MOT & Insurance Time Again

I haven't been getting up to much motorsporting of late so things have been a bit quiet round here. After 6 months of looking Rachel and I have finally been able to find a house that we like and has space for our lives. Unfortunately it needs a fair amount of renovation so it has been sucking up all my time for the last few months and it will continue to do so for at least a few months more.

But no matter how much other work I have on I still like the keep the Nova road legal. So first job up was to renew the road insurance. My policy was with REIS and, although I've never had to put a claim in against it, they have always been easy to deal with so I saw no reason to change. The renewal quote was £302 but as I plan on doing a good few events during the year I got them to add on on event road section cover which bumped it up to £365. I have previously been buying insurance at each event, which is £18.50 a time, so if I compete in 4 events this year I will have made an overall saving on last year, and every event after that is a bonus.

So with the easy job done the next one is to get a new MOT. I know the Nova is generally solid so the MOT doesn't hold much fear foe me, and if there is play in the suspension parts I would rather change them anyway rather than have something fail during an event. I am lucky enough that Mark next door is a Vauxhall mechanic, he took a look over her and said all was well except my front tyres are done and the sump gasket is weeping, easy peasey.

I picked up a sump gasket, 5L of 5W40, and an oil filter in Fyfes and delivered them to Mark to fit. I could do the work myself but as I said the house is taking up all my time and Mark isn't too hard to pay. Unfortunatly the 1600 Nova engine needs two sump gaskets, one above and one below the baffle plate, so only half the job was done the first night. I rang Fyfes the next day to get another gasket and the first thing the fella on the phone asks is did I know that engine requires two gaskets! Why hadn't I been talking to him the day before and I could have got the work done in one go rather than having to push the car between garages with no sump attached and dripping oil everywhere!

So with that sorted I just had some new tyres to buy. I had been running a pair of Vredestein Quatrac 3's and I had been pleased with them but I had done a few autotests with them and pretty much destroyed them. I only managed to get 974 miles out of them which is pretty shocking but I suppose that is to be expected when I turned so much of the tread depth into smoke. I had heard good things about the Yokohama A021-R's and all the southern autotesters are using them but when I priced them they were €130 each which is just too much to spend on tyres when I have new house stuff to buy. As I don't seem to get much mileage out of my tyres anyway I just took the easiest option and bought the cheapest Kumho's that Modern Tyres had, which turned out to be ecowing KH19's. An eco tyre on a rally car is a strange thing but sure we will see how it goes, no more autotesting though.

Insurance: £365
Gaskets: £7.96 each, £15.92 total
Oil filter: £3.40
5W40: £25.60
Labour: £65
Kumho ecowing KH19: £45 each, £90 total
MOT fee: £30.50
REIS Motorsport Insurance Specialists
Fyfes Motor Factor
Modern Tyres
Kumho Tyre ecowing KH19

MOT Pass

Brilliant news, the rally Nova passed it's MOT yesterday. All I need now is some road tax and I'm fully legal again. It feels like the car has been off the road for ages so it was great to take it for a drive. I love driving it, it's raw and noisy but I get a kick out of every mile I do in it. There is still plenty of work to be done to tidy the car up but at least I can use it again now. I have bought all the equipment that is needed to build the car up to MSA spec so I can get it log booked, then I can use it in any event I want.

I would never have got it finished without all the work that Niall has done on it. He is really enthusiastic about the rally car and he mechanics at 10 times the speed I do.

Updating the Tax Book

I sent the Nova rally cars tax book to the DVLNI yesterday so that the engine change can be record and everything can be kept above board and legal. The engine came out of a red Nova I bought years back so I sent a copy of its tax book too to show where I had gotten the engine. That's not one of the methods that the DVLNI list as proof of an engine swap but hopefully it will be good enough, however as they are a large government organisation I don't expect it to be that easy, no doubt it will turn into a whole saga. I hope it doesn't cause too much of a hold up though as I can't get the rally car MOT'ed until the tax book comes back.