"The Dazda" - "How high can you try?"

If you've ever wanted to get into motor sport, then offroading is probably the easiest and cheapest means available. This is due to the ability of the sport to cater for everything from the budding novice to the full-blown professional.

This picture is the culmination of almost three years of effort (on and off) of two blokes (plus a whole heap of extras).

Me, and me mate Jez, bought the original 'Dazda' in converted form. The car was a 1968 Datsun 1600 (or 510) that had already been converted to accept a rotary engine. The conversion consisted of a cross-member that looked as if it had been made out of angle-iron and some precision (tongue-in-cheek) redrilling of the gearbox mounting bracket. Also included was a box full of engine parts (most missing) and oil everywhere. The oil, it seemed, had been coughed up by the engine during its last throes.

Needless to say the expense started there!

Building an off-road car is a great expedition into the unknown, especially if you deviate from the manufacturer's specifications, in terms of suspension and engine components.

As far as I can tell there are probably four ways you can build an off-road car:

Buy a production vehicle and bolt in a roll cage and fire-extinguisher.
Buy a production vehicle and bolt in a roll cage, fire-extinguisher and a completely different engine, drive train and suspension package.
Build a kit buggy or get one built for you.
Build your own buggy completely from scratch.

The first two (and possibly the third) are within reach of the average joe. The fourth is definitely left to those of you out there who work in metal fabrication shops and have access to bucket loads of information on engine drive train combinations, suspension packages, lots of time and even more money.

A fifth option does exist; buy a car/buggy someone else is selling. These are usually the result of someone leaving the sport and good deals can be made. Just be careful, as some of these cars/buggies will be on their last legs.

There are four factors that dictate how fast/competitive you are:

Power to weight ratio
Suspension setup
Braking ability
Traction

The obvious thing to do is strip everything you can off your car, drop in the most powerful motor you can find, slap on the biggest brakes, beef up the suspension and bolt on some knobblies. Ah, if only it were a perfect world...

Everything you modify on a car affects how the car will handle. If you drop in a big motor the front end will seek out every rut and bump no matter how tiny, the car will have a tendency to understeer (due to the additional weight up front) and the back-end will skip around like a roo on steroids.

The solution to this dilemma is either good planning, mates-in-the-know or the tried-and-true trial and error method. We "chose" the latter.

There are a lot of things to plan when building up an off-road car. The following pages are just a small percentage of the thought and effort that goes into building any sort of race car. What I've tried to do is point out the topics that have either caught us out or caused us some problem (whether it be during a race or on the shop floor).

As a first suggestion, I'd start by saying that a large workshop is not a luxury item. For any of you that have tried to work on a car in a single car garage, you'll get the general idea. With a large area to work in, it's easier to work on the car, find parts that have been taken off the car and find the tools you used. We currently have access to a factory shed and it's wonderful.

Secondly, don't try to do too much at the one time. We have missed several races simply because the car was in pieces on the factory floor. A simple brake pad change can easily turn into an upgrade of the entire back-end (I kid you not!).

Well, we'd seen an opportunity to get into a slightly larger car, and as a result, probably pushed the pace a bit to far on the last short course for 1999, at Harvey. You can see the results on the left. First the bingle with the other car, then the crunch after taking the big jump too hard have done strange things with the front suspension. Both the front right headlight and right and middle spots are gone, and both front struts have been bent at their lowermost point (see insert). This was the end of the line.