PEUGEOT 106 RALLYE

The Peugeot was sourced from a horse riding stables just outside of Gatwick Airport. It had been sat in a barn since it's last outing on the Rallye Sunseeker in 2004. We decided to buy the car and in no-time at all it was back in our garage having its stickers removed and the bodywork tidied up.

After some small maintaince it was used on 3 single venues and 1 multi venue event in its group N spec. This in turn netted Liam "1st in Class One Driver" and helped Pete acheive "2nd Overall Co-Driver" in the Dukeries Motor Club Championship of 2008.

The car was of a basic spec with it having only a roll cage and all the guarding to make it different to the road going version of the 106. It was decided to work on the car a little to improve its spec so a group N Pug Sport exhaust and K&N induction kit were added to improve airflow in and out of the engine.
After the 2008 season Pete and Liam decided to convert the car to Rally First specification.

In the 2009 season the 106 competed on some of the best rally stages in the country as part of the BTRDA championship, it only let us down on two occassions, both times on the last stage after completing a hard days rallying, once at the Somerset Stages with a broken steering rack and once on the Plains Rally in Wales with a broken drive shaft. After completing the Dukeries Rally, the car was sold to a dealer in mid 2009 (it was a shame to let it go, as we had some good times rallying in this car), when we purchased the Vauxhall Nova as the next step up the learning ladder for Liam, the story of the Nova is below.

VAUXHALL NOVA

Purchased in June 2009 (after the Dukeries Rally), the car had not been rallied for several years and although useable, was in a pretty poor condition.
We decided on a partial strip down of the car to replace some of the older items and generally check over the new car.

However, as we stripped down the car we found a few cracks and holes we didn't expect, so a full strip down, full seam welding, extensive strengthening and repair work was commenced on the car. The car was stripped back to a rolling shell in the PAL garage, then transported to the Alpha Concrete workshops in Lincoln, where the shell improvement work was commenced and completed to a very high standard.

As the shell strengthening work was ongoing, Liam decided to purchase an uprated 16 valve engine to replace the original 8 valve engine purchased with the car.
A Vauxhall (X16XE) rally prepared 1600cc 16 valve engine was purchased and transported from Wales. It was then decided that to get the most from this engine we needed to replace to twin 40 carbs and as throttle bodies were a little beyond the budget at the time, we bought a pair of twin 45 DCOE carbs to fuel the new engine.

After the extensive shell work, strengthening and respraying, (this took over 6 months to complete) the car rebuild was started. Some of the original items could be
re-used, but all the engine items and many of the associated ancilliary items had to be purchased new before fitting. After a lot of hours over what seemed like a very long time the Nova was ready to go for it's first event.

After the rolling road set up the print out showed 130 BHP at the wheels (thats around 160 bhp at the flywheel), a quick test drive revealed a very nippy Nova, despite how long it took to build it was all worth it in the end.

Due to damaging the 1600 engine on our first rally, we have now fitted a previous class winning 1400 8v engine with its associated ancilliaries, so its back to class one where we first started our rallying adventures.