Demon Rally Team Debuts New Car @ Wild West 09!
The site of the event was a small town in the southeast corner of Washington state. A town where if you blink too long you may just miss it. Once a year this delightful town opens its doors and welcomes the competitors, teams and spectators for the Wild West Rally. This year would mark the return of the Demon Rally team in their brand new VW mk2 Golf. Just a year ago the Demon Rally team had a very bad wreck which left their VW Rabbit in completely destroyed. This year they came back, and they came back with a vengeance!
Since the wreck in ’08 the team had found a new completely prepared VW Golf that was already a decently fast vehicle. However, the teams owner/drive Tom Burress knew that without some major re-working, the car would never be fast enough to compete with the best teams in the country. Over the past 6-8 months prior to this even, RalleyTuned and the Demon Rally crew set to work tearing the new Golf completely down to a bare shell and upgrading and improving anything an everything they could get their hands on.
To start out the entire chassis was seam welded and reinforced. The suspension was upgraded to a much beefier setup from JVAB. RalleyTuned was brought in to help with the Fuel Injection upgrade as well as handling re-wiring the entire car. We removed every single wire out of the car, stripped anything out that wasn’t needed and added new circuitry for the things that the team felt would be necessary for competition. A STACK cluster was installed to handle all the guage needs in one handy package, however the discovery of the internal battery being bad prompted us to make a last minute change to use a small Palm Pilot to display the information. The motor was upgraded to a 2L 16v with some beefy cams and head work, megasquirt EFI, and a VWMS gearbox. Tom also fabbed up a steering quickener to help control the car in the heat of battle.
After some initial testing the team was confident in the new chassis and ready to get the car into it’s first event. After a short press stage the car was puking out oil from the breather. Modifications were made and the breather situation was fixed so that Tom could focus on driving. “When we finished the second stage w had a chance to check on the oil consumption, fortunately, the breather drama had calmed down. We lost much less oil, my confidence in the car was starting to grow, and I felt like we could attempt to get into a good rhythm very soon.†-Tom Burress
Despite a plethora of issues including melting shift linkage, broken motor mounts, smashed radiator fans etc, the Demon Rally crew continually kept the car in running order and allowed Tom and Don Burress to complete the rally. At the end of the weekend the team had finished 6th overall on day 1 and 4th overall on day 2, and besting the 2wd cars winning Group2 in its debut event! For more info and a more thorough breakdown from the event, visit DemonRally.com
