Our Car

We hope that this article lets you know something of what we have been doing at the college to introduce motorsport into the curriculum and why we are doing it.

Why do it?

I am sure that in the dim and distant past all of our readers will remember some contact with the education system and rightly or wrongly you may have found the programme you were on boring. This is something that our full time and day release students often pointed out as a negative aspect of the course, so we looked into various ways of making the courses more interesting.

What to do?

We looked into a variety of things that the students would be interested in doing, unluckily the college management ruled out the more popular suggestions, due to them not being related to the course the students were on, it may also have had some thing to do with the involvement with drink, night clubs and sex. As a second best we came up with the idea of an involvement with motorsport in one way or another with the key factors being it must be based around a normal road car, the technology must be related to what the students deal with in their work place, it must be cheap.

The choice we made?

We decided that a good choice would be to go into tarmac rallying in a FWD car with a relatively low power output, this would give a great deal of scope for development. Also to aid development and keep costs down we decided to go for a major manufacture which had compatible parts on other models in the range. To this end we decided if possible to use a car already owned by the college, this would save the possible conflict that may be met if we requested money to buy a vehicle. A Vauxhall Astra 1.3 was available with a sound body although the interior was in bad order and had started to look scruffy. This was an ideal choice apart from it being a 5 door shell which we decided we would have to live with.

The development process

We used various groups to develop the car depending at the stage they were at in their learning. Here is a brief guide as to what was done by whom:

• The car was dismantled by first year parts students, the students removed cleaned and labelled parts, this helped them in identifying where the parts they sell every day actually fit onto a vehicle.
• The body shell was seam welded by a group of BTEC students who were doing welding as an addition unit on their programme (this was the only part of the process that fell outside our normal syllabus).
• The body was rubbed down and prepared for painting by some 2nd year students who don't get experience of this in their work place.
• The vehicle was kindly painted for us by Crawley Down Garage a friendly Rover and Nissan dealer.
• The car was then ready to be rebuilt by a group of 3rd year day release students who repaired and overhauled units as and when required.
• The vehicle was built wherever possible to standard specification with an emphasis being put on safety.

Testing

When the vehicle was completed we took the car and a group of 20 students to Goodwood for one of their open test days. This was a very productive day in that we learned a lot about the car however it was marred by an engine noise that developed on the final laps. When the students striped the engine back at the college they all of the big end bearings to be in a rather sad state along with the crankshaft. We had two problems:

I. How do we find a new crankshaft to get the engine running again?

II. Why did the problem occur?

The answer to the first problem was solved by the donation of a 1.4 Astra engine whose crankshaft was similar to the 1.3, this we were able to swap over with a small amount of other modifications. This was a valuable lesson to the students as to them being able locate and modify parts from unexpected sources.

With the aid of some avionics students we were able to solve the second problem which was traced to a crack in the oil pick up pipe, it happened to be the first time they had used the crack testing equipment in a real situation.

The First Event

We had our first outing on the Armstrong Spring Stages in February which proved to be an enjoyable days competition, which lead to a reasonable result of 20th overall and 4th in class. The car proved to be reliable and although performance was limited it drove well throughout the day with no major problems.

Ongoing Development

We are continuing to develop the car on a ongoing basis to hopefully to demonstrate to the students the effect of the modifications related to their cost implications. We have managed to include the following developments:

• Twin 40's
• Uprated springs and dampers
• High performance brake pads
• Strut brace
• Group A camshaft

We have other developments planned for the next year funds allowing:

• Gas flow the cylinder head
• Four branch exhaust
• Uprate suspension mountings
• Fit sump guard

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