Gumball STi Racing

The saga of our "simple" upgrade to the car continued. After installing our custom turbo from Cosworth, our team at Fourstar realized there was a problem and managed to isolate it to a faulty housing. Who knows how they did it. Most mere mortals would have given up before finding a valve that wouldn't seat properly.

Armed with a new housing Frank went back to work, but still couldn't get the car up to power. Back on the horn to Cosworth and the engineer there realized that there was an error in their calculations. They built us the wrong turbo! They scrambled the jets and sent us a new one. Now the clock was ticking.

In goes the third turbo and now we are talking. This turbo is a monster. Huge torque and HP, so much so that it was too much for the piping Frank built. New pipes later and we have ourselves a car that has around 460 hp at the crank.

Now it was time to get the beast on the track for a test. We head to Mosport DDT for a day of lapping and learning how to drive the car again with all of the new HP. The day was blazing hot and started out well. While the car was cool it performed very well, rocketing up through the gears like they were butter. However, we realized that there was a problem pretty quickly. The car started to reach temperatures of over 110 degrees C and started to lose power and act very strangely. So much so, that we had to pack it up and head back to Fourstar after only a few laps.

It turns out that the car needs to stay below 100 degrees to operate and over that, the ECU starts shutting things down to preserve itself. We installed a race radiator and a new thermostat, end of problem. The car is ready to race, but are we?

In other news, we have been slaving away on our race trailer to get it ready for the event. It is now fully pimped out with upgraded electrical, a new generator, rewired surround sound, digital projector, video monitors etc. We are ready to kick back in style and enjoy the post-race activities this year.

Richard has also invested some serious hours in cleaning up the A/V inside the car. Our good friends at East Hamilton Radio wired proper circuits for our multiple cameras, installed the new Alpine GPS, moved the invertor to the trunk etc. Hopefully we won't have any camera or audio issues like we did last year.

On Wednesday AM Richard starts the big drive to North Sydney NS to catch the Ferry on Thurs. AM. It looked like he was going to be driving out alone, but is now being joined by Stick our good friend and crew chief for Lance and Giulio's car. It is a full 22 hrs and they are hoping to drive straight through to make the ferry on Thurs. AM. We will see them there as we are flying in this year.

It is hard to believe, but this time next week, we will be racing!