Bulgarian - ish Nova GSi Time Attack / Trackday car (C16SEi)

[uh60]

Hi, guys, I am Stefan, some of you know me from the Vauxhall Nova Facebook page where I have been buying and searching a lot of parts for my 2 Novas.

Little bit of history, bare with me, I will try to be brief. I moved to UK to study Automotive & Motorsports Engineering in Huddersfield , West Yorkshire and throughout my years there I learnt a lot about the industry, spent a placement year at Helical Engineering near Blackpool as an applications engineer and bought and brought a lot of parts for my Novas in Bulgaria.

Now graduated and back in Bulgaria I finally managed to put together my first (rotten really) Nova GSi and finally start racing with it after dreaming about this for almost 5 years.

Here is the Nova I bought, it is a 1991 GSi Irmscher C16SEi engine (It uses Bosch Motronic 1.5, I do not think you had these in UK)

It is a Corsa A here of course but that don't matter now.





Little did I know how rotten it was







That should be solid :D



If you are interested, I will go on with details on the restoration.

Ended up with a new front end with turrets





And hit the track on 12th of September this year



I did not know that I can wind down the GAZ Coilovers at the back to make ET49 wheels fit, so I fitted ET30 7J 15" inch wheels and in order to avoid rubbing the car was set up very high. The car is also poly bushed with Powerflex all round, GAZ Coilovers all round, 256x20mm front brakes, Engine is fitted with a C26NE throttle body (63mm) , AFM from C20NE and lightweight flywheel of 4.1 kg. Also fitted GTE body kit on it as I want to keep the GSi one spare for the other Nova.

Our first race was horrible, there was too much air going in and not enough fuel and the engine was very sluggish so finished last in both 1.6 N/A and 2.0 N/A class, the alternator broke down so we got on our way back to the garage and after I parked it starter gave up as well.





Will continue in the next post.

[uh60]

So we fixed the problems, went on an Edurance race where the car managed to go 5 hours of constant racing speed without even a single technical issue apart from the tyres that had to go to the bin.



Last weekend we were at another race track nearby, I spoke to some of the lads on the facebook page, think it was Ben who gave me the tip to lower the back as much as possible and fit ET49 wheels which with lowered GAZ height will not interfere with the springs.





The car now has much more power after I fitted a 4.0 bar fuel regulator and injectors from X20XEV, still needs to go to a rolling road though as now power starts coming after 3500 RPM.

On some corners it felt sluggish so I took out the headlight to allow for more air to come in.









It is running 350 LBS front springs and 250 LBS rear, I adjusted the front dampers on 15 clicks, the rear on 11 and the car had sort of good balance.

There were big problems with accelerating with the steering wheel turned, you can see from the onboard video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKdpnHBNo3w

Otherwise the weekend well, I think the bouncing on the front wheels on accelerating can be cured with harder dampers or better tyres for next year.



Currently I ran Cooper Tyres ZEON XTC but they are not suited for trackdays (cheapos)

The car is also running 1.2deg camber using Eibach Camber Bolts but I use standard top mounts as I fear if I use camber plates it may damage the chassis.





If you are interested, I will give out some more info.

[totalnova]

I'd love to see any rebuild pics that you have.
Great to see you saved this.

[Jonesfach]

I'd love to see any rebuild pics that you have.
Great to see you saved this.

Seconded.

[uh60]

Right, I can make the album, where I have got all the pics from, public so you can see it or I can upload it all here, the thing is I have more than 350 pics in that album, but of course if I only share the album a lot of the valuable info will be missed out. Any thoughts ? I just don't want to make a 6 page thread full of pictures of rust dust :D .

[totalnova]

We love rust on PNG this is why it's easier to do a project thread while your doing the car

[uh60]

Yeah, but even I lost all hope that this car would not end up beeing a stack of Pepsi cans :D so I did not find any point creating a thread for a car that finishes in the scrappy.

Alright here it goes :

In February 2013 my mate started stripping it while I was on my placement year





Fitted a rust free door as the previous one had the hinge that was gone, I even went on a date with the Nova which also went excellent apart from the car refusing to start but turned out to be a bad earth. I started to take in the fact that this car probably has a mind of its own.



Snapped bolt when taking out the head



The cylinders look sort of okay, more to that story late







I went back to Bulgaria the weekend before he started stripping it and was bashing it with around 100 miles around town .. suicidal ...







He cut out all the problematic pieces and ended up with this

[uh60]

Meanwhile looking at the ads someone was stripping a 1.2 . so I bought this :

[Jonesfach]

Tidy that 1200 shell.

[Benn]

Nice project. Glad you got the wheels/coilover issues sorted and better ET wheels on.