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RAV4 over winter workshop update

 

Following the Manston event I quickly started to build a 'to do' list of jobs for the Rav. The first event of 2026 seemed like a very long way away, but I knew the time would fly by.

 

First easy job was to replace the punctured tyre. It should have been easy but took 3 trips to Protyre as the warehouse sent the wrong flavour of tyre twice. Back at the workshop, I noticed a small amount of coolant on top of the gearbox. I quickly ascertained that the coolant top hose (that I had replaced before Manston) was leaking. Almost no coolant had been lost so it was of little concern, especially as I was about pull the radiator to finally install new mounts.

 

I'd been looking for new stock rad mounts for months in the UK, but they seemed to be "unobtainium", so I did a bit of part number cross referencing and found some on eBay from a Lithuanian seller! They took about 6 weeks to arrive, but were just what was needed. The rad was reinstalled with the new mounts, I flushed the coolant and I cleaned up the aluminium casting on the engine to get a better seal.

 

 

The next job I tackled was the headlights. The robustness of the Rav headlights was becoming an issue. At Plurenden one of the headlights had ended up with a couple of broken mounting points. I put this down the beating the car has taken due to the awful Bilstein front shocks. Prior to Manston I fitted a pair of almost new looking used lights I'd picked up at Silverlake, but after the event both had multiple mounting lugs snapped off. 

 

I decided that drastic action was needed and set about strengthening them. With a combination of flat  aluminium bar and chemical metal, I made a composite plastic headlight / epoxy / aluminium sandwich on every mounting bracket. Hopefully this will give them the strength to survive the next event!

 

(Headlight pic)

 

After the last couple of events I'd noticed that a lot of grass, leaves, dirt clumps and general detritus was collecting on the bottom of the radiator. As the radiator is pretty fragile the logical thing to do seemed to be to add some fine wire mesh to the inside of the bumper airduct. I eventually found something suitable at Moles Country Store, and about 20 cable ties later it was secured in place. Whilst I had the bumper off I found one of the welds had broken on the near side headlight trim bracket, so reattached that too.

 

(Grill pic)

 

Christmas has now come and gone, and it was time to get on with the job I'd been putting off, the strut towers. After finishing the Manston race in October I'd noticed some pretty big cracks had appeared in the strut towers. After hundreds of miles of racing over the years, and a few hundred miles of very rough racing on terrible front suspension in recent months, the shock and vibration was taking its toll.

 

 

I'd really been hoping to 'outsource' the welding, but after several false starts and dead ends I'd decided I would just have to get on with it myself. The repair would be a tackled in two parts, first to stitch the cracks back together, then to add some additional strength.

 

Closing up the gaps and stitching the cracks back together turned out to be harder than expected. Where the turret was originally pressed from a sheet of steel, in places it is incredibly thin, and it's in these areas that the cracks were forming. 

 

The next step was to add some additional strength. Space is very limited and I needed to find a way to complete the work without removing the engine, gearbox and front subframe else I'd probably not end up racing at all in 2026! I decided to 'strap' the strut tops down to the chassis rail sections using flat steel bar, formed to fit the profile of the inner arch. This way the load from the impacts would be distributed along the strut tower and back to the chassis.  .. I hoped this would prevent the strut towers being worked like an accordion, with the weight of the engine and gearbox pushing down on each impact and the suspension pushing in the opposite direction. The arch was then finished with a fresh coat of stone chip and black paint. 

 

 

The entire job took a lot longer than the 'couple of days' I originally estimated, but overall I was pretty pleased with the result, even if it did result in a trip to A&E and 2 further visits to hospital after a piece of grinding swarf got under my glasses and lodged in my iris... 

 

Whilst welding the near side suspension turret I was looking at the braided flexible brake pipe and noticed a small area of damage to the braid so I decided to replace it. After a bit of googling I found that they were Goodridge 600 series pipe with reuseable ends. I ordered some pipe and replacement fittings from CAM auto developments and found it was really very striaght forward to make a new line; simply cutting the pipe to length, adding the fittings and inserting the olives. This was a good time to flush the brake fluid, and swap the pads for a new set (even though the 'old' ones were only about 25% worn, it seemed a good time to do it!).

 

The final job on the list was to fix the sticky emergency cutoff. This was picked up at the last event at Manston. I stripped the cable and lubricated it, and re-installed with a different routing. The result was still a bit stiff but it worked. 

 

At the end of January I received notification that my application to the Demon Tweeks #TEAMDT sponsorship scheme had been successful! This gives me some new stickers for the car and, if I post pictures and video of the RAV4 racing using their #TEAMDT hashtag the chance to win £300 of vouchers. So here is the new look for 2026:

 

 

 

The final piece of the jigsaw was the bumpstops. If I was to race at Manston on the 21st of Feb, I would have to run on the old front suspension. This would mean 2 things; the first that I would need to take it easy to ensure the car survived intact, and second I really needed some bumpstops. 

 

The previous foam bumpstops had worked OK for maybe 2 or 3 laps, but had then disintegrated.  I diecded this time I would go for something more durable so ordered a pair of progressive powerflex polyurethane ones from Demon Tweeks. These were despatched promptly, into the clutches of the (not so) Royal Mail where they stayed for about a week finally arriving on the Wednesday evening of the week before the race. This meant I had a busy Thursday fitting them to the car.

 

 

Then finally, with less than 48 hours to go until the start of the race, the Rav finally drove out of the workshop for a successful road test and the 2026 season was under way.