Stage Rally Project Car

[ChaosXIII]

Hey guys,
Decided to start up a build thread to actually start to document some of this car. I want to get some feedback for the build as I make some major changes, but for now I need to do some race prep stuff and I figured I would document that.
Also I figured I would include some pictures of the roll cage process as well as the suspension fabrication as when I went to design the rear suspension I could not find any pictures of what I wanted to do.

The car started out as a car to putt around in and race some rally cross (auto cross in dirt). I didn't know much about working on cars so I figured the best way would be to jump in head first and attempt to build a race car. As things progressed I decided I wanted to make the plunge from rally cross to stage rally and with that a lot of pretty extensive modifications to the car needed to happen. I started studying up on the nasa rally sport rule book, as I wanted to race in the California Rally Series, and started the long journey of building this car. The first big step was the roll cage. I found a fabricator who does some really awesome work, Jimmy Godde at Godde Fabrication in SoCal. I had have the cage installed in stages as I did not have the funding to do an all up build immediately.

The first step of the cage install was to strip out the interior and do the wonderfully fun (NOT) task of removing the sound deadening out of the car. To get this done usually you have to choose between heating or chilling the sound deadening, and in this case as I live in SoCal it was naturally 102 degrees outside so I figured why not just add a bit more heat to get the sound deadening out. This actually turned out working really well.

After this we loaded the car up onto a trailer to head up to Godde Fabrication to get working on the cage. With a cage built to stage rally rules every joint has to be welded all the way around, so that means there are three options to welding the top of the cage:
(Option 1) Drill holes into the body of the car where the cage feet can pass through when the top needs to be welded, temporarily tacking a plate over the hole, building most of the cage and tacking it into place, cutting the temporary feet out, dropping the cage through the floor, welding the top of the cage, jacking the cage back up into the car, sliding the plates under the feet and welding them into place.

(Option 2) Building cube lift blocks with the correct thickness plate for the cage feet, tacking the cube into place and then building the cage on the lift blocks, cutting the lift blocks out the way and dropping the cage down, welding the tops of the cage, reinserting the lift blocks and weld everything into place.

(Option 3) Build the cage into the car and then when the time comes cut the top off the car to weld the top of the cage, and then re welding on the top of the car when the cage is finished.

For my build I chose to do Option 1. The process began with cutting the holes into the car where the cage needed to dropped through the body of the car.

After this the cage was bent up and the parts started getting tacked in.

After this I had reached what I could afford for the cage so we had to call it there and start putting parts back in to continue rally crossing. After I got the car back I painted the interior white, and this ended up taking way too long and causing a huge mess. However, I got it worked out after way too long. I bought a used and previously crashed Bimarco Grip seat to use temporarily. After I got that seat I realized that I could not use the Planted seat brackets I had bought for the car as with the side mounts and the planted bracket I couldnt even sit down in the seat it was so tall. I had to bring the car back to Godde Fabrication to fabricate a bracket that sits lower than the Planted one. I thought this would work, but even after being dropped as far as I could and still use the stock mounting points I couldnt get the seat low enough and with my helmet on the top of my helmet touched the require impact foam on the top of the cage. I decided that at this point this was good enough until we could figure out a better option.

Ill post up more later on in the week when I can gather up the pictures. Looking forward to showing more of the awesome stuff about this car!

 

[hotfocus]

Awesome build.

 

[Tom]

Subbed

 

[71shadow]

Very cool! I'm wanting to do a cage in my autocross focus as well and about 7 other go fast mods haha. Loving your build so far!

 

[VonKrause]

This is legit stuff man

 

[ChaosXIII]

Okay guys, sorry for taking so long to post another update. So with the car with a partial cage I started to shake the build down with some rally crosses. After the first race I soon noticed that the car needed some underbody protection the car went back out to Jimmy at Godde Fabrication to build up a skid plate for the car. The Focus doesn't really have any way to build up a decent skid plate so some extensive fabrication had to be done to build a frame to support an aluminum plate to protect the sensitive bits on the bottom of the car. We created a subframe that is removable from the car to allow for service to be completed in the pits. The plate is 3/16th thick 5051 Aluminum (hint for people building a rally car, this is definitely not thick enough and too soft an alloy and I ended up having some issues with this skid plate!)

After this the car was fit to race at competitive speeds in rally cross so I took it out to give it a go. Well, I got a bit over zealous and decided it was a good idea to clutch kick at full steering lock and ended up breaking my passenger axle in half at the outer CV joint. I ended up having to see just how easy it is to pull off the underbody protection in the pits (its not) and replace the axle so I could get home (I thought it was a good idea to drive the car to the race, lol).

After that minor set back I found some speed and started to get a feel for how the car handled with the new chassis rigidity.
[video=youtube;iR4phYVGKPo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR4phYVGKPo[/video]

After racing in rally cross for a while more, I decided to solidify my plans for what I want to do and what I want my first stage rally to be, I decided on Gorman Ridge Rally 2016. The first thing I needed to do was to finish the roll cage in the car, and to get it inspected by a scrutineer and get a log book certifying that the roll cage was up to spec. The car then made another trip out to Godde Fabrication to finish up the roll cage by adding in door bars, a pillar reinforcements, seat mounts, and a pillar gussets.

To finish up the door bars you need an X across the door and there are a few options but the standard options require that one of the bars gets cut to cross through a continuous bar. I didn't like that option as sliding into a tree is a real possibility and I'm not a fan of being crushed by trees. So we decided to do 2 continuous bars bent into shallow U's that meet to create an X. The bars are then welded together and a gusset welded across them. Then a bar crosses the X that attaches up near the windshield bar then down to the cage foot.

To fix the issue of my head hitting the roll cage from being too damn tall, we cut out the stock seat mounting points and dropped bars down from the main hoop to bolt the seat to the roll cage. We welded some big beefy D tabs on the cage to act as harness pick ups while we were there.

We then had to weld in the A pillar reinforcments and the A pillar gussets. We also had to weld in taco shaped gussets on the top and bottom of the X in the main hoop.

At this point the cage was complete and it was off to get inspected. After a long ordeal of hunting down a scrutineer I got my log book!

At this point we reached a major mile stone on the project, but there was still a lot more to do. Gorman Ridge Rally consists of the last half of the event being ran at night, on the edge of a cliff. So I needed to build a light bar and mount up 2 spot lights, and 2 wide driving lights. So the cage made yet another trip out to Godde Fabrication (This is starting to be a pretty sketchy drive in this car lol, not too terribly safe on the road anymore considering the complete lack of visibility!)

After this I needed to tackle the major issue of the suspension being no where near strong enough to compete in Gorman, a notoriously rough rally that is more like a war of attrition that a race. We started researching what the best options were but we kept running into issues with off the shelf set ups as most of you know, the rear of the focus consists of a shock and spring separated. And the spring is not a standard size and we were having issues finding a decent spring rate as a major issue of the off the shelf solutions is too stiff in the rear which causes instability on jump landings. So we decided lets go big or go home, so we set out to figure out what is needed to convert the rear of the focus to accept a coilover built by Doug Naggy at Streetwise Motorsports (based on Bilstein motorsport universal shocks). We laid of a plan of cutting out a notch in the rear shock towers to allow clearance, and some shaving needed to be done on the old spring lower perch. We also wanted to change how the suspension mounts on the lower pick up point on the knuckle as we weren't digging the single sheer mount and we wanted to switch it over to double sheer, so we rotated the pick up by 90 degrees to allow for a standard heim lower joint. The top was also set up to accept a heim joint as the upper mount. (Caution! Weld porn incoming!!)

The front was a bit more standard, but it still required some work as we wanted to go with an inverted strut set up without breaking the bank so we modified a Bilstein HD to accept a threaded lower collar and made a beefy enough setup for my budget. We also had to modify the top of a Bilstein coilover top to fit inside of the stock Focus strut top.

So with this the major stuff was done. I had to install an intercom to talk to my Co driver and install a reading light for the Co Driver to read his notes during the night stages, but this wasn't too terribily interesting so I didn't take any pictures of that. I painted the whole interior white before the race to prevent rust, but I'm not sure why i chose white lol. The car is never clean now lol.

I completed the race with out any major issues, apart from over heating throughout the day. But, that is to be expected for a new build so I'm not too broken up about it. We found that the expansion tank had a crack in it and the cooling system was not pressurized so the boiling point was much lower than a pressurized system. We didn't know that at the time and we thought it was a ventilation issue so we tried to cut a ghetto vent in the hood but we ended up just ditching the whole hood in a last ditch effort to finish. This didn't really help though lol. What really helped was re routing the wiper sprayers to spray on the radiator.

The ride home was pretty triumphant knowing how far this project and I have come. And thankfully my Girlfriend put up with the many many many hours I put into the project and her putting up with me wanting to race quickly at night along a cliff face.

So now we are up to date on the build and now I am going to post up on some new projects on the car. Mainly cleaning up the hideous hole cut in my wonderful crew (lol) and mounting a WRC style vent in the hood. I'm looking forward to running a more active build thread for this car!

 

[FocusMike]

Great fab work.

 

[ChaosXIII]

Yeah, Jimmy at Godde Fabrication sure did do an amazing job on this car!

 

[hotfocus]

Are you doing this professionally or just a hobby? Either way this is a solid rally build.

 

[ChaosXIII]

Are you doing this professionally or just a hobby? Either way this is a solid rally build.

Thanks! No, this is just a hobby.

 

[UnfocusedST]

Looking good. I want to build a rally car someday.

Sent from another garage.

 

[Alex Arce]

So much awesomeness in this thread. There are a few rally guys on this level here in town. I want to see if I can get them on this forum to post up their builds too!

 

[ChaosXIII]

So much awesomeness in this thread. There are a few rally guys on this level here in town. I want to see if I can get them on this forum to post up their builds too!

Hmm I think I know a lot of the Austin rally guys. A lot of them are on my team, Pick It Up Motorsports. We have another Focus over there, a white 2012 Sedan. The guy that owns it, David, works at the Rally Ready rally school. Theres starting to be a pretty cool rally scene in Texas, which is awesome. I'll be heading out there next year to race in a rally sprint they are going to put on.

 

[Alex Arce]

yeah David Moss, cool. dude. Met him at the Texas Focus Round up we hosted back in May. I know that guy with yellow svt invited you to the last one in San Antonio in October.

 

[Tom-E]

This is just an awesome build. Can't wait to see more!