Ladoga 2008

Back to Russia in a Series 3

I made a video but Youtube didn't like it because of the music

Youtube does at least like this video - fresh for 2008 we made a whole new and much hairier car:

The story is long - almost as soon as Jez rolled off the last stage of 2007's event there were plans, discussions, and ponderings on what we could improve. As soon as we were back in Blighty, the internet was being scoured for parts and information.

The short version is that we started with a blank sheet, then added a Corvette Z06 LS1 V8 engine to it, good for around 400hp which was something like 3x what we'd been working with before.

In the course of the year, the lab was tooled up - judicious ebay scouring, trading favours, and other wheeling & dealing resulted in a very expensive TIG welder as well as a few other niceties that we'd had to do without before.

Although we used the middle section of a Range Rover chassis, everything else was custom fabricated tube-frame:

In addition to building a car of a level that was pretty much unseen on the UK off-road scene, there was also fettling of Eddie my 109 (see below), the acquisition and welding up of a 2-Door Discovery to act as an additional support truck, and so so much running around scrounging up parts, tools, supplies, and favours.

Over the tube frame we press-ganged Mike to come and weave his sticky magic in glass-fibre, which allows you to make some difficult shapes in very thin, light & strong materials pretty quickly… if you're Mike. Us mere mortals just end up covered in sticky itchy goo and with something that looks like an accident in a glue factory.

Correx and packing tape set the shape:

Glassed in with very light matting - thickness measured in GSM much like printer paper, which tells you how light this stuff can be!

Another weird shape - this was purely done by stretching packing tape around the cage and then glassing over it:

Finished article - even the legend Ron Covell would be there for days trying to shape something like this out of aluminium…

…that's not to say Jez didn't get a bit carried away with the aluminium fabrication and his shiny new TIG set:

And Eddie got a few improvements too…