'85 Merkur XR4Ti Rally Car

before I read that, let me just say I've been patiently waiting for your recap :)

New England Forest Rally Day 1

We got up bright and early and headed up to do some last minute servicing before Parc Expose.  It was difficult, because at that moment we discovered that a rally Merkur in New England attracts nerds like nothing else on earth.  Just crowds of car dorks every time the thing was left unattended- it was the best:  

After some quick topping up of fluids and stocking of the interior (water, snacks, bug spray for the giant mutant insects) we headed down to Parc Expose.  They almost lined us up correctly, I don't know how that Mitsubishi got in there:  

Lots of cool cars at this event, sorry everyone but your local Cars and Coffee hasn't got E36 M3 on this:  

And some DC friends (Kimmet, Battocchi/Schafer) were in attendance as well:  

After a short driver's meeting, we got on the road and transited out to SS1, Concord Pond.  Which is a FAST stage.  Insanely fast.  It's an absolutely bonkers stage to open a rally with, and we went way too cautious while the experts literally flew through the whole thing:  

The car felt good, and I felt like a real wuss, so on SS2 (a second pass of Concord Pond) we knocked a ton of time off and I was still convinced I left at least a full minute on the table.  That stage requires complete, absolute commitment at triple digit speeds and I just wasn't there yet.

Then it was a transit back to service (every transit at NEFR is like an hour long) to check everything over- and the car was fine!

I even had enough time to eat a sandwich after checking everything:  

Then another nice long transit out to SS3, South Arm, which was much more our style.  10 miles of rocks and crests and speed variations- it was really fun, and I started feeling good despite Concord Pond having humbled me immensely earlier.  The car got up to about 230F, but we set a good time and really nailed the chicanes and many of the more technical sections.  This was a turnaround stage, so at the end we got to hang out with the other rallyists while we waited for the stage to be cleared and reconfigured.  Always a good time, and we also had great conversations with Foquette (SiF Racing) and the Mugen CR-Z team (who were patching up their car after a half-roll on the way in).

After the turnaround, we had our first real issue- the starter wouldn't crank.  I wiggled the starter wires while Sara held the button down and the car fired right up- we later determined that the actual staked in electrical connections at the starter motor were loose.  SS4 was Icicle Brook, which was 16 miles including most of South Arm as well as a run up and then down a really steep grade with rocks embedded in the road.  We did great on this one, although I had to back off a bit as the temperature neared 240F at the highest altitude of the stage, but others didn't fare so well- Kimmet hit a jump so berkeleying hard he bounced off the road into the woods, Teixeira took down a freaking tree, and Minneman's CRX seemingly disintegrated.  It was a very high attrition stage which we were happy to make it out of unscathed.

Day 1 ended back at the service park, with many teams patching up suspension and underbody damage from big rocks.  I checked over everything on our car to find not even a single bolt loose, although we'd burned some oil and boiled some coolant.  

Sara took the light bar off and demanded that I capture evidence that she also works on the car, as if anyone doubted that:  

Our car wasn't broken and we were ready to get going on another day, so we packed up Chief (since the service park would move the next day) and drove both cars back to the hotel.

New England Forest Rally Day 2

Day 2 was long.  It started at 7am and had over twice as many stages as day 1, but we were at the service park early anyway to hand over Chief's keys to Rob so he could get our rig over to the remote service in Errol NH.  Also, in an unprecedented event, one of my family members attended a rally!  My brother showed up the cheer us on:

He then nearly died in the woods, went home early, and slept for a full day, but it's the thought that counts and it means a lot to me that he showed up.  I'm the only one in my family with the racing gene but they tolerate me.

We brought the car to another Parc Expose, this time parked next to Foquette, who gleefully pointed out to his dad (Ford fan) all of the alarmingly excessive things we had done to our car to make it as reliable as his Subaru.  Then we were all sent off on another long transit.

SS5 was Wilson Mills, which I don't remember a ton of but I do remember it was the first of the truly dusty stages.  The temperature was in the mid to high 90s for most of day 2 so dust and heat and sunburn became our world for a while.  We put down a respectable time, didn't hit stuff, and the car got hot but not alarmingly so.

Then we had a dusty dirt transit to SS6, Aziscohos.  12 miles of speed and rocks with a triple caution completely open bridge in the middle.  It was here that we discovered how terrifying it can be to hurtle along at the top of 4th (gearing calculator says 113mph) with the shift light blinking from being on for so long and the temperature gauge steadily climbing.  This was the first stage where the temperature really hurt us, with the coolant reaching 250F and me backing off significantly until it came back down.  We crossed the bridge relatively uneventfully and put down a somewhat decent time:  

The temperature thing was clearly becoming an issue as the day got hotter.  On SS7, Morton Cutoff, we didn't have much of an issue since it was only 3 miles, but when we reached the final stage before the first service things were a little tougher.

SS8, Sturtevant Long, was 13.4 miles of fast that gradually tightens and gets rougher until the last few miles of constant 3s and 4s covered in rocks and crazy spectators.  We pushed as much as we could here but spent the last few miles with the temperature gauge pegged and steam pushing out of the coolant reservoir.  We also had our only reasonably large "oops" of the rally, sliding out and grazing some branches for a moment, but otherwise went as fast as I thought we could without cooking the engine and made it through without damage:  

At the finish, the coolant was boiling until we got our timecard and got moving.  We had to do something to keep it cool, so at service we got a little bit Roadkill:  

Nothing else was wrong with the car though, so after the hood was removed and the lugs were torqued?  Sandwich time again:  

We found out Downey's rear subframe was slowly ripping itself out, but he's extremely fast and gives not one single berkeley so he left service and continued to haul ass.  12 minutes later, we left too and basically ran the same four stages again in a different order.

SS9 was Sturtevant Short, not living up to its' name at about 6.9 miles, and the car got hot again but took a longer time to get there.  This time there was an M3 with some pretty gnarly looking suspension damage at the finish, a testament to the size of the rocks that were lurking everywhere if you got off the line.  For some reason I don't see any pictures of our car running sans hood yet but I'm sure they're out there.

SS10 was Wilson Mills a second time, and it was short enough that our hood removal prevented any cooling issues, although the dust was pretty brutal.  At the end of the transit after this stage, we dumped in as much water as the cooling system would take, including all of our spare bottles as well as the contents of my camelback.  Foquette also gave us a few bottles, and we declined his offer to pee into the reservoir as well.

SS11 was Aziscohos again, and despite our newly improved cooling it was still a bit too hot for the who-knows-how-old Saab 900 radiator the Merkur has.  I had to back off again, and we hit the triple caution bridge a little wonky and had a scary moment as the car thumped off of the wheel tracks and onto the railroad ties that make up the base of the bridge.  Overall it was fine, although we boiled a good amount of water out of the cooling system.

SS12 was short enough (Morton Cutoff again) that the temperatures stayed in check despite the boiling that happened on Aziscohos, and we went fast despite rough conditions and a lot of rocks.  I'm really pretty happy with the suspension and skidplate on this car, and could feel it on this stage more than any other.

We blew past all the other crews changing out of their driving suits and had another long transit back to service:  

At service, we checked everything again and it was fine, by some miracle, again.  The car took a lot of water but otherwise was happy, so we put the hood back on for the final stage (and the lack of questions at the finish line) and headed off for SS13, North Road.  This one was less than 4 miles but had plenty of places to hit rocks and stuff, and we went as fast as possible to put a nice ending on our rally- we were both clearly tired, with some sloppy notes and sloppy driving to match, but at the end we were ecstatic! 

NEFR is no joke, we had completed it in a 34 yr old turbo Ford (Ken Block couldn't do it in a much newer, many times more expensive one!), and had one transit to go.  Hell yes:  

Blah blah, finish line, awards, you know the drill.  Downey had a well deserved win in our class:  

and we got 4th in class and 18th regionally- knowing how much we left on the table between the cooling issues and getting up to speed, I'm very happy with that.

Victory Lap

So what do you do after completing a rough, difficult, fast rally on a whim in a car older than you are which hasn't run reliably for months?  Drive up a big berkeleying mountain!

Without putting the car on the trailer, we drove to Mt. Washington, then up it:  

Visibility got bad near the top:  

The summit:  

And a better photo from further down:  

We got to the bottom, stuck it on the trailer, and combined some stickers to tell the story:  

Ready to leave:  

And capped it all off in style by visiting my uncles in Cape Cod on our way home:  

What a weekend!  We will be back at NEFR some day, it's an incredible event.  Thank you so much to everyone who helped us along the way!

Pretty awesome!  Congrats on the successful finish.  I saw the broken M3 you described on Jalopnik.  Looks like that driver is a writer there. 

In reply to Lof8 :

I saw the article as well- the section he tagged a rock in was pretty nasty if you got off the line, the rocks were the size of basketballs!

So much awesome! You guys kick ass. 

Good job, thanks for the write up.

Jealous of the trek up Mt. Washington. I wanted to do that, but with a broken oil pan wasn't in the cards lol. 

The guy with the M3 is the same guy who took that old Subaru XT (or whatever) there a couple years ago. 

custom radiator time?

Other notes/anecdotes:

-Downey makes the rest of us look like fools with overpriced cars who can't drive.
-Havas and Whitsell need to have some sort of bus+racecar showdown.
-TXratti is super nice and also constantly hops into racecars with strangers and somehow hasn't died, and I'll never remember his real name because I met him on the forum first.
-Foquette will take literally any excuse to pee on a Merkur.
-Mt. Washington is a gnarlier road than Pike's Peak.  I've been up both now, fight me.
-We are, statistically, better at old turbo Fords than Ken Block.
-Brolin dropping his SOFR catchphrase at the finish nearly made me poop my pants.  "Hell yeah, brother!"

The most obvious issue at this event was cooling- we need a better radiator and more ventilation to get air out from under the hood.  I have several ideas for that so hopefully at least one of them looks viable when I actually start taking things apart.

The tech inspector also didn't like our front strut supports on the cage- they want them to end at the strut towers rather than continuing forward to the frame rails, to maintain whatever "crumple zone" Ford may have designed into this thing.  That's annoying but doable.

The biggest thing I want to fix about how the car drives is pedal feel and responsiveness, especially when it comes to the brake pedal.  The pedals are mushy, flexy, and tend to bounce around when your foot isn't on them, which all combines to make it very hard to feel confident at speed since you aren't guaranteed that the brake will work the same every time, or that the gas will actually be in position for a heel-toe rather than bouncing back past your foot making you miss it.   I'm not sure whether I should reinforce what's there or just start over with real motorsports pedals.  I would also love quicker throttle response but I'm not sure how feasible that is with this engine.

The rest of the car seems to have done remarkably well.  The suspension felt great, skidplate did its' job, drivetrain had no issues, and the engine seems to be fine despite exploring the upper regions of the temp gauge.  This is also the first rally where the intercom worked the whole time, and the electrical stuff all seemed to be happy other than the starter issue.  So our list is as follows:

Need:
-Better cooling
-Replace starter
-Change all fluids
-Repaint wheel wells, trailing arms, rockers (have lots of bare spots from gravel blast)
-Chop tubes in front of strut towers

Want:
-Better pedal feel
-Better throttle response
-More interior cooling

Want but not nearly as important:
-Weight reduction (the hatch is super heavy, there HAS to be weight I can take out)
-Replace lexan (can barely see through it any more, very scratched)
-Add more butt padding to my seat
 

This all adds up to a very fun time in my opinion!  I think it's kind of funny to see the Ur Quattro there, I probably know the owner/driver.  Maybe someday I'll be able to get out to check one of these out.

As for your cooling issue, have you looked through any of the offerings from Griffen or other type brands?  They normally have a wide selection of sizes, and can normally be easily modified to mount correctly I to a lot of different vehicles.

In reply to de80q :

I have looked at a few of the common radiator manufacturers- there are multiple options which will fit in the spot I have now, but I also want to take things apart to see if there's a clever way to get myself more space or better mounting before I make a decision.  We can't afford to do another event for a bit anyway so I might as well take my time and try to work out the best path.

Did you replace the water pump and or thermostat a while back ago?  My memory is somewhat murky about that. 

Still, a new radiator with enhanced cooling capabilities would be a welcome change and piece of mind.

In reply to Samebutdifferent :

Water pump, thermostat, head gasket, and hoses are all relatively new.  The radiator and fans are "good used" stock Saab parts so I think they're probably the weak links, and I would prefer even just an equivalently sized all aluminum radiator over stock stuff.

All the photos and views from this rally make me want to add it to next years calender, the roads look like a blast!!!! nice job on finishing and I certnaitly know the feeling of backing off on water temps. I was doing that a lot at SOFR - if this keeps up im not sure how to combat that my radiator is already rated for 450hp lol and im making less than half that.,

It finally makes sense why the Xr4ti was so high on my want list, being a nerd myself 

Great job on the rally, I had no doubt you and Sara would finish!

Are you running a separate oil cooler on the car?

Not the stock one but an actual one? Might help with the cooling issue.

In reply to GPz11 :

Yep, big FC RX7 oil cooler.  We only ran one rally with the stock one and had to be VERY careful, things got hot fast.

Ok, yeah, sounds like time for bigger radiator or cut holes in the hood like I did.

In reply to GPz11 :

Or both!  We've already got 280zx vents in the hood but I think a big extractor in the space between the radiator and the front of the engine might help.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

In reply to GPz11 :

Or both!  We've already got 280zx vents in the hood but I think a big extractor in the space between the radiator and the front of the engine might help.

That's where I had the vent cut on my original hood, you may recall. I don't know that it improved anything in reality, but in theory it should work. 

Its all the car. I still brake too early for my taste. 

great first time out man. NEFR is different and now you know. Awesome to see the red rwd crew make it through. Two of them their first time! 

maybe next year we can have josh back and do some damage to his e34 pan. 

paperpaper said:

Its all the car. I still brake too early for my taste. 

 

great first time out man. NEFR is different and now you know. Awesome to see the red rwd crew make it through. Two of them their first time! 

 

maybe next year we can have josh back and do some damage to his e34 pan. 

 

you'll learn about low oil pans soon enough, buddy ;)