The Race Taxi's first drive

We drove the car out from the garage, so it wasn't that much. We are still missing the brakes and the car needs a lot of finishing work. Not it can be moved by driving in and out from the garage, so it's a big relief.



You have to have two people driving if you don't adjust the idle high. One presses the throttle in the engine compartment and the other "drives"

Today we got the clutch working, which was a quite big job because we moved the work cylinder. The mounting point for the battery is also almost complete.

Update since a long time, the race taxi got wheels...

A friend told me that a sales site has 18 pieces of 15" center lock wheels for a reasonable price, so I was going to buy them for our locosts. I found the adverticement and called the seller right away. I didn't have the time to read the ad, and found out that they were 16" that isn't legal in the locost racing series in Finland. After thinking about it for a moment we decided to buy them anyways. If nothing else, we could put them on the race taxi...

The wheels are made by PLS in France and I was told they have been in a Mercedes Benz touring car. The weight is 9 kilos each. The wheels are three piece with a magnesium center.

When I got the wheels to the garage I quickly realized the problem of space required to store 18 wheels.. :-)

Most of the wheels are pretty badly damaged, so they will have to be straightened out. I think we can get a couple straight sets for the car. First we have to check the centers for straightness and cracks, and then check the outer halves too.

The wheels will be mounted in the same fashion as the 911 street car. The bolt pattern will be changed with an adapter.

A new guy got involved in the project, Erno. Erno has already brought energy and enthusiasm to the project which has rub off on to me and Mika. Most of race taxi's events this summer's will be attended by Erno.

The brake calipers arrived

The project moved forward by the find of brake calipers. The calipers are from a Chrysler 300C and they are street legal in Finland, quite lightweight and you can get aggressive brake pads. The problem with the T4 calipers was that the brake pads available were pretty much stock.

Even though there isn't much work left, we don't have the time at the moment to build the car. We're supposed to begin in January.

Race Taxi startup

After some trouble, the Race Taxi is alive.

The Subaru Impreza WRX 2 litre turbocharged engine with a half meter long exhaust sounded just as good as we thought it would. And yes, it was loud.

The engine sputtered slightly. Probably because we didn't have the exhaust gaskets so the ECU tried to correct the mixture with wrong information coming from the lambda. But the engine is installed and works. There's still loads of bits and pieces to do, but after this it doesn't feel that bad.

Link to the Youtube video: Race Taxi Startup

Back to work on the Race Taxi

It's been a bit quiet lately because of other stuff hindering working on the car.

Something new. A video recording system with suction cup mounted bullet camera. This will probably be used as a rearview monitor for our passengers, so the camera will be mounted on backwards on top of the car.

We also bought a data logger on ebay, but more about that once it arrives.

Most of yesterday was spent cleaning the garage and making space for the car.

We got a Porsche to keep the Race Taxi company. The car hung on top of a crane as an advert for a local radio station, after which the listeners could vote if it will be dropped or if it will be the main prize for a lottery between the listeners. You can probably guess the results.

We got interested of the car because they were supposed to drop it head first. Dropping the car backwards pushed the engine about 20cm forward which resulted in the firewall bending the frames of both seats useless. We haven't had a closer look inside yet, but it doesn't look good.

The first we did was to remove the ads on the car.

A picture from behind shows the whole truth.