
going to be difficult to fit the big V-8 into the car. The V-6 is quite
a bit smaller and lighter, and so will be much easier to fit. The
smaller engine will of course make less power and so to keep the
performance up to close to that of the bigger V-8, I will be running
more revs (~8,800rpm) and a shorter diff ratio, thus increasing the
torque at the wheels to nearly the same amount. The other reason I'm
using this engine is because it'll be indentical to the one in my
Starlet, and so help reduce the total cost of building the engine.
Here's the estimated power output.
The useful torque curve is quite wide, so the engine will still be
quite drivable. |
This is one part of the rally car package.
I have decided that to be able to really use
400hp+ odd in a small car like a Corolla, that I really need a proper
4WD
system, and so the car is going to be fitted with the gearbox from a
Ford Sierra Cosworth 4WD, thus making it a 4WD rally weapon. To do
this,
I will be moving the engine and gearbox back a couple feet, and this
will help the car be better balanced as well. This involves cutting a
rather large hole in the firewall and moving the gearbox tunnel back a
fair bit, but it'll be worth it.
Here's the only picture I have of the gearbox, will get more when I purchase an actual gearbox. |
You can't see where the transfer case comes out the rear end, as it's on the other side. Hopefully I'll be getting one from England some time in early 2004, courtesy of a friend in the UK, so I can make a little progress on that side of things.
One of the problems with having the engine sitting in the middle of the firewall and a diff sitting in front of that, is that there's not a lot of room left to put a steering rack in that area. What I really needed was to find a FWD car that had the steering rack sitting in front of the crossmember and so had the sterring arms on the bottom of the strut also point out forwards instead of rearwards like they almost always do. After a fair bit of searching and questioning, I found that such cars are rather thin on the ground ....
Fortunately, Ford Sierra to the rescue again! I dug up a picture of the bottom of the front of the car, and it turns out that they have exactly the rack & struts I'm after. Here's that picture.
#1 is the short driveshaft from the gearbos to the front diff, #2 is the gearbox itself, #26 is the transfer case, #4 is the front diff in the is case (I'll likely use a Nissan R180 diff though), #16 is the rack which is hidden behind the front crossmember, #19 is one of the front halfshafts, and #8 is one of the tie-rods on the steering.
So it's all slowly coming together ....
Hopefully it'll be on the road by late 2004 odd.
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