B4 Avant - 2.0E to 2.2T

[Sleeper_Avant]

few things to notice:

- smokey exhaust - seems to only do it on idle at a specific spot in the temp range - once the car has warmed up the smoke disappears...the car runs fine otherwise

Turbo related, i suffer with this

- funky idle - still no idea why the idle isn't stable - I`ve completely eliminated the PCV system and vented to a catch can as seen in video - there's no path for any fuel/oil air to go into the intake at the moment...

split boost hose/manifold gasket


- boost hits about 20psi and drops out after that

See above lol


- hit a rev limiter or overboost protection in 1st gear around 6k rpm...doubt it's a rev limiter so more likely overboost...can't duplicate in other gears...

boost cut stays in all gears untill you turn ignition off/on


I hope i halped with some ideas

[prj]

few things to notice:

- smokey exhaust - seems to only do it on idle at a specific spot in the temp range - once the car has warmed up the smoke disappears...the car runs fine otherwise

Blown turbo.

- funky idle - still no idea why the idle isn't stable - I`ve completely eliminated the PCV system and vented to a catch can as seen in video - there's no path for any fuel/oil air to go into the intake at the moment...

Get a different ISV and try it. Pressurize your intake. It's either your ISV or a vacuum leak.

- boost hits about 20psi and drops out after that

1.4 bar boost spike is about right for the average tune.
Check for boost leaks.

- hit a rev limiter or overboost protection in 1st gear around 6k rpm...doubt it's a rev limiter so more likely overboost...can't duplicate in other gears...

That was a trigger error or bad supply to ECU.

- blow through MAF works fine...no codes from ECU

That does not mean ECU is getting LOAD right.
Do an AFR log, likely timing and fuel is all over the place.
Check block 2 from left in measuring group 0 at hot idle, note the value.

[NiTeC]

- turbo is freshly rebuilt and not smoking in any other conditions other than a very specific temp range on idle
- all hoses in the system are brand new
- PCV has been completely routed out of the intake and into a catch-can
- every free port on the intake is accounted for
- hmmm...a bad sync signal you say? I didn't think about that - I`ll scan it tonight to see if any codes popped up...

I noticed something else after a spirited session yesterday - the car died twice while pulling up to a stop in neutral...started fine after that...when I parked it back home the idle was jumping up and down by 3-400rpm...disconnected the idle control valve and it froze solid on one spot so I'm starting to think this might be causing some issues...I`ll clean it up tonight and/or switch to the eurovan/V6 one and see what happens...

[prj]

- turbo is freshly rebuilt and not smoking in any other conditions other than a very specific temp range on idle

Well, then it'll just have to be rebuilt again.
Only other thing that can cause similar symptoms are the valve seals, but it would not be as specific as you describe it.

- all hoses in the system are brand new
- PCV has been completely routed out of the intake and into a catch-can
- every free port on the intake is accounted for

That does not mean anything in regard to boost leaks.
Have you actually pressurized the intake with an air compressor and sprayed down soapy water all over the intake or not?
For example I can guarantee you that your ISV will blow bubbles around the connector at 0.5 bar.
Don't assume that it's tight, until you have pressurized it to 1 bar and can see that the air is escaping very, very slowly and there are no bubbles anywhere.

As for your PCV. I would not route it to atmosphere, it does not provide the suction to effectively suck out all the blowby out of the system, so your oil will get fouled sooner than usual.

- hmmm...a bad sync signal you say? I didn't think about that - I`ll scan it tonight to see if any codes popped up...

There might not be any.
If it is a strong jerk, like the entire car shuts down for a moment, then it's deffo a trigger problem. Hall sensor can not cause this - only engine speed and crankshaft position sensors. I have not seen them fail - usually a short or bad contact somewhere. Clean the connectors with contact cleaner.

I noticed something else after a spirited session yesterday - the car died twice while pulling up to a stop in neutral...started fine after that...when I parked it back home the idle was jumping up and down by 3-400rpm...disconnected the idle control valve and it froze solid on one spot so I'm starting to think this might be causing some issues...I`ll clean it up tonight and/or switch to the eurovan/V6 one and see what happens...

Your ISV is getting stuck, and possibly you have vacuum leaks.

[NiTeC]

loaded up...finally got to throw on the white rims - love it! those will look great on camera



Leaving in less than 5hours...

Follow us on Twitter @ETM_Targa, like us on Facebook or simply keep an eye on http://www.eurotrashmotorsports.com

Targa Newfoundland - here we come!

[Audicted]

Looking great Emil.

[NiTeC]

downtown Halifax...



it's fun driving a street legal race car took her to Peggy's Cove today...still having issue with the engine shutting off when I put it in neutral...makes no sense to me...I`m swapping the original ICV valve tomorrow...could this be because of the close proximity between the MAF and the throttle?

[NiTeC]

oh boy...

can you find the missing car?






gravel was tossed on the tarmac...the car got sideways, I counter-steered (apparently wasn't supposed to do that) and line it right for the ditch...10ft vertical drop straight onto the intercooler...front is busted up, took out the rad, cut one of the tires, bent a control arm and cracked the turbo....no big deal...



took a while but the local boys got us out of there...



fixed the turbo up, got a spare control arm on the airplane tonight - tomorrow's gonna be a long day...gotta somehow fix the bumper up, do all new piping for a sidemount IC, get it aligned, fix the rad, get a new rad support....sigh...

[bikerjim]

Oh god, thats terrible. You sound ok though, hope you are, thats the main thing! Hope you get her back up and running again soon.

[NiTeC]

all right folks...it's time I did a more detailed write up...I`m sorry it took a while but I haven't had a single minute since we're been back and even now I`m stuck in China Lake, California with some slow internet making it hard to finish processing the footage...

We wanted to get to Newfoundland a few days ahead of schedule to give us a chance to drive a few of the more complicated stages. It was the first event for both my father in the navigator seat and myself in the driver seat. To top that off we had virtually no test time with the car so we were worried we`ll be having hardware issues. In any case it took us a few days to get there. We stopped by in Halifax for some fresh fish and a little cruise to Peggy's Cove.





The ferry ride is rather long at 14hrs or so. We got to meet a few of the other teams on the boat and had a chance to review the route books and discuss the calls from the navigator seat. Once off the boat, we headed to St. John's, where we were staying for a few days. We were also scheduled for the Targa Newfoundland school which was to run on Thursday and Friday and is taught by Targa veteran Glen Clarke (Openroad Motorsports). I already took it last year but it was going to be beneficial to my dad as it focuses on navigation and gives a good description of some of the more problematic parts of the route. We spent a couple of days driving various stages with Carbonear and Brigus being the most interesting ones.

The thursday session was in class and gave us a chance to review some theory and meet a few other competitiors including Zahir Rana who brought his Ferrari Enzo along for a ride. On friday we took a short ferry ride over to Bell Island, where we were going to run a practice stage to get some seat time.

A few pictures from friday:









As the day was progressing, the speed was building up. We ran the stage one way in the morning and the opposite way in the afternoon. There was a pretty quick right hand turn with gravel on it, which I had driven all morning and was fully aware of. The car gave me no problems crossing over the gravel beforehand. My original plan was to take it easy for the first few days of the race until I`m more familiar with the car and avoid doing something stupid. Unfortunately, that right hander had different plans for me. On my last run, the car hit the gravel, the rear end came out and my natural reaction was to counter steer to correct the oversteering. Later I found out that this is by far the worst approach to the situation. Glen had mentioned a few times that when you hit gravel you should avoid overreacting. I now know exactly what he meant. The problem is the transition from gravel to tarmac. Once traction is restored, the car goes exactly where the tires are pointing - in my case a 10ft ditch filled with rocks.

Here is the full video of that run...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VapQcxi4UyI

The result was of course rather sad...






The crash aftermath...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8iPZOeZsUs

This was also the first time we met with the famous Newfoundland local hospitality and spirit...we had over 20 kids get together to help us dig the car out. When the tow truck said he can't get us out of the mud without sinking himself, everybody started calling their friends to bring their trucks, ATVs etc over. In the end everybody pitched in and we pushed the car out for the truck to be able to tow it.



We headed home rather down in spirit. I thought the race was done for us but my dad remained calm and kept saying we need to make a list of all that is broken and fix it. This is also the first time we met the famous Targa Newfoundland competitor spirit - we had over 5 teams offer help in various ways. Glen told me one of his techs is flying in from Ottawa the next morning and can bring any parts we might need. We rolled up our sleeves, took the whole front apart that night and made a list of everything we need. Lucky for us, I had that donor car still sitting in front of my house. The extra control arm, a set of headlights, a half shaft and some other bits were at our hotel at lunch the next day and so the rebuilding began. We had to be careful to not miss our registration and first aid courses, however we were forced to miss the scrutineering and the 'Prologue' stage on sunday. The Prologue, however, is not included in the overall scoring - it's more of a warmup and allows the officials to set the starting order for the next day. Needless to say we were placed at the end of the pack.

Here we are making a bumper out of Canadian Tire sheet metal



Along the way we had to get a new alignment - the front left tire was completely out of whack even after we replaced the control arm. The Capital Group of St. John's did us a big favor by putting our car on their brand new state of the art alignment setup in one of their Subaru Dealerships...



Monday morning came. We were able to finish everything we had to by late sunday night and were lined up for scrutineering at 7am on monday. Needless to say people couldn't believe we were actually going to start the race, but when we fired the engine up all doubts were gone - we were back in the race! Scrutineering was not an issue - the car was actually set up pretty good for all the safety stuff. We passed our breathalyzer test and loaded up - off we went. The day started off with a transit to the first stage. The problems started as soon as I backed off the gas on the highway off ramp. A huge cloud of smoke came out and of course all doubts were back in. We parked at the breakfast location and everybody gathered around to see what's up. The car was completely engulfed in a cloud of white smoke - clearly oil or coolant. I thought we might have cracked the head or something of that sort but the engine ran just fine - just copious amounts of smoke. We made the decision to keep pushing - there was nothing we could do at the moment.

The smoking was getting worse but again - the car just kept running. We stopped for lunch and started tracking down the drivers around us and saying sorry for chocking them all morning.We lined up the first stage after lunch and off we went. Two minutes later, one of the marshals signaled us for emergency and to stop immediately. We came around the corner and found this:




This was a rather interesting crash involving some rather interesting people.

The driver of the Nissan is Mark Kostick. He owns a Kia and Nissan dealerships in Western Canada. Mark prepared a Kia Forte Koup last year and raced Targa. He mis-shifted and blew the engine up, ripped the engine out of a brand new car and managed to finish the race, but lost the leadership. Since then, Mark's apparently had a chip on his shoulder and was determined to win this year. So here we are - mid day monday. Mark comes around flying out of a corner, doesn't listen to his navigator, loses control, slams into the guard rails twice and ends up in the rear end of Danny Williams' Subaru STI. Now for those of you who are not following Canadian politics, Danny Williams is the son of Newfoundland's ex prime minister, who's had a rather 'interesting' life himself. His Subaru left the start line with white smoke. Turns out, they had a head gasket issue and overheated on their way through the stage. They parked the car on the side and got out asap. That might have saved their lives or very bad injuries at least.

Mark wasn't so happy. AFAIK he broke his back in the crash. Now - it gets even more interesting here. Mark was supposed to support the Kia Forte, which Kia bought back from him and gave to driver Jacques Deshaies and navigator Shaun Keenan - journalists with Autonet.ca. We became pretty good friends with the Autonet/Kia team through the week - great guys. Anyways - Mark had promised to support their team through the week. Soon after the crash though, he ordered his crew to pack it up and head back, leaving the Kia team stranded with no support. They sorted it all out through Kia and finished the race with very good scoring.

As soon as we drove away from the crash, we passed a yellow Porsche Turbo in the water. The driver, Bruno Rodrigues, miscalculated a corner, took out a rock and caused some serious damage to his Turbo. My crew helped him get the Porsche out of the water and loaded him up on our trailer. Funny enough, a day later, we tried to tow start his car after it died at the end of a stage - pretty funny stuff.



We had serious work that night - the turbo had to come out. While the other teams were busy polishing their cars and signing autographs, we were yet again taking the front apart. Lucky for us I had a spare. Hours later we were ready to go and I took her for a spin. I had full power and was very happy. We didn't consider the fact that the car was cold and the air temp was very low. The next day, the ECU started cutting the boost off pretty quickly when the car warmed up. We thought that improving the airflow through the improvised metal pipe would help us out and instead of setting up the intercooler we spent the time cutting holes in the bumper, hoping it will work.



That's also the first night we slept inside



The next day we kept having the same problems - tried a few things like unplugging the boost control valve but nothing helped. We were still running but had no power at all, which kind of sucked as we ran two of the fastest stages that week and kept getting passed by the next team. This is also the day we had to run Gander. Here is a spectator video of that stage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWEeUb5CV8U

You can see us around 2.00min and you can hear the car run like poop but there was nothing we could do. We had another busy evening ahead of us. I had an extra 1.8T intercooler and luckily had brought the stock turbo intake and throuttle hoses from the S4. Surprisingly, it didn't take us very long to set the intercooler up - we had power again. This time I made sure I warmed the car up and did some more thorough testing before I was happy with the results.

We ran our best two stages the next morning. The car ran great and my dad and I were getting used to the communications. With the exception of a late 'Tripple Warning' call on his side, which gave me goosebumps, everything else ran smoothly. People were no longer passing us - in fact considering the rainy stage, the quattro gave us a good advantage. Here's the footage from Boat Harbour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI-g1zTpxVg

The good times didn't last very long. After lunch, the race resumed out of order for some reason. We didn't figure it out and thought we were late for our turn. As we were in a hurry and basically lined up at the start line as we pulled up, I made the mistake of dropping the clutch. The car didn't move. We quickly pushed it off to the side and had to sit there watching everybody else run while I wasn't sure if we blew the tranny, lost the clutch or something else. This stage also claimed the first injured spectator in 10 years of Targa history. In any case, after a quick inspection I figured out that we stripped the rear right shaft. We still had that spare that flew in from Ottawa for the front so naturally we started hoping they are the same. But they're not. Took us a while to figure out a way to retro-fit the shaft so that we can use it. We also ran into that Newfoundland hospitality again. We pushed the car into a local's driveway and while we were trying to fix it, a few of the neighbours were helping us out. They also brought us some sort of fried moose pancakes, moose steaks and one of the guys gave my dad a pair of moose antlers as a present.





In the end, not finishing 2 stages wasn't so bad after all. Thursday also claimed the Enzo - it ended up in the river after a little gravel exercise similar to mine. You can watch Zahir's footage here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaMkT1Dk6xQ

We had to transit the stage after his crash:


here his crew is trying to dry off the interior and the electronics of this 2.3mil $ car


Friday came with it's own set of challenges. Hurricane Maria rolled through the island. We saw winds in the 90km/h range and insane amounts of rain. The organizers canceled the high speed morning stages due to standing water and high crash probability. We proceeded towards the last two stages - Carbonear and Brigus. They were also the two stages we practiced a week before that. The car ran fine through the rain and the stages did not present any significant challenge. We had a little issue with the throttle after the first run of Carbonear but as soon as we got back to the start line everything was fine. Brigus was downgraded to road condition 3 due to the standing water and tight corners. I think that's the only stage we zeroed the whole week

Here's Carbonear 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSQH5Jh3mN0

Brigus 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnnF4VNAvE

Brigus 2 - event finish:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcbCm5PBOqk

Needless to say, passing the finish line was something extraordinary. I can't remember the last time I had this feeling of accomplishment. Everybody came to congratulate us - we were like the Targa success story . With this ended one of the most intense weeks of my life. We met some incredible people, saw some unbelieavable things and learned tons about ourselves and what it takes to succeed. I strongly recommend this adventure at least once in a lifetime - you will not regret it.



Also a good article by the Autonet guys that talks about the Eurotrash team...

http://www.autonet.ca/autos/news/2011/09/18/18705571-autonet.html

[macspring]

Gutted for you with the initial incident, but what a recovery, and then more grief, and then finishing.

Amazing, but also with the write up and the photos, and the video clips, I feel like I was there also.

Well done on changeing the car to quattro and overcoming all that the rally threw at you and then finishing.

Well cool.


Epic !

[Bram]

Good story to read. What an adventure!

[prj]

Very nice story...
As for your "letting off throttle" issue. That MAF is not designed to work on the pressure side for a number of reasons.
It'll never really work completely properly like that, even if you were to recalibrate the MAF in the software.... BTDT.

If you want to use the MAF on the pressure side you need a HFM5 and correct calibration for it, these were designed to work in blow-through applications from day one and have no issues there at all.

[NiTeC]

Very nice story...
As for your "letting off throttle" issue. That MAF is not designed to work on the pressure side for a number of reasons.
It'll never really work completely properly like that, even if you were to recalibrate the MAF in the software.... BTDT.

If you want to use the MAF on the pressure side you need a HFM5 and correct calibration for it, these were designed to work in blow-through applications from day one and have no issues there at all.

yes and no....on day 3 when it was obvious we needed the intercooler in there I installed the whole piping as per stock setup - MAF before the turbo...the issue was not resolved...I was convinced that the problem was the blow-through as well but there must be something else...still yet to figure it out...

[prj]

Well yeah, if it keeps stalling like that it is usually just a vacuum leak somewhere or your ISV is messed up.

But what I said still applies. The MAF will not really accurately report the amount of air going into the engine in a blow-through application, so your LOAD will be all over the place, meaning your timing and fuelling will be as well.