My GT-G40

[Weeman]

Wow i was looking at your pics this morning and it got me thinking that looks like my GTs plate...

I have a Red GT at the moment with H665 ERP as its plate! Its in no where near as good condition as yours tho but its currently having my G40 engine fitted for the summer

[Alex]

Have you got any pics mate? I'd be interested to see

I've already seen my number plate neighbour haha!



Yours will probably be the same as mine - made in January 1991 and registered later on, as a pre-reg? I reckon the manufacturing dates will be near identical.

Where was it sold originally? PM me if you want.

[Alex]

Booked in for corner weighting at AmD on the 6th July. :-)

[PeteG40]

does that mean you have a month to go back to your pre-wedding weight which is the normal Alex weight?

McD's ahoy!

[Alex]

Ha! I'm well over my wedding weight. Laxatives ahoy more like it!

[Alex]

A small change for June. But I'm pleased with these

Strange squeak, about once per second, from somewhere at the back of the engine bay though. Increases with engine speed. Could do with taking it for a drive to see if it goes away, I'm sure it's nothing serious.

July plans - corner-weighting, new cam belt because it's getting old, and then Club Polo track day first weekend of August.

[Alex]

So, yesterday I got invited to an unusual event that I wasn't expecting. Volkswagen Group UK Logistics, which deals with the movement of parts around the UK and Ireland, was celebrating ten years at its building on the Birch Coppice business park near Tamworth with an event for its employees. They needed a group of Volkswagen Group vehicles to display, standard and modded, and asked me to come along which was pretty cool.

Excuse the quality of the pics, my camera's packed in so I'm stuck with an iPhone and that's it




These were taken before most people arrived, was a really interesting day out too. The scale of the warehouse is staggering, there's enough space to park 9,600 Golfs inside and most of it is a few storeys high with parts, stacked on huge shelving units like this one:



I'll bet there are some really amazing parts hidden away in those racks. Spotted what I'm sure were a few pre-94 Polo fuel tanks in a crate as we were walking through. Incredible place!

[Alex]

So, I spent the weekend at Inters. First time I've done the whole weekend, including camping, since 2003 at Bentwaters.

I tend to bung the car in the show and shine at Inters, never really expect to pick anything up but it's free to enter and beats leaving the car in the car park. Much handier for nipping back to get stuff out of the boot too.

Gave it a quick wipe down with a wet micro fibre, topped up on bumper black, left it as is.


And... this happened. Staggered. The Show and Shine was quiet yesterday to be fair, but against what I'd say was a very high standard of cars in my class this was the last thing I was expecting. If you're reading this, and you voted for me, then BIG LOVE back. Made my day!


Camped over on the edge of the campsite. A good mix of Dubs


Got soaked earlier, and didn't get a chance to do the handling course as I wanted. But I'll be booking my place on the CP track day tonight, so I'll get to abuse my tyres there instead. Good times!

[Alex]

Busy couple of weeks ahead.

Off to AmD next Wednesday for corner-weighting - original booking got cancelled because the guy was off sick. I'll be interested to see just how squiffy the corner weights are at the moment!

Then I'm moving from Kettering to Cardiff the Tuesday/Wednesday after that, and taking the car up to Autotuning and Alarms near Pontypridd (same place that's worked on the car since about 2001) for a few odd jobs before the track day.

Namely:
- replace the ancient self-adjusting clutch cable fitted at Polo Show two years ago because mine snapped
- replace the sticky starter motor, as it's getting annoying now
- front wheel bearing is just starting to rumble. It's got hundreds of miles left, but Lincolnshire and back from Cardiff with a track day in the middle is too far to risky to leave it.
- and, to be on the safe side, I'm getting the cam belt done.

Token picture from last week. Just because:

[Alex]

Today has been an interesting day!

I took the car down to West Thurrock for corner-weighting this morning, arriving at 8.30am to give the guys at AmD Tuning plenty of time to sort out its all-to-cock weight distribution.

Polos are designed as left hand drive cars, so most of the weight is on the right hand side. Add in the driver and, well, not good. So I'd scheduled a day off work to let them tinker with it, expecting this to be a mammoth task.

Put the car on the scales and... well it's not as bad as I thought:


Total weight, with a half tank of fuel (just under) and no driver (so kerb weight) is 828.5kg. At 150bhp, that gives the car a power to weight ratio of 181bhp per tonne. To put that into perspective, it's roughly the same as the SEAT Leon Cupra R and Scirocco R. Not bad for a 1.3...

But what's more impressive is the way that weight is distributed. The following are figures with a ballast on board that weighs as much as me.

62% (front) 38% (rear) - about right for a FWD car
54% (offside) 46% (nearside) - time for me to go on a diet...

Diagonals:
Front right to rear left : 50.9%
Front left to rear right : 49.1%

I guess the fuel tank and driver are mounted far enough back that some of the weight is carried by the opposite diagonal measurement. The main seat mounting points are just in front of the shut line for the door, and the fuel tank is behind that.

Basically it's about cock on. Very surprised, and very happy too!

Shame I now have a cracked windscreen to sort, though. Stone flicked up off a car on the M11. I think it can be resin filled, but we shall see. If it can't, then I'll leave it until after Blyton to fix.

[xandyx]

get a bucket of sand for passenger side and you're ready to go!

[Alex]

Good fun, yesterday.

The car's great around a track - I'm less so. Mix of inexperience and fear.

But...

The n/s CV joint has sprayed grease all over the inside of my wheel arch, and was making a quiet knocking noise on the track. Drove it 230 miles home and it wasn't acting up unless I was pushing it through a roundabout, it's the side that gets the most frequent abuse on the road with the diff. Non-genuine fitted, hasn't lasted, so genuine VAG going on very shortly.

I developed a boost leak late in the afternoon, so I'm only getting 0.5 bar of boost at full throttle and feels fairly blunt as a result. It seems to be the charger-intercooler hose that's leaking. I tightened the jubilee clips this morning, got a few seconds of full boost and then it started hissing at full throttle again. So at least it's not the charger, it seems.

[Alex]

Quick update. Boost leak and oil leak were easy fixes, CV joint is now a genuine item. Car's happy again, so I took it up to Porsche at Silverstone for their YouDrive@Porsche day.


Did a session of high and low grip surfaces in the new 911 in the morning, then took mine out on the skid pan and ice hill in the afternoon. It's moving in the pic, so the iPhone has distorted the car:


That's the skid pan, you drive over a kick plate at increasing speeds, and it has a hydraulic ram which kicks the back end into a skid which you have to control. Turns out mine's piss easy to bring back into line on that, and I got up the ice hill every time, even when I was giving the handbrake a yank to make it more challenging. But when you're the only front wheel drive car in a line of five Porsches and a Pontiac Firebird, it really ought to be that way.

Interesting to get a feel for how the car behaves though!

Loving this car at the moment, it just feels really well sorted. Obviously not the quickest G40 in the world but still HUGE fun to drive and it'll hang onto the tarmac longer than my nerves will let me. So plenty more track days to come.

MOT next, and a clean, I think. Amusing to see it gets dirtier with each pic since the Polo Show.

[Jester]

Interesting read, looks really mean in that first picture outside the Porsche building

[Alex]

No new mods, just new pics. I bought a DSLR last weekend, and spent a while cleaning it earlier, so thought I'd get used to the camera settings by taking photos of a subject I'm familiar with shooting.















And I've left this one a bit larger. Went to the Heritage Motor Centre earlier to meet up with a group of motoring journalists and PRs. The one rule was you weren't allowed to turn up in a press car. Made for an interesting car park!