According to Peter’s text records, the call to pull the engine was made at 2AM on race day. I’d slept a few hours on Wednesday, one hour on Thursday and was about to get a nice round zero before piloting a car that had never been driven —by anyone — up a narrow road course in the woods. We’d been talking about Steve Albini, so we put Terraform on the shop stereo.
When I last updated readers, getting a running, driving K24 Lada/HachiRuskie to the Empire Hill Climb was looking like a 50/50 shot. I was running short on time with a healthy list of projects and a lot of unknowns. To make a long story short, with some help, I completed those projects. My buddy Frank bailed me out by building a custom exhaust over the course of a couple lates nights, Jimmy and Henry lent a hand, and I ended up with a running, driving car a few days ahead of the event. Everything was rounding into shape with a little time to spare.
When I was finally ready for a fast-ish test drive hours before tech, I learned that the car wouldn’t rev past about two thousand RPM and probably wouldn’t be have enough to make it up the hill at all.
There was no time to figure it out, so I loaded the car on the trailer and set off to have the car looked over. Adam Sondag came along and we met Jimmy, Peter Hughes and Matty Riley in Empire. While we waited, we tried to get the car to rev. On the advice of one of the guys from Hybrid Racing, we asked my wife to bring us a new knock sensor. It did nothing, but we played with it a bunch and consulted a few of the experts milling around the pre-race cookout.
Around 9PM, we passed tech (my helmet was expired and my firesuit was ratty) and brought the car back to my shop for some additional fiddling. Jimmy’s work on his Subaru rally cars has made him the tuning/sensor knower in our little group. So, he rewired the knock sensor, plugged the laptop into the Hondata ECU and stared at the screen. He did this about 9 more times, which led us to the conclusion that something was going on inside the engine. Like I said before, this was about 2AM.
I suggested calling it a night, but within a few minutes we’d resolved to figure it out. A look under the valve cover and a lot of discussion revealed that the timing chain was maybe a tooth off. We started pulling the engine and transmission apart and set the nasty spark plugs we’d found aside.
Way back when I realized I’d have to cut the transmission tunnel out and make a new one, I decided to make it huge because I didn’t know how many times I’d have to take the engine in and out. Unfortunately, when I added a cross bar to the roll cage late in the build, I placed it close enough to the engine that it was impossible to remove the crank bolt without at least tilting the engine upward. This meant that we couldn’t take the timing chain cover off. So it was cherry picker time. It was also remove exhaust, remove coolant lines, remove radiator, unplug charging harness, remove, fuel system, etc, etc time.
With all that done, it was time to pull the crank bolt, then remove the timing chain cover.
When wrenching, a good thing to keep in mind is that if a part you’re trying to remove feels stuck, like it should come apart easily and won’t, there’s usually a reason. You can try to force it, sometimes it even works. But more often then not, you’ll break something important. Even if you’re really strong, it’s best not to muscle it, but to take a second and think.
Why would this timing chain cover feel like it doesn’t want to come off? Is there maybe one tiny, unseen bolt in the corner that you’re not seeing? Often, yes, there is a tiny bolt, but you apply enough pressure to shatter the cover anyway, even when you know you can’t get one at this hour, up here in Northern Michigan. Maybe at a junkyard…what time do they open on Saturday?
No matter. I pulled the cover aside and started digging through my stuff. Do I have aluminum welding wire? No. Do I have some JB Weld? Yes. Let’s smear it on and go back to the timing chain. Wait. How many hours until the race? Will this stuff cure by then? No. It’s on to the gasket maker, that’ll hold.
The hours between that moment and when we started throwing tools and spares in a bag to load for the race are a blur. The weekend before I’d been short on sleep, dazed, running on adrenaline. I broke a handful of angle grinder safety rules while cutting out a cover for the transmission tunnel and I was hurt pretty bad. I didn’t take the hint. I pressed on, pushing the no sleep thing, doing everything I could to get to exactly this point. After months of building this car almost alone, silently staring my phone, and generally beating my head against car problems that only I could have created, I was gassed. Spent.
I remember standing next to the car with my forearm on the roof an and my head on my forearm while Jimmy, Peter and Adam messed with the timing chain, confirming that I had installed it wrong. I remember catching the timing gear just in time to make sure it went on the right way. I remember applying gasket-maker and bolting covers down, but I do not remember actually fixing the car.
As the sun rose, the four of us wrestled the car back together and onto the trailer, arriving in Empire in time to fuel and make it to the driver’s meeting with 30 seconds to spare.
What I would love to say is that the day was perfect, we won our class, and I didn’t feel tired. The reality was that I slept really hard on the lawn of the Empire Rose vacation rental. Twice. I also fell asleep staging the car at least once. I felt awful, like I was watching everything happen to some other hulking moron. I’d felt like that for days, really.
On my first run, the car popped and sputtered its way up half the hill before I put it in neutral, floored it and the engine roared to life. The result was a deeply not-respectable 53 seconds-ish. My second run was more popping and sputtering, but I remembered the flooring it in neutral trick and got into the mid 30 second range. Run three saw me flooring it from the start and turning in a halfway decent 26 second run. The car didn’t run well in the afternoon, but I completed all my runs and in the process learned that when the motor is going, it is a fucking rocket.
It’s incredibly light, so it gets up to speed fast and then doesn’t have to slow down after that. You can more or less stay in it for the whole run, it’s just flat and composed and so easy to steer. Because it’s a BRZ, but ten inches shorter and much, much lighter I was expecting it to be twitchy, always eager to send the ass end around. But, and I think this is largely because of the incredible Bridgestone RE71S tires, it just does not want to come unstuck. If you manage to unstick it, it’s easy to control with the throttle, easy to point with the wheel. The tires also delivered strong launches from the starting line which are crucial for setting a good time. I really can’t say enough about them.
Race day was not a success on paper, I don’t even know where I actually finished, but I was definitely the fastest car that had an engine installed a couple hours before the race. And, every time I ran, I got at least a flash of the Lada’s potential. When it’s running right it’s a monster.
After the hill climb, I loaded the car, drank a beer and jumped in Lake Michigan with some of the people who helped me get the car over the line. I didn’t feel good and it would be days before I did, but I felt relieved. I’d successfully resurrected the Lada I’d saved from Canada so long ago, blessing it with an 86 chassis and Honda power, something nobody else has done. I had once again proven myself as a high-level practitioner of automotive buffoonery.
Obviously, nobody has this before it because it’s a bad idea, maybe the hardest way to end up where I wanted to be. But somewhere along the line, this Lada I had no reason to ever come in contact with arrived in my life, nuzzled up and became precious to me. I tried to give it up, let time and distance work their magic until it was just a fun memory. But that was my little car out there, nobody cared about it like I did. When I was offered a chance to get it back and make it into something, I didn’t even have to think about it. It was the only thing that made sense. I think generally, if something is really worth doing, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard.
I wouldn’t call myself an optimist, but I do like a project. Every now and again I’ll find myself transfixed by something impossible, imagining how great it could be if I loved it enough, if I pressed my will and my heart against it hard enough. This race car isn’t great—unfortunately, I started out with a Lada that the universe wanted dead a long time ago. But, I did build it, pretty much from scratch, into something I love. It’ll be a good little race car for as long as I can keep it together.
The following day, while returning the trailer and the beer kegs, I stopped off for a new set of iridium spark plugs. I removed the plugs I’d fouled while running the car with incorrect timing, installed the new ones and found that the car runs beautifully. I’m signed up for an autocross this weekend. UPDATE: The plugs are completely ruined after maybe 5 minutes of running. Back to the drawing board.
