Geoff Page Racing F1 turbo powered Dax rush
Discussion
Stealth-wagon said:
johnfelstead said:
Stealth-wagon said:
Since this is a Geoff Page appreciation thread, I'd thought I'd chip in.
The guys a legend in RS200 circles. He's always been around the periphery of freaky engines with F1 bits added, one off whacky monster powered specials, and Group B cars. Very handy bloke to know.
He used to look after my old RS200 Evolution back in the day. I owned it from 1992 through to 2002. Had no intention of selling it until I took I was invited to some Ford Owners Silverstone Track to drive it around the circuit with the wick turned up and demo it to the crows blah blah. At the time the engine had a obviously genuine 580bhp, geared for about 160mph in 5th, and it really flew. Remember these things were 4wd and weighted only 1000kg or so. Missile would be an understatement. Best lap I ever did around the grand prix circuit was 1min 55sec's … which was about 25secs behind contemporary F1's IIRC, and this was a car I drove home afterwards ! The suspension was remarkably compliant and supple, but the engine and box were brutal. Driving one was a real fix, and as good as a workout. Ahh, them were the days !
It was bought by an American bloke who walked out the crowd into the paddock area, and offered me a stupid amount of cash for it. Turns out he had just sold a gazzillion shares in a dot.com float, but he really had no f
king idea what he was buying and more or less destroyed the engine within days of ownership.
Thats an interesting story and different to what i was told at the time regarding the purchase of the car, it explains a lot that at the time didn't add up, if it's the same one, E9** **P? It was sold just before easter 2001.The guys a legend in RS200 circles. He's always been around the periphery of freaky engines with F1 bits added, one off whacky monster powered specials, and Group B cars. Very handy bloke to know.
He used to look after my old RS200 Evolution back in the day. I owned it from 1992 through to 2002. Had no intention of selling it until I took I was invited to some Ford Owners Silverstone Track to drive it around the circuit with the wick turned up and demo it to the crows blah blah. At the time the engine had a obviously genuine 580bhp, geared for about 160mph in 5th, and it really flew. Remember these things were 4wd and weighted only 1000kg or so. Missile would be an understatement. Best lap I ever did around the grand prix circuit was 1min 55sec's … which was about 25secs behind contemporary F1's IIRC, and this was a car I drove home afterwards ! The suspension was remarkably compliant and supple, but the engine and box were brutal. Driving one was a real fix, and as good as a workout. Ahh, them were the days !
It was bought by an American bloke who walked out the crowd into the paddock area, and offered me a stupid amount of cash for it. Turns out he had just sold a gazzillion shares in a dot.com float, but he really had no f
king idea what he was buying and more or less destroyed the engine within days of ownership. I knew the guy who bought it quite well, he isn't American, but he worked for an American software company at the time. I was asked to drive it at the 'ring the weekend he bought it but refused as it was virtually underivable, put your foot down and it went sideways at 100MPH when you were going straight, zero traction. I didn't fancy binning his new RS200 and suggested the car needed properly sorting before it did any more work, you sure got your moneys worth out of it! I sent the engine to Geoff to sort out post that trip, it was in a right state.
Edited by johnfelstead on Friday 14th November 23:03
You're right - he was actually Australian as far as I can recall. I was taking a pop at his 'big American software company employer' …
I do not know where you fit into the equation, but here for the hell of it, is what happened from my point of view. You might find it enlightening, but make of it what you will …
Read through my post on 2/6/08 :-
http://pistonheads.co.uk/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...
The above piece humorously described what probably happened mechanically when you experienced the 'sideways at 100mph' behaviour.
The mechanical fault meant you were driving a 580bhp rear-engined front-wheel drive monster. And it was intermittent. No wonder it went all over the road sidways ….
This fault occurred a couple of times, and before we found out what it was numerous 'experts' suggested that it needed lots of expensive investigation/repairs, such as 3 new viscous diffs, a whole new transmission train, and new everything else in between, and all for at least £10k yadda yadda. But as you'll see in my write up, it all came down to something costing a few quid, and needing someone with experience to pinpoint the problem.
As for the new owner of my car … well, read on... The purchase was very unusual, with payments spread over many weeks. I only met the actual owner once, on day of collection, and two intermediaries handled everything else. Each intermediary was earning a fat fee for handling the deal and were keen to just rush it through. No one seemed to have a clue what they were buying but were adamant they wanted it none the less, despite me repeatedly pointing out it was a heavily modified road legal Group-B more suited to track days than the road, and it certainly wasn’t a car for popping down to tescos. Most of the time the car was trailered about, but sure I used to have fun on the country roads round here as well. They didn't even want the mass of spares I'd accumulated, or understand that cars like this don't have off-the-shelf parts.
But when it was set-up correctly, it was utterly amazing with immense grip, traction, power that was virtually untouchable on the road by anything with 4 wheels or 2 ... I've got Datron print outs of its performance with results like 50-100mph being the same as a Mclaren F1. IE, it was bloody quick. Read the 1994-5 Guinness book of records, and you'll see an RS200 Evo in there instead of the Mclaren F1 …
It was continuously built up over 10 years, and doing half a dozen track days a year, and I think it had 3 or 4 engine upgrades / rebuilds, and numerous box swaps, suspension changes and so on. As a fairly unrefined and hairy 1980's road legal group B rally car it was always going to need a lot of attention and money spending on it, and on a very regular basis, preferably with a full team of mechanics on hand behind it. It certainly wasn’t a ford family car with 15,000 service intervals which is what the buyer seemed to think.
I recall wasting hours on the phone to the new owner(s) explaining the cars idiosyncrasies, and even wrote up a "How To Look after your unique RS200E" manual before exchange. Nothing was straightforward with it. But, I knew it was all falling on deaf ears. Given the state of engine tune (about 580bhp from a 1984 hybrid long stroke 1.9lt BDT engine using an evolution head) it also needed special treatment when warming up, or cooling down, and some absolutely VITAL things like a can of additive for each fill up with 98 ron petrol from a decent supplier etc.
On the day of collection is was abundantly clear that the new owner intended to just 'hop in' and drive the car for his first time himself, then go from my place in the midlands, down the M1, through London to demo standing starts to some friends, then straight onto the Nurburgring … all in one weekend … a 2,000 miles round trip, just like that, having never driven it before … with a few laps on the ring thrown in for good measure … Sure, modern "super-cars" can do that, but anyone who's owned a real or heavily modified RS200E will tell you that its just luck if nothing breaks in 100 miles of use.
As strongly as possible I suggested that it was not cut out to be driven in traffic jams, let alone a 1,000 miles to the ring and that he should PUT IT ON A TRAILER (I've still got the emails) if that's what he wanted to do. Even the tyres were soft and good for only 800 miles at best. And it had only averaged 750 miles per year in my ownership, most of which was on the track. The clutch was a competition paddle clutch, and not exactly easy to use, and the engine was tweaked to the limit, and rebuilt every 1,500 miles or so.
I spent a great deal of money on that car, and I was a tad pissed off to receive a series of phone calls within days of handing it over saying everything had 'gone wrong'. The specialist given the job of 'fixing it' called me and relayed a tale of woe, including how the new owner had destroyed the competition clutch trying standing starts (nearly impossible anyway), and put plain 95ron unleaded in from a supermarket forecourt and then half melted the head under full-boost and drop-clutch starts. The engine needed 100+ ron to be safe. By the sounds of it, all the clutch dump starts had shreded the rear drive shaft which is why the 'sideways' behaviour makes sense - as described in the link above. And I strongly suspect that what you drove at the ring was a car that had been totally buggered in the space of a few days by an naive new owner getting one to many 'fixes' from the 580bhp / ton experience that it was capable of delivering.
Last I heard about it was in 2005 (or thereabouts) from a chap who'd bought the remains from an advert on ebay for the rolling chassis, less the engine - that was in a shed in Essex waiting for a £29,000 engine rebuild including a new head, and repairs to a cracked block or similar.
Hearing about what had happened to it within days of leaving my place was heartbreaking bearing in mind how much effort had gone into it during my 10 yrs of ownership.
So let me just repeat, the car you tried driving round the ring was probably on its last gasp and in need of serious attention and should never have limped over there in the first place. No wonder you thought it needed a major sort out.
A real shame.
Edited by Stealth-wagon on Saturday 15th November 12:55
Where i fit in was that i was asked to help look after a 22B that the guy who bought your car owned in the UK, whilst he was in the USA, but it ended up being stored, and used by the intermediary you dealt with down in the midlands instead. The idea was to give it the odd run out to keep it moving, but it ended up being this persons daily driver with me not involved in its care other than the occasional email.
Richard (who is Welsh, but spent a lot of his life in Australia, he is a good guy) then asked me if i would take a look at some RS200's for him, as he was thinking of buying one. Next thing i knew he had bought your car, with me having no involvement in the purchase, i was supposed to inspect any potential car for him but never got a call. If what you say is true, that there were substantial fees involved in the purchase of the car for the person who you dealt with, then thats a really sad state of affairs. I'd be interested to know more by PM if you can show me that info.
The first time i saw the car was the night before the trip to the 'ring, I wasn't aware of any burnouts taking place prior to me seeing it. I had a read of your info regarding how to start the car and warm it up, all fairly straight forward stuff. It was pretty tatty around the edges, really needed some TLC and a thorough going through prior to any decent trip, i found cracks in some of the wheels for example, it was obviously a track toy.
The trip turned into a bit of a nightmare for Richard, his 22B was being driven to the 'ring by the person you dealt with, Richard was driving the RS200, i was in my car along with a decent sized group of friends. The 22B made it as far as the M20 before the engine expired, so that ended up on a flat bed. The cars then got stuck in a jam outside Brussels for an hour, that may be where the clutch got fried, it had no cooling fans, you can guess the scenario of that car, with it's race spec clutch and no fans in that situation.
At the 'ring i went for a run in the car as a passenger, the first time i sat in it was at the start of the lap, it was terrible, wrong tyres for what was a very cold day (it was snowing!), far too stiff and completely unpredictable, i was going to drive it until that point but after that lap i suggested it needs a proper look at before doing any more with it, i didn't drive it. We found the rear damper mounting bolts were about to fall out and the platform lock rings were loose, so either they shook themselves off during the trip or they hadn't been tightened during a change. It had been driven on the roughest road in the world in Belgium, so it's conceivable it just shook loose.
The car appeared to have survived the trip in an OK state and I suggested some changes to detune the engine and clutch, fit fans, softer springs etc. so it was more suitable for that kind of use in future, i made my own way back post Dover so didn't see it past that point, but got a phone call the next day to go take a look at it as it wasn't running right. I thought maybe the plugs had fouled pootling about without warming it up properly, as i was told on the phone they had driven it 200 yards down the road in the morning and it started to miss, it was on pretty cold race plugs so that can happen. So i bought a set of plugs for it then headed down to take a look (i lived 100 miles from where the car was kept). When i got there i took the plugs out and the gaps were all over the place, which i thought was a bit odd. I popped the new plugs in and tried to start it, it would cough into life but ran like a bag of spanners on two cylinders, so switched it off straight away. Something more serious than plugs was going on and the gaps being out lead me to think it had det damage issues. I then went and bought a compression tester, it had zero compression on two cylinders, about 1/3 on one and OK on one.
At that point i thought no way has this just happened in 200 yards. I was then asked to take the car home with me and fix it for them, but i didn't want anything to do with that, that's when i got in touch with Geoff and started the ball rolling with him taking a look at the engine. Geoff was a super guy to deal with, very helpful. He sent me a set of photos of the engine when he stripped it, what a mess, that was the last involvement i had with that car and the person you dealt with.
A year later i got to see some in car video footage taken on the road on it's way back from Dover, it was detting so badly you could hear it from the video! So it probably had the wrong fuel put in at the services or they were running it on high boost with no additive, thats what caused all the damage, it wasn't detting on the lap i sat in it at the 'ring so was quite happy to run on 98RON on the low boost setting.
Hi took the Dax to Brands for a track day and met a few mate's from here and had onboard camera on for a few laps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWE07IKJU98
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzLMBMbCYUk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzLMBMbCYUk
Edited by busa turbo on Monday 3rd May 20:44
busa turbo said:
Excellent example of slicing and dicing through the track traffic 
Glad to see Geoff is still optimising the power out of anything, particularly if its got a f
k off turbo bolted to it !
[quote=carl_w]Hey busa turbo, I think I've competed in some of the same sprints as you (I wouldn't say "against you" as I'm in Class A2). Presumably the Dax open days are in Harlow? Any way of finding out when they're coming up in the future?[/quote
Hi thay usually have two a year one in April(good friday)and one in September.
http://forum.daxsportingclub.com/phpBB3/index.php
Hi thay usually have two a year one in April(good friday)and one in September.
http://forum.daxsportingclub.com/phpBB3/index.php
few more pic's
new pikes peek Rs 200 engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unaNXrILig4
new pikes peek Rs 200 engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unaNXrILig4
Edited by busa turbo on Tuesday 30th November 19:18
Edited by busa turbo on Tuesday 30th November 19:20
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