Since Steve's been doing a bad job of keeping this post up to date, I figured I'd fill you guys in on the last two years.
After he broke the strut housing at Rocky '17, we managed to track down a spare housing in I think Lethbridge? So that was cheap and easy. I stepped in to navigate and we ran a small regional event completely drama-free in the fall.
The timing is fuzzy for me on the rest of this, but Steve took the car in to Lakeview and Max swapped out all the beaten up stock bushings for Whiteline. Our first test day on the new bushings had Steve giggling like a school girl. This is actually what inspired me to them on the Forester. Steve had also crushed his oil pan on the skid plate (AGAIN), so they installed a more shallow one and a KillerB oil pickup. There were some other things done there, but I can't remember the specifics so they can't have been too exciting.
We ran Rocky last year on the new stuff. We broke the exhaust off at the headers partway through the first day. We ran Saturday afternoon without a hood because the exhaust was venting directly into the engine bay causing the car to overheat. At some point we completely flattened the exhaust, so it was completely replaced. We blew 1st gear on Sunday. We DID finish the event, but drove at least 70 km without first. We didn't think we were going to make it to the Final MTC because of the amount of knocking coming from the input shaft. It felt a lot like a failing drive shaft.
After Rocky, Steve put a 4.44 trans into the car. He was also very frustrated with how little uphill power we had at Rocky. So in January this year, we took the car to Vex and he had a Haltech installed with an ethanol flex fuel system. He'd decided that we see too many people lose turbos at events and wanted to avoid going turbo if at all possible. We're not 100% sure what we're making for power right now. I'll have to dig out the dyno sheets, but on E60 we made around 15 more HP/torque than before.
Next we ran Cochrane Winter Rally back in March this year. It was -38° on both days. The rally car wouldn't start for the inspections on Saturday. Our service crew (Jacky) wasn't due to arrive till Saturday night. We had to leave shortly to make our pacenotes, and if the car wasn't fixed that night, we'd be out of the race. I called Jacky and begged him to head over ASAP. As we would be out of cell service, I basically told everyone I could find that we were having issues and to let our service crew know if there was a garage available to try and warm the car up in.
When we got back, the car was tucked into a garage and had FINALLY started not 10 minutes earlier. It turned out that we'd blown an 80 AMP fuse trying to start it, and Jacky had to go all the way back to Pick n Pull in Calgary to get a replacement (THANK YOU!!!). The car sat in the heated garage overnight, and we had to leave it running on the trailer for the hour drive up to the stages. It's unnerving enough to look back into the grill of a car while you're driving. Never mind when the headlights are on.
We finished Cochrane with little additional drama. We had the starting issue sorted out, and moved on to Rocky where we broke the exhaust off AGAIN. We haven't looked to see if its also crushed. On the last stage, Steve said the car was handling a little funny. I noticed on the way home it was sitting kinda funny on the trailer. So we took the suspension out and realized the strut tops hadn't been reinforced and we blew one out. Steve's gearing up to get his house listed, so it'll probably be a few weeks before we can really start taking the car apart. We're going to have to relocate it while the house is on the market, so it likely won't get looked at until after it's found a new (temporary) home.
I have some pictures that I'll dig out later.
