dar's feature of the month Sept 2007

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DAR'S
Nova_story

The reason for building this car was purely to beat my dad around a
race track. Apparently I didn't know anything about building cars and
taking them around the track until I actually did it. He has an ex
group N rally car. It’s an RS Turbo with an enormous amount of work
put in to it.

So I had to find a car that was cheap to run, small and fast. I had a
C20XE engine in the garage. I know these engines are great. So that
was the engine sorted. I am not a mechanic so any transplant had to
be a simple one. I found that the smallest car that was easy to put
this engine in was a Nova. So with my mind made up I went looking for
a car. It took a few months of just putting the word out and looking
at a few to find a nice looking Nova that had been garaged for years
with a blown engine. So I handed over £150 and took the car away.

I then started to buy lots of bits for the car to make it track
worthy and also to help put the engine in.

However I wasn't about to build the car on my drive. So a garage had
to be built. In short that was done and the car was wheeled in. The
engine, suspension, gearbox exhaust manifold and various other bits
where taken from the living room and put in the garage. Thankfully
work was quite and since I work from home and self employed I cracked
on with the car (Mid 2003). I had the garage built on to my office,
woohoo!!

I decided that since I didn't have the standard injection system that
I would bite the bullet and get some throttle bodies. I found out
that I had a life policy that was worth about 2k. So I cashed that in
and bought the TP208 kit from SBD.

Three months later it was taken to Longlife exhausts and had a new
system fitted. I wanted a centre exit exhaust so I had taken the
spare wheel well out. Once that was done. I insured the thing and put
it on the road. After lots of tweaking and bug fixing it went for its
first trackday at Keevil airfield (Nov 2003). I got banned from the
day because apparently the car was too noisy(never had a problem
anywhere else). But it did go very well! With that I never booked
another trackday with motorsport events because they where way too
sensitive about noise. On the static noise test it was just 94db.

Anyway Castle Combe was just down the road and it was almost time for
my first trackday and my first time on track with my dads car(2004).
The Nova was fast but not fast enough!

So after a few trackdays I decided more development work needed to be
done. So a quaife ATB diff was bought (Mid 2004) and that improved my
lap times by four seconds!! Now I was on a par with the RS Turbo.

At the end of the year more development work was needed(2004/2005).
So I decided that the suspension needed more work and that the car
needed to be lighter. So I bought a fiberglass boot and tailgate as
well as some AVO coilovers and polycarbonate windows.

Now the car was a lot better through the bends as well as being that
bit quicker everywhere else. The lap times dropped again. Another
year of having fun on track passed and it was winter again. So time
to develop the car further(2005/2006). I wanted better tires but a
195/45R16 is not a common tire. So I changed to 15" wheels and put on
some Toyo R888's. Tagged the cage in to the A&B Pillars, Took all the
unnecessary brackets out, lightened the wiring loom, took out the
heater matrix and blower, took out the dash and put in a front heated
windscreen.

On the first outing after all this work (2006) I killed the gearbox. Bugger!

Still the car went well up until the box broke. I fixed that and ran
the car for a few months, then decided that the rear bumper was a
parachute and not letting the air escape from underneath the car well
enough. I decided to fit a rear diffuser.

This didn't improve the performance of the car, but made it a lot
more stable so it stayed on. I also picked up some bigger brakes, not
because I really needed them, but they came along for the right
money. By this time my car was way faster than my dads car and I
wanted another challenge. So I decided to sprint it. What fantastic
fun that is. It showed just how fast my car was or wasn't. I came 8th
in class on my first sprint. I was happy with that.

The rest of the year was great. The car was handling just how I
wanted it although the car had a tendency to just spit me off of the
track on long runs. This was most evident at Donnington Park. So more
work was needed on the suspension front. I was also getting fuel
starvation out of some bends. I was curing this by putting more fuel
in the tank at the start of each run. It got to the point where I was
getting fuel starvation even with a fair amount of fuel in the tank.

So at the end of 2006 the car came in for its winter modifications. I
decided that it needed a bit of an overhaul and a tidy up. I also
decided that instead of making the engine more powerful I would get a
Quaife gearbox instead. So the engine came out and the old F20 box
was sent off to Quaife for a nice new Straight Cut Close Ratio gear
cluster. Whilst the engine was out I made it a bit prettier by
spraying a few bits and bobs. I also treated it to a new cambelt and
followers.

After my trip in to the gravel trap I decided that I didn’t want the
brake or fuel lines outside the car so I brought those inside as
well. I ordered a swirl pot and then got hold of SBD for a proper
injection pump, fuel filter and fuel pressure regulator. I already
had a fuel pressure regulator but this new one was what SBD use for
all their upper end engines. It also fitted on the end of the fuel
rail, which really neatens up the plumbing.

Whilst I was at it I decided that I would replace all the bushes and
rose joints on the car. I also bought a new exhaust manifold and
wanted a bigger bore exhaust system since the standard one I was
running could have been restricting the engine. Even if it wasn’t, I
was going to have a better engine at some point so I thought I might
as well beef up the components now rather than later. With this in
mind I also replaced the drive shafts and CVs with the bigger 2l
items. Anyway back to the exhaust. If I wanted a bigger exhaust
system I would have to change the gear stick from the gear stick to
the gear linkage. This was because on a Nova it hangs under the car
in the exhaust tunnel. There isn’t much room down there as it is! So
off came the old gear linkage and the gear stick from a Vauxhall
Cavalier was put in its place. The Cavalier gear stick mounts inside
the car thus freeing up lots of space in the exhaust tunnel. Whilst
it was out I also looked at the standard gear linkage. Mine had lots
of play in it. So after some thought and some experimentation I came
up with a fully rose jointed linage with no play in it what so ever…
Bargin!

Back to the exhaust again! So with a nice free exhaust tunnel and
everything back on/in the car it was time to decide what to have. Now
I like a nice sounding car but I’m not a fan of really loud cars.
Plus I didn’t want to fall foul of noise limits at circuits. Whilst
this isn’t much of a problem when sprinting, it can be at trackdays.
I also wanted a 2½” exhaust system, which is quite big for a little
Nova. I decided that I would have three silencers put on it if there
was room under the car. The silencers that the bespoke system makers
use are all free flowing so there was no problem there. I took the
car to Infinity Exhausts that had just move to my home town (Kind of
a no brainer really). Told the guys what I wanted and let them get on
with it.

The system they built for my car was exactly what I asked for and was
as far as I was concerned perfect for the job. It also sounded quite!
A three box system under a Nova is mostly silencers!

My first time out after all this work was great! Although the car
went back to under steering a bit. So after the first trackday I
invested in some harder rear springs and was going to test them out
at Llandow. I had also bought some new tires to test as well. When I
arrived at Llandow it was raining, I hate driving in the rain! But it
was a chance to try out my new wets. Now I know Llandow is a grippy
circuit but these new wets (Eagle F1’s) were awesome! Almost like
driving in the dry! Then for the afternoon the sun came out. On went
the proper tyres and I went out to test them. I usually run on R888’s
but bought some medium compound Hankook Ventus rally tires and
although the R888’s are awesome compared to normal road tires. These
things were a step up again! It took a while to get used to the
amount of grip they gave me. That coupled with the new gearbox and
suspension made the car feel so planted and fast it was unreal! A
fantastic day of testing.

That’s pretty much how the car has been since. My plans now are to
build an engine for the car that it can now handle. Hopefully I will
be able to scrape enough money over this winter to do that. But if
not it doesn’t matter since the car is great fun to drive anyway. I
also need to get it log booked so that I don’t need an MOT for
sprints.