The plan was to get the car on the trailer last weekend. The plan was to have the transmission and the struts sorted a week before the rally. The plan was to not be last minute with like 3 major things. I gave the plan enough time. I set it in motion a month before the event. I monitored and updated the plan. I called and made sure the plan was going to work and then made other plans.

New transmission, clutch, and struts. The transmission leaked out of it’s first shipping container and delayed it for a week. The clutch was ordered on April 4th and was confirmed on the 14th but never shipped. The strut bodies were sent out for machining on April 3rd and as with any ‘one-off’ custom suspension setup – it takes time. Dave Turner Motorsports did a fantastic job with them.

The transmission arrived and I went to work. When the clutch company did get back to me I learned they didn’t have my complete order. I cancelled the partial order on the 18th and called allchryslerparts.com. I spoke to their internet sales person directly and they had the clutch kit and bearing in stock and ready to ship. A call to Dave Turner revealed that Bilstein needed to ship him some small parts and that they didn’t go out before Easter vacation.

Monday: Harry from the SoCalNeon Club gave me a hand getting the clutch and tranny swapped. I’m now on a fresh R/T transmission with a PT Cruiser clutch. The PT unit has more holding force but is basically a stock replacement. Tuesday: I swapped the front control arms with stock bushings back on the car. The stiff poly bushings keep splitting apart. There is just too much play on the Neon front control arms for stiff bushings in rally. I noticed the passenger side subframe mount had broken free from it’s factory spot welds. I drilled and bolted both sides with a fat ‘grade 8′ metric bolt. (So THAT’s what the knocking noise was from… ) Today: I’ll install the struts and get the car on the ground, ready to rally. Tomorrow: I’ll drive Ze’Neon to work and get it aligned. It will have a solid 30 miles on it before the clutch drop at the Super Special Friday night.

To add to the drama: My birthday is tomorrow and I got a root canal yesterday.

UPDATE: Around 1:00 AM I discovered that the front right tire was rubbing the strut bad. I tweaked the strut out more and adjusted the spring perch. The rally tires barely clear on that side. Just enough to drive it to an alignment shop. After a warm up lap I hit a large speed bump in town at around 50MPH. Shwoom! – A successful test.

Last night I cracked the case on the 3.94 and prayed that the magic wouldn’t fall out. After reading the forums over at Neons.org I learned the best way to install it. Replacing the stock dowel pin is no good. Replacing the stock diff pin with the ‘diff saver’ is not much better. (Pin cracks in half and shoots out both sides of the diff = grenade ) The Mopar Differential plates 05134957AA are the way to go. The pin is free to slide a bit, but is prevented from turning my MTX inside out.

As soon as the new clutch arrives I can get this installed and then tested!

I’ll admit that my in-car camera footage seems static. Yes – It’s an inside view of going really fast on a dirt road, but it’s always that same shot from the roll cage. One of the new upgrades that I have for the car is a Sony bullet cam (or lipstick camera) hooked to my trusty old DSC-TRV330 HandyCam. Now if you know me, you already know that I didn’t stop there.

The first problem with the in-car camera setup is power. The camera battery lasts maybe an hour and costs more then a set of tires. When you add a bullet cam you must power a recorder AND the camera. So, do you grab 12v from the car? Do you try to power the recorder with car as well? Then, say something dramatic happens, will you remember to start the recorder after you spin and stall the car? You won’t.

I wanted the following:
1. A large rechargeable battery that could run the recorder and the camera.
2. A recorder interface that would allow me to start and stop the tape without scrambling out of the car or reaching back in some sort of crazy yoga position. (and subsequently elbow Christine in the head. )
3. A way to keep this all self contained and not attached to the functions of the car.

I went looking for 12v NiMH batteries and came across a 4.5 AmpHour beast – designed to power kit robots. I then picked up a spare Sony charger on ebay, ripped it apart and pulled off the cord. The HandyCam requires 8.4 volts, but after some testing with a DC to DC converter I got it to happily run on 8 volts. I then powered the bullet cam with 12 volts from the robot battery. Now I have the whole kit running off ONE rechargeable battery that will last days instead of hours. I recorded several exciting hours of our fish tank to test it. Click here to see a break down of what’s in my bullet cam system.

The only thing that remained was camera control. Without it, you’re wasting tape. You can’t imagine the gigs of digital video that I transferred and had to skip through. We’d get to the time control and I just didn’t want to reach back there after my belts were tight. So, I’d start recording before we pulled into the ATC. That’s 6 minutes of boredom right there. Then after a stage I’d be pumped up and forget that we’re still rolling. It’s only after we’d pulled into service that I realized I was still burning tape and 2 hour batteries. “Dammit!”

It’s a good thing I was an AV Geek in High School. I needed LANC. LANC is a controller. LANC can be used to control two recorders in an editing suite, or it can be used to make the zoom a nice thumb button on a tripod. Sony sells a LANC controller for the HandyCam, but after some exhaustive Google work, I learned that it can’t start recording in VCR mode. This is the mode the camera is in with the bullet cam connected, and if I can’t start and stop the recorder this $100 unit is worthless to me. I did however find a LANC controller that was exactly what I needed. You see, the kids over at Hoyt Technologies have been doing extreme camera work for some time and sell a single button LANC remote. Not only does it start and stop the recorder in VCR mode, but you can hold the button for a few seconds and put it in standby. A quick press of the button gets the tape rolling again. It’s fantastic and Christine ordered it as an early b-day gift for me.

Today I tested some potential locations of the bullet camera in the car (and outside). The HandyCam can grab stills onto a memory stick, so I took some test shots. I think we’ll stick with inside the car for a few rallies, and get more brave as the season goes on. I’m stoked about the foot cam and the wide angle lens on the camera grabbing much more of the action. The 2006 rallynotes.com videos will undoubtedly rock.

Kaiser from our crew stopped by the other night to swap ECU’s. He just finished the conversion from automatic to manual on his Neon and was limping the car around with the old computer. In trade he had a brand new Mopar ECU that he didn’t want to use for a daily driver (with the cost of premium fuel these days) and we struck a fair bargain.

Both cars started right up and Kaiser and I were both interested to see what the Mopar computer did ‘out of the box.’ I frantically piled all the tires and items stored in the car off to the side of the parking lot and we took off. Rev-limiter? What rev-limiter? No speed cap either. The car makes power all the way past six grand. After the car was warmed up I wound it all the way out to 7 grand. That’s quite enough for a motor with 80,000+ miles on her.

I came up to traffic and began to slow from sub-light speed. The brakes dragged a little but didn’t bite while the pedal dropped to the floor. “Ahh… We have no brakes…” I announced calmly to Kaiser as I slipped into 3rd and engine braked the car. I safely pulled to the right and yanked the e-brake hard while looking for the anchor to toss out the window. We manged to pull off the highway and get back to the parking lot without incident.

The rear left brake line was dripping fluid when I pulled in. After a quick look, it was worse then I thought. It was coming from the hard line before the connector. The frame had rubbed away the metal and opened the line. My new set of braided replacement ends would do little to fix this, so I decided to replace all the hard lines and run them inside the car. I might as well do the fuel lines too. This afternoon I was up to Baker Precision to pick up fuel and brake line. I’m glad it happened now and not at a rally.

A couple years ago I was hanging out with some friends at casa’de trunkmonkey and we were watching all the rally footage available to Sean’s PVR. This included a “Legends of Motorsport” from the 1981 Acropolis Rally.

About 3 minutes into the show, begins this sequence of radio calls. Service crews are trying to contact each other, back and forth, etc. They layered the audio over a deep electro beat. Ambient radio chatter along with a track you might hear from Fischerspooner or Prodigy. A wicked tune matched up with 80’s rally cars. Sean, Andrew, Brian and others wondered if we could ever figure out where to get it.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the remix site to “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts“. A project recently remastered and re-released by Brian Eno and David Byrne. This album – way ahead of it’s time – was released in 1981. I’ve been a fan of Byrne’s work, so I click to hear some of the tracks. “Mea Culpa” hits me right off the bat. “I’ve heard this before”. My brain jumped into trainspotter mode. It took me about an hour, but when I came back to my desk I knew I had the song from the Acropolis Rally Video.

A quick dip into the DVD rally video collection when I got home yielded “Chariots in the Sun – The 1981 Acropolis Rally.”
The song is “Mea Culpa” off the album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” done by Brian Eno and David Byrne.
Oh… and you can download the video here – please enjoy it.

We started with Kumho tires last season, but they let me down in the summer. I was unable to get any in the country even after calling Tire Rack and Kumho directly. *cough We contacted the Tabor Rally Team and they got us setup with a fresh set of Silverstone tires, which we ran in Prescott, and have had good luck with. They seem to be stiffer then the Kumhos and be up for a little more beating. Unfortunately they were almost $40 more a tire and it stretched the budget far enough that we ran them on the front of the car with the rallycrossed Kumho tires on the rear. Yes – mismatched tires… We’re no WRC team here.

After looking at the contingency programs, and reading reviews on the Hankook Ventus R201’s – we ordered some up from Todd Swift at Frisby Performance Tire. The tread pattern is certainly unique and designed for a wide range of surfaces. We got them in the hardest compound for two reasons. 1. They last longer. 2. It’s hot and it never rains here.

Bilstein 36mm inverted strut inserts with custom digressive valving. Yummy sounding – aren’t they? Next we’ll get some strut bodies built and get them on the car.

A fresh transmission is on it’s way and a small pile of boxes are filling up one corner of the living room. Normally this would drive the woman of the house crazy. Instead, Christine only asked what tire compound we should order from Hankook and moved the parts into a neat order by the door. ♥

I’m really stoked about what we’ll be able to do this year. We’ll be bringing the performance of the Neon up to it’s highest production level and pushing ourselves to finish and do our best.

< < Are these BEEFY or what?!

The Southern California chapter of Neon America had a meet on Saturday and we stopped by Tustin Dodge to attend. I will say that it was not exactly what I was expecting. For starters, they are really organized and we went over past and future events and club items. More like a board of directors meeting then a ‘parking lot gathering’. What can I say – I’m used to 200 people showing up to a park in CT and when the cops show up asking who’s in charge, they point at me…

It’s a small family crew that was quite welcoming and made us feel right at home. After recording the minutes, we all strolled over to the cars to go grab some fast food in the area. That’s when the talk turned serious and I wanted to get some Neon owners opinions on my upgrade path.

So I’m looking for a fresh transmission from a sport model with the 3.94 final gear. I’m going to install a Phantom Grip with the diff saver brackets (mopar 05134957AA), and a fresh clutch. While I’m in there I’ll install the solid bobble strut and new shifter bushings. For the engine I’ll get an MSD coil pack for better spark and try to get my O2 in a place that the exhaust + skidplates won’t crush it. I’ve also ordered stainless steel braided brake lines finally. I need to get down to the salvage yard to grab some more rear trailing arms and other spare parts for the bin.