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July 2001: Suspension repairs part 1

I went to a Tiger Tales (national tiger owners club) organised sprint day at Curborough.

Anyway the day had been going great and I had completed a slow timed lap and was halfway through the second lap when all a sudden the steering felt very heavy. I slowed up thinking that I had a puncture - however it was slightly more serious, one of the nuts holding the passenger side TCA to the front upright had given way which dropped the car onto three wheels and rendered it undrivable.

After getting the car off the circuit I tried to fix the arm but the screw thread was wrecked. The only thing I could do was to hitch a lift with Paul Toyne into Lichfield and buy a new TCA which was fitted to the car in the paddock. Unfortunately no more racing was possible for me and I drove home thinking I had got off lightly. I think the word lightly developed a new meaning after that!

To Summarise:

I replaced the TCA (£20) and had the wheels rebalanced (£10)

I found the headlight on the passenger side had failed so I replaced both sealed beam units with a pair of halogen ones(£30). This is a very good upgrade as you can now see when out driving at night!

It had also scraped the sump bottom out. The sump already had a small leak but this got a bit worse (£20) Note the Pinto sump is one of the worst things even to replace due to the fact it weighs about 10lbs and requires 23 bolts to be tightened whilst lying on your back under the car.

When replacing the sump I discovered that one of the engine mounts had cracked (due to No.3) so they were both replaced (£47)

So the total cost of one lousy nut (20p) was £127 plus my time to rebuild the car (3 days).