Unfortunately the Demon Rally Team will be unable to compete at this year’s Idaho Rally. The team put in a serious effort to attempt to complete our new competition vehicle in time for the event, however a series of unfortunate events and missed deadlines has forced us to withdraw from the Idaho Rally as competitors. We were not willing to show up at this event with an ill prepared vehicle and have chosen a new target event, the Wild West Rally in Pomeroy, WA, on the weekend of September 25th. By that time we should have enough time to fully prepare and test our new competition vehicle. Look forward to a great show in pomeroy this summer.

We are hurriedly scrambling to get the car back together and running for our testing and break-in session this upcoming weekend at the No Alibi TSD. There is a good chance we will achieve that goal at the last minute.

In the past few days we have made significant progress to getting things back together. The engine is ready for it’s fluids, the brakes have fluid in them, the custom rule-required protection on the fuel cell is installed, the suspension is ready to be adjusted, the hubs and bearings on all the corners have been refurbished and installed, the co-drivers seat and foot rest are installed, the transmission is in and hooked up to the axles, etc. etc. etc.

The to-do list is still long, so we’re putting in extra hours over the next couple of days to get everything sorted. Wiring should be finished on Wednesday and the car should start (fingers crossed) that day. There are a lot of incidental finishing tasks that must be done before we can head out on the long No Alibi trip. But we are doing our best to get some long distance testing in before we start tuning and tweaking.

Stay tuned to see if we make it!

Got some more work done this weekend…Brendon was busy wiring away while Don and I worked on setting up the 034 Crank Trigger Setup, had to swap over the coolant hardline to the Golf/Jetta style one instead of the rabbit one.

I started installing Stack Dash sensors on the oil filter flange, but I guess I got too excited and ruined a $50 temperature sesnor along with the filter flange…luckily I had a spare filter flange….down goes another $50 along with an hour or so of my time without making any progress.

Brendan brought over his label maker and I was able to start labeling the plethora of switches, its nice to see everything start to come together…doing a little finish work goes along way towards motivation.

It looks like we’ll be able to drill and tap the factory aluminum coolant pipe on the driver’s side of the head for the Stack Dash water temp sensor, hopefully we can get that done next weekend when the tap comes in.

Don put the car back up on stands and I started with the exhaust. The Techtonics race header is awesome, just a little tight under the shifter for our application. Cascade Autosport changed the original exhaust configuration to a passenger side exit with a Magnaflow muffler out back and the cat up front. Well I stole that cat for my daily driver and I wanted to change out mufflers and the cat for something a bit more race specific anyways.

I snagged a Dynomax Bullet Race muffler. It’s compact design allows for an install just past the header, with a bit of shielding it will be tight and protected from the debris kicked up. I snagged a metal core catalytic converter and we will end up running that at the back of the exhaust system, using the cat as a tail pipe. After mocking almost everything up (I need to snag just a couple more feet of 2.25″ pipe), it’ll be a great fit, tucked up right against the body shell. We’ll add protection to the bottom of the exhaust system. I used some small scraps of 1/2″ particle board to keep good clearances. The exhaust is so tight in the back of the car that I had to bore a hole in the rear valance on the passenger side for the exhaust to come straight out. The straight through design with very few bends should give us a nice performance gain when its all said and done…hopefully the car will be quiet enough to pass Tech.

The center carbon switch panel mounts got fabbed up, I used nutserts as it should be a low stress environment and trying to reach a nut in that location would be a huge PITA. I also was able to mount the Relay Panel inside the center console, I need to add a rear support bracket, but it looks great, a couple more center console mounts, some trimming and addition of carbon panels and it will look great.

As usual one step forward usually means a few more things to add to the TO DO list, and a couple hundred more dollars to spend, but we are making progress despite being 3 months past our original completion date. Our new date of completion will be July 9-11th at the Idaho Rally

Check out the rest of the build gallery