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NO MONTE FOR KICKASTRA RALLY TEAM
Unprecedented numbers of entries received


The Kickastra Rally Team disappointingly has not been included in the entry list for the 2011 Monte Carlo Rally.

Having competed in the WRC three times, and since the homologation of the team’s Opel Astra OPC had expired for WRC events, the team decided to try to take on a new challenge in the form of the Monte Carlo Automobile Rally, the opening leg of the IRC. In addition, Team AutoScharf decided to also participate to celebrate the 40th birthday of the team’s driver Bernd Knuepfer.

As an admirable gesture, the Automobile Club de Monaco waived entry fees, which resulted in overwhelming interest. Just two weeks before applications closed, the Automobile Club de Monaco had received more than 250 registrations for the centenary edition of world's oldest motorsport event.

Preparations were well underway for the rally should the entry be accepted. New tarmac suspension was fitted courtesy of AVO UK, Adrian flew to Germany for a test session organized by Team AutoScharf and the Motorsport Club in Grunhain, Germany, and logistics were organized for service and team accommodation.

The team will now review its plans for 2011 and look for other potential exploits. As usual, the team will post updates here.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3...


As most Kickastra fans will know, the team have an entry in for the 2011 IRC Monte Carlo Rally. The final entry list will not be made public until 8th December, but this would leave little time for proper preparation so the team decided on a testing day in November.

Jonathan liased with Tobias of AutoScharf in Germany in order to get the car ready for testing - this being after AutoScharf had rebuilt the engine of the OPC when it suffered an engine failure due to a broken connecting rod. Tobias had also installed a rolling road at his workshop and the hope was that we would be able to put the OPC on the dyno and map the programmable ecu that Jonathan had bought for the car a few years ago.
Everything was arranged and Adrian flew across to Germany on the 17th November. A six hour drive starting at 3am from their base in Blickstedt saw them arrive at AutoScharf in Lauter at around 9am. The day was spent changing over the front suspension on the OPC to the tarmac setup. These were the same uprights used when the team tackled WRGB in 2006 but converted to 3-way adjustable. The rear suspension was the same used in WRC Rally Finland in 2009. We thought on Rally Finland that the balance of the car was a little off with the back being too hard. With the front now being fitted with tougher springs, we figured the balance would be about right.

Later in the day we finally got to run the car on the dyno. Unfortunately, due to software communication problems Jonathan was unable to map the ecu as planned. The dyno run showed a major drop off in both HP and torque early in the rev range, and coupled with the inability to maintain a stable idle prompted use to revert to the standard ecu. A comparison with the dyno curves of the AutoScharf car which did have a properly mapped ecu showed a 15HP and 25Nm deficit. Jonathan will continue to investigate the mapping of the programmable ecu or a replacement for it.

Day two dawned with the two cars being prepped and loaded. Tobias was taking his OPC for testing also. A third car was due to meet us there - a C2R2max. The road we were to use was section that was specially closed pretty much just for us and arranged by Tobias. It was just under 2km in length and run both ways. In the "uphill" direction it consisted of long flat right, a fast uphill kink left, flat crest and hard braking into a medium right that could be cut with mud inside, a flat kink left into a near flat right over crest that could be cut,an absolute kink kink right and left into a muddy and wet 90 left that transitioned into a very long wet right into left over crest and finish.

We did a couple of runs in each direction along with a familiarization run either way. As expected, the balance of the car was great. The suspension in places where we cut the corners was very forgiving, absorbing the bumps easily. Some adjustments to the high speed bump improved things. Adrian took the opportunity to take Berndt Knupfer - the driver of Tobias OPC - as co-driver for a few runs in the Kickastra car. His comments were very positive, saying that the car was sprung a bit softer than Tobias car, but the balance was fine. Adrian then went as co-driver for Berndt in the AutoScharf car. Berndt comments about his car being sprung much stiffer were apparent. The general thought was that our car would be the better setup for a long and varied event as the Monte was envisaged to be.


All in all, we thought the day and the trip was a huge success. A lot was learned, some interesting insights gained, and a way forward for the ecu achieved. We are now looking forward to the publishing of accepted entries for the Monte come December 8th in the hope that our names are amongst those given a slot in the starting lineup.

Link to video

Link to photos

MCBI Double Header
Good event. Got merged up to S10, and finished second to Ian Warren in the Swift.

Kickastra Team Codriver Enters Rallye Thueringen
Kickastra Team Codriver Enters Rallye Thueringen



Following a successful debut and class win of the teams rebuilt A7 Vauxhall Astra GSi in Rally Barbados, the normal resident of the codriver’s seat Jonathan Linton has decided to enter the German Rallye Thueringen.

The Rallye Thueringen is based in the South Eastern Germany. 2010 will be the 49th edition of the Sparkassen-DMV-Thuringen Rally 2010 by the organizer, the Motorsportclub Poessneck e.V. It is a 134 km all Tarmac Rally with very technical stages making pace notes essential. The rally starts on Friday 18 June 8 p.m. with a 17 km stage followed by a special stage in the host city of Poessneck at 10 p.m. The longest stage is a 23 km test on Saturday.

The team built and maintain an Opel Astra OPC in Germany prepared for FIA group N3, which the team successfully completed a hat trick of WRC finishes in 2006, 2007 and 2009. Jonathan decided to try a hand at driving his own car and entered as Car 000 on the Rallye Gruenhain in 2009. He is now hoping to get more familiar with his Opel Astra OPC, test new tarmac suspension settings and make steady improvement over the event.

Once again the team will be supported by Team AutoScharf led by the team’s close friend Tobias Scharf. Tobias has his work cut out prior to the event as his own Opel Astra OPC Turbo suffered a rare accident on the Sachsen Rallye just weeks prior. In addition, the Kickastra Team’s Astra OPC requires final assembly following a full rebuild after the 2009 Rally Finland. Team AutoScharf will be working long hours from their base in Lauter, Germany to prepare both cars in preparation for the event.
Jonathan will be codriven by Frank Haustein, a friend of Tobias’.  Jonathan will have to put his German knowledge to good use as the pace notes will be taken and read in German.
The Kickastra team would like to thank main sponsor Ravensden, who have been unwavering in the team’s support, Team AutoScharf, John Sealy from the BMF for supporting the entry requirements and the Rallye Thueringen organizers for allowing special permission to enter the event past the close of entries.

Kickastra Rally Team

Rally Barbados 2010 - Event Overview
Following the build of Kickastra Evo III, the car was debuted at the Dark Hole Speed Event. The handling was not the best, and we suffered from gearbox problems - 3rd gear dogs among other things.
The gearbox was rebuilt with 3rd gear, 6th gear, the crown wheel and pinion and diff bearing being replaced.

The car's next outing was King of the Hill - the "shakedown" and seeding event for Rally Barbados. After a reasonably good time on the practice run, I succeeded in rolling the car very gently at about 3 MPH. In spite of this, we managed to bend every panel on the car as well as smashing the windscreen so badly that we were not able to take further part in the event.  

This then set the stage for 6 days of mad scrambling to get the car ready for Rally Barbados, starting with dropping the car at the bodywork man immediately after the event so he can start straightening the roofline over the front windscreen to accept the new glass. A new windscreeen was sourced on Tuesday and was fitted on Wednesday after Andy (the bodywork man) had done some "dressing up" of his initial straightening. There were then a number of late nights/early mornings to fit the new navigator seat, sumpguard, door mirrors, kill switch cable, and relocation of passenger lap belt mounting eye. We managed to also squeeze in a wheel alignment and a spanner check. After the drama, we were ready for Rally Barbados (with a few hours to spare).
Onto the rally itself. Jonathan arrived on Friday afternoon and took ownership of pace notes written by nephew Dominic the previous day.  

RB10 Day 1
The car felt ok generally, but the handling was definitely off. A variety of adjustments in the course of the morning to the rear shocks improved things somewhat, but it still wasn't quite to our liking. More to follow...

RB10 Day 2
The second stage of the morning looked to be wet, so we took the slicks and put on wets (RA-1s). The stage turned out to be pretty dry, but the tyres made a huge difference the handling and the feel of the car, so we decided to leave them on for the rest of the day. The confidence level was much better, and the times reflected this. Apart from the lurid moment braking into Kendal corner from 100+MPH on a freshly sprinkled road and narrowly missing ploughing into the crowd who were blocking the escape road, the day was relatively uneventful. A spectator noted that in a L-R-L-R combination of corners, the front wheels were less than 2 inches from the curbs on each cut. Navigator Jonathan confirmed this during the rally, remarking that the edges of scenery were often approaching uncomfortably close to the extremities of the car, indicating absolute full use of the road and grip.  
Result? There was one!...First in class, a welcome result after last year's RB09 retirement while leading the class.  

Provision results available at this link.

Adrian Linton

Vauxhall Astra GSi Evo Ready to KickAstra
Edited article by Corey Reece . 

"We were having handling issues all day. Shortly after the start of the last Canefield run we made a cut and the back ‘stepped out' then ‘snapped back' causing the front to hit an embankment. From there we spun, hitting the rightside-back. We continued on briefly, then the oil light flickered and we pulled off. We damaged the radiator, cross-member, bent the subframe and lost oil as the oil cooler lines had been cut."
This ended Rally Barbados 2009 for brothers Adrian and Jonathan Linton and saw the end of their Vauxhall Astra " KickAstra Evo 2"and the building of Evo 3. Given that Evo 2 was built from scratch in 16 days, there were a number of things which needed attending to but were never done. So, Adrian decided to do all the necessary things in the building of Evo 3. The decision was made to reshell  and refresh the car, get rid of all the unnecessary wiring to drop some weight and to engineer an independent suspension set up with softer Proflex spring rates to have the car up to scratch. This required some shifting of the fuel tank, but it was decided that a fuel cell would have been a better option.

The extra underbody space also allowed for a straight exhaust to run from the engine. In the re-shelling, Adrian added some fender flares to the car. Anyone knowing Adrian would know that the flares, though aesthetically pleasing, serve a purpose as they have remedied the problem of tires rubbing on the fender which the previous car suffered from. 

In the engine department, not much was done other than relocating a few things in the engine bay. The car is in dire need of re-mapping, something which Adrian says should squeeze some more speed from the engine. This along with having the suspension fully sorted he believes should go a long way in making the car quicker across the stages. Following a noise from the gearbox during the MCBI Dark Hole event, Linton has had to pull the gearbox down, causing him to trade his driver boots to fill navigator shoes for David Brewster in the Automotive Art Shakedown Stages.

Looking ahead, the intention is for the Linton brothers to contest the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC) Ypres (pronunciation  EE-preh) Rally in Belgium. The rally was opted for after the Opel Astra OPC no longer had a valid homologation for the World Rally Championship (WRC). There is also a hope of entering Rally Jamaica, an event Adrian said he has never completed as a result of various mechanical misfortunes.
In the not too distant future, we may also see another Linton becoming more actively involved in local rallying. His son Dominic will get to see firsthand the competitive side of the sport after his exams are over. The young Combermere student was actually responsible for pace noting whilst Jonathan was still overseas in the lead up to Rally Barbados 2009. A drive is not far away as Adrian joked that there is a whole race car lying around the house, albeit in parts. Best wishes to the Lintons from Zhaust.com in the 2010 Motorsport Season.

Article reproduced from Zhaust.com