It is the intention to build a budget car for both Stage Rallying and Road Rallying. It will be running in the 1600cc class purely because the 2000cc class is so vast with some seriously powerful cars in it!! This is not intended to 'tell' you how to build a car, it is merely our interpretation how 'we' want the car to be built, safety first. You don't have to agree with everything, but, if you have something that could help others building a car, please e-mail us.

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So where to start....... well you need something to build on. Because the budget is the main concern we found this 1986 1.6 GTI for £350-00, it was an ex-boyracers car with a loud exhaust and spax suspension (Eyuk!) but it basically looked ok and had quite a perky little engine.
First job, strip the thing to a shell (as you can see), be selective what you junk as for a Road Rally Car you will need some of the interior.

Next job the dash and wiring loom to come out.
Most of the loom will be scrap because you wont be using it, best thing to do is take it out, strip out what you dont need and use whats left. We will be making a new loom complete because its easier.
We will be junking the heater box as well and replacing with two electric blow heaters from a caravan. They're smaller and less to go wrong!!

Next job is to start and get the old shell into good nick before any cage can be fitted. Thanks to some bad sill repair work carried out some years before it meant the old rotten sills had been left inside the new ones hibernating the rot which had spread pretty bad. Both chassis sections at the base of each door pillar had to be repaired, still the good news is we strenghtened it at the same time. The sills were repaired correctly and is now better than new!

Its just a process of elimination working around the different points of the shell cleaning, repairing, strengthening
Once repaired the seam welding can begin, BUT, before that ALL the seam sealer that is applied to each seam has to be removed! this is the biggest ball ache ever. If you can employ some numpty to do it for you its got to be worth £100 quid. As it is we havent got 100 quid so had to do it ourselves.

There are a number of ways the sealer can be removed, scraper, heat and scraper, wire brush or acid dipping. The later is the best solution for new shells as it also removes the galvanising, but, if we dipped this shell there would be bugger all left! so its wire brush and scraper.
Once the sealer is off (see you in about 3 weeks!) you can start with som e modifications.

Nearly forgot, before you attempt any welding mount the car on flat ground and try to keep the car as level as possible in the stands (unless you have a jig) The order in which you modify doesnt really matter at this stage. We started with the easy and most visible bits to keep our incentive flowing. 44mm diameter 18 gauge CDS tubing is used for the cage. The main cage must be made from material as per specifications in the blue book, wether it be CDS or T45. We have a budget so are using CDS (Cold Drawn Seamless), as for the rest of the cage i.e. door bars, crosses, front leg braced etc you can use pretty much what you want to, pipecleaners if you want although they wont stop an impact. We will use majority of 44mm and 38mm CDS for the front strut links and brace. The cage hoop, front legs and the windscreen bar need to be bent, its bloody hard to bend this stuff so we took the easy option and bought these 4 pieces from Safety Devices.