Project Sipster
Part 4: California or Bust
by Dave Coleman
Part 4 of Project Sipster marked the first time I ever actually saw the car, and what a sight it was. In the picture above, notice a few things about the front of the car. See how the ends of the front bumper are beveled, so the top of the bumper is slightly shorter than the bottom? That's how you know the bumper is on upside-down. Notice how the driver's side headlight looks lower than the passenger's side? That's no illusion. The car is seriously bent. Look at the radically different angles of the front lower control arms, just visible under the car's powder blue chin. Yikes!
Project Sipster made a bizzare and inexplicable stop at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca for a very simple reason. The weekend Jared finally hit California was the same weekend I was at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca enjoying one of the fruits of employment with one of the most fun-loving car companies on the planet: The annual Mazda employee track day. This fact, you'll notice, was conveniently glossed over in the original story.
Desperate to know how far we were from our 7-second objective, we sweet talked the corner workers into letting us onto the track during the lunch break to do 0-60 tests on the front straight, and then to drive up and down the corkscrew for video footage. That's right, UP the corkscrew!
Strangely, I can't find a single picture of that weekend, and even the video we shot seems to be MIA at the moment. I'll post it if I can find it, but meanwhile, here's the story:
Sipster Day 10
Not quite to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan
"You ain't crazy, are you?"
Can't really fault the guy for asking. Project Sipster is full to its bare metal roof with luggage, disorganized boxes of Rabbit parts and a full Cabriolet body kit; fender flares, side skirts, front bumper and all. To the untrained eye, it looks like a homeless camp. Our Editor isn't helping with the image problem. In the 30 minutes he's been stranded, hoping somebody, anybody will drive past this desolate stretch of Canadian nothingness, Jared has put on two pairs of pants, three sweatshirts and a sleeping bag. He hasn't slept for days and his hair… actually, his hair always looks like that.
After a short explanation, something along the lines of "I'm cold and I'm gonna die soon if you don't help me find some Diesel," Jared's savior swings open the passenger's door of his F150 and then pauses.
"You ain't broke, are you?"
40 minutes later, Jared is very happy to have passed this little entry exam. If you're going to run out of Diesel, Frank is the kind of guy you want to come along. A local farmer with 40 head of Angus, not only is he willing to backtrack 5 miles to the nearest gas station, but his gas-powered truck actually has an on-board storage tank for Diesel fuel--for the tractors, don'cha know.
Even after filling the tractor tank and then pumping it into the Sipster, no amount of cranking will make it start. A Diesel engine's fuel pump is belt driven, you see, and the engine has to be spinning a lot faster than the starter can manage before it can purge all that air it sucked when it ran dry.
Luckily, farmers also carry rope. After half a mile dragging the Sipster along in first gear, the fuel pump finally primes and the sweet symphony of Diesel clatter rattles out across the tundra once more.
So how exactly does one run out of fuel just 40 kilometers after an epic, week-long engine swap and rusty floorpan replacement operation? It's called a learning process. Our TDI-powered Rabbit is a quirky little bastard. Keeping the modern ECU happy in an oldster body meant bringing along some of its friends for it to talk to, like the instrument cluster from the same 2003 Jetta that donated the engine. The ECU and cluster can talk all day about speed, RPM, coolant temp and all the warning light stuff and never know they're in a Rabbit. The fuel gauge, though, is another story. The signal for the fuel gauge has to come from the Rabbit tank.
In a 1981 Rabbit, more volts coming from the fuel level sensor means there's more fuel in the tank. In a 2003 Jetta, more volts means less fuel. Or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, the gas gauge now works backwards. If it's on E and the low fuel light is on, it means the tank is full. No big deal, Jared knew this and left Regina with just under half a tank showing on the gauge. Halfway between Regina and Moose Jaw he learned another quirk of our new gauge: Half full means empty…
Sipster Day 11
US/Canada Border
Attempting to drive a baby-blue homeless camp though the border is probably enough by itself to get you the coveted customs strip search. Doing so with a New York driver's license, driving a car with a temporary registration from New Jersey on your way to get a permanent registration in California after getting an engine swap in Saskatchewan is really just extra credit.
The good cop/bad cop routine starts right away. While Jared removes his layers and the Sipster endures unseen humiliation behind closed doors, one agent seems genuinely curious about the car. The other just wants to know where he stashed the knives.
There are no knives, just extra bumper struts leaking oil all over the place, a 300-piece socket set Jared found on sale, and a 10,000 RPM snowmobile tachometer from the '70s hidden amongst the dirty laundry and surplus bodywork. Before long, it's good cop/other good cop, everyone's reading about the Sipster on TopGear.com and the first good cop is telling Jared about his own TDI and how he's in the 700-mile club (Diesel nerds like to brag about how many miles they can get on a tank).
The crew in the Customs chop shop did a number on the Sipster, though. The interior is tossed, junk is everywhere, and, no, wait... that's what it looked like before…
Sipster Day 14
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, Salinas, California
Aside from the gas gauge thing, the Sipster just blazed a flawless trail across 1,800 miles of North America just days after its engine swap was complete. Cruising at 85 mph most of the way isn't fuel efficient, but it's very time efficient. So far, it's clear the 70 mpg thing isn't going to happen on its own. Fill ups have been revealing 45 to 48 mpg. Not too shabby, but hardly the unfathomable mileage we're looking for.
"Yea, but it's really fast," Jared insists, clearly having had his perception of speed permanently warped after spending a week with the Sipster's original drivetrain. This is the first time I've seen the Sipster in person. More importantly, its the first time I've smelled it. Walking around the car at idle, the engine clatters like a Peterbilt. From the front, it's much louder than you'd expect if you've ever heard the barely-audible purr this same engine makes in its rightful home. From the rear you can actually hear the faint hollow whir of the turbo spinning away at the other end of the exhaust pipe. It's a tantalizingly subversive sound that gives you the feeling we're getting away with something, but it's a sound you can't enjoy for long. Stand behind the Sipster for more than a few seconds and your eyes start watering from the stink. We may not be making much CO2, but we're making a lot of something. We'll have to put that on the list of things to deal with now that it's warm out.
To really get a sense of how big Jared's relatively uneventful road trip was, take a look at his route relative to, well, everything else. In those same four days, Jared could have crossed Australia. He could have driven from Mongolia to Thailand across all of China. He could have traversed all of western Europe. That he could do this in a vehicle assembled from a few thousand dollars worth of junk says something impressive about the state of human evolution and the technical maturity of our garbage. That he could do it solo (you'll notice no mention of intern Chris Gifford in this story, as he had turned tail for New York the instant the blue beast clattered back to life) in what was still a drafty, rattly torture chamber while still doing nightly site maintenance on TopGear.com says something about Jared's iron will and steadfast sense of desperation.
While the east-coast crew has been frosting their digits over the last couple of weeks, I've been basking in the Southern California sunshine waiting for them arrive. Eager to shave a day off my wait, we've met not quite halfway, here in the Northern California motorsports paradise that is Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Why? Because we can.
The Sipster's throttle response is downright zippy, far from the dull-but-dependable feel you expect of a Diesel. Ease up on the clutch at 1100 rpm and bury the go pedal and the front tires light up without hesitation -- both of them, thanks to the Peloquin diff. Grab second and there's a little chirp and then… not much. Certainly not the nose-lifting, hold-onto-your-Doritos surge of thrust Jared claims to have relished after every rest stop. Grab third and there's just a pathetic string of surging and bogging.
The fuel filter's full of rust again. $12 later, Jared's story is a little more believable. Lining up on the front straight, the stopwatch reveals another little secret about Diesels. They aren't as fast as they feel. The instant torque and frequent upshifts give you the sensation of acceleration, but the very fact that you're upshifting at 4500 rpm warps your sense of speed. 60 mph is actually deep into third gear, meaning time is wasted doing two upshifts.
 |  |
The Stig can pull off an upshift in a quarter of a second, so I put on a white helmet and head back out for another attempt. Halfway through first gear the door to the glovebox falls open and its contents hurl themselves into the passenger's seat. I do a Stiglike upshift, mash the gas, and… nothing. It's in a gear, but it sure doesn't feel like second. Back on the clutch, the shifter feels like it's in a bowl of oatmeal. Off the clutch.. what is this, fourth?
So anyway, before the Stigfist broke the shifter cable, the Sipster squirted to 60 in 8.9 seconds. A few days later, after driving South at a more fuel-friendly 70 mph, Jared reports a new one-tank record of 52 mpg. The 1.9 seconds we have to shave off the 60 sprint and the massive 18 mpg gap to our fuel economy goal look mountainous from where we sit. We've got ideas for how to make up the gap, but honestly, we were hoping the gap would be smaller.
There's nothing like a barely-attainable target to make you overlook the obvious. We just out-sipped a Prius on the freeway and annihilated it to 60 mph with a bunch of discarded old Volkswagen parts and a week's worth of other people's labor. Ahhh, that feels better…
Aaand the story ends there... If you remember Part 3's cliffhanger ending, where I promised to reveal all that went wrong during the actual engine swapping process, this story is quite a let down. With such a compressed schedule, and Jared ragged from his weeks on the road, I still hadn't really figured out what happened during the swap. On top of that, TopGear management was eager to stay light on the technical details, lest we scare off the lightweights. The success of TopGear, after all, comes from their ability to appeal to those without toolboxes, so their fear may have been justified. Rest assured, I do get to the details eventually, but we save them for the end.
The original post:
No comments:
Post a Comment