Dead?: Ford Festiva

"Mercedes Streeter" (smart) 11/26/2019 at 18:39 • Filed to: gambler 500, festiva, TDI

3

11

I fixed the Festiva just enough to make the 150 mile drive to the first Northwest Indiana Gambler. It would end the weekend in much worse shape.

My fuel leak fix stopped working the morning of. I stupidly tried to make a hose clamp out of JBweld, which failed immediately. I then discovered that zip ties make great hose clamps for a good seal.

I arrived at camp after sunset and gave the car a good, hard send. In flying through a makeshift rally course at highway speed I broke a rear brake line. I called it a night before I’d accidentally kill the whole car.

The next morning I decided to take a picture then start stripping the car down. I removed my CB, the headlights, and the turn signals. Unfortunately, the turn signals would accidentally end up destroyed. After I had the car sufficiently torn down, I decided to go on the full time trial lap. My brakes were shot, all I had was braking using the engine and manual transmission.

I hit a jump super hard and started uncontrollably laughing. In doing so I ended up burying the front end in sand. It was amusing as only five minutes earlier I was the only vehicle to make it through the sand pit.

What you don’t see in those pictures is the caved in unibody rail under the b pillar and slight bend in said b pillar. That happened when I sent the car over an impossibly steep hill and sideswiped a tree in midair on the way down. This is also how I lost my door bars.

I spent a lot of the weekend getting the car from 5 mph to 0 using bushes and trees. The owner of the park encouraged us to blaze new trails, especially if we blazed hard ones. The only rule was that we couldn’t touch the corn field.

The person who recovered me from the sand only pulled lightly, but it was enough to really get the buckle and the bend in the pillar going.

From here, I just decided to give it one last send. I slammed it into a rock about ten minutes later and discovered the car to only be running on three cylinders.

I was able to limp it back to camp and that’s when I engaged my “everyone try to kill it” idea. I removed all of the stuff I cared about from the car then one by one, challenged Gamblers to kill the car.

The first person discovered that I partially annihilated a coil on the engine. They cobbled it together enough to get all four cylinders firing again.

It was then four of us hopped in (remember, I removed the rear seat) with helmets on as a new challenger appeared to try to kill the car. He forgot the car didn’t have brakes and darn near rolled it during his run. By this time the fuel feed line had some catastrophic damage and was pissing fuel everywhere, but the car still ran. Someone grabbed duct tape and got it ready for another send.

With his failure, the car was then passed to another challenger. This one had the car dead in no time flat. He sent it into a shallow pond then got stuck. The car sat there for about 20 minutes with water up to the speakers on the dash. After a Bronco rescued us (after rear ending us), the car ran exceedingly poorly until it stopped running and wouldn’t start again.

Our diagnosis? The tank was far more muddy water than it was fuel. Nobody cared to fix it again so we declared the mission a success.

I rigged the steering wheel to permanently blow the horn at anyone that tried to start it and the car was left for dead. We assumed the car just needed to dry out for it to start again.

Later that day, the car got a victim. Someone tried starting it and my prank deployed. He ended up ripping the horn wires out. xD We successfully towed it back to camp for it to dry out.

Throughout the night it was rammed by various people, traveling some 20 feet and nearly getting bumped into the onsite lake.

By the next morning, someone went cow tipping and put the car on its roof!

I gave the title to the owner of the park. He plans on putting the car back on its wheels, fixing what we broke, then having it as a side by side in the park.

Confession time...

Alright. So, I definitely went too far with the Festiva and these two rallies it participated in. It was a fun project, a fun experiment, and the rallies themselves were brilliant. But, I made some choices in various situations that while I don’t regret, I do not want to do again. I’m not going to discuss them . Just know that I’ve learned some lessons. Sometimes experiencing something once is all the experience one needs...or perhaps an experience maybe one didn’t need to begin with. The Passat is - in a way - a symbol of me dialing back my crazy from 12 to hopefully 11 or 10. It’s a safe crazy, a creative crazy...not just crazy. I apologize to those I upset along the way from family, friends, and people who were or are close to me. 2019 may be my best year yet and perhaps the best me , but that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of the occasional screw up...

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Final note.

I’ve been driving the TDI since the Festiva’s death and I learned how to conquer limp mode. Limp mode is actually really easy to avoid if you shift before 2.5k rpm. The Passat has plenty of torque to do that, too! It even cruises at 70mph no problem...but uh, it does immediately run out of power (turbo “turns off”) should you try exceeding 70. What I did wrong the day I drove it was shift at 3k rpm, which meant the car went into limp mode not even a mile from the seller’s house. And limp mode in this particular car doesn’t have any specific light like a smart does, so the whole time I thought I wasn’t in limp mode. Of all the cars with 260+k on the odometer this one is the nicest. It rides, drives, and looks like a car that only has 100k.

I still await a cable for my ThinkPad so I can fire up VCDS and start my troubleshooting adventure on it. Right now I’m still betting the problem is the N75.

themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles > Mercedes Streeter 11/26/2019 at 19:21

3

Pour out a quart of the cheapest 5w-30 for a car that went out like few dare to dream - attempting to overthrow the humans!

But seriously, I'm glad you had fun with it and got to go out in a way that satisfied all parties....or at least, satisfied them well enough.

Mercedes Streeter > themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles 11/26/2019 at 19:32

0

Oh yeah, I definitely got my $500s worth out of the car. It's not even dead, either. Next time I see it the car will probably be full on side by side, complete with ATV tires!

I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker > Mercedes Streeter 11/26/2019 at 20:03

1

A hhh, B5 limp mode. This car has a sunroof, yes? Look at your drains. They are almost certainly clogged. The ECU is under the carpet in the passenger footwell. There is likely some corrosion on there. 

Mercedes Streeter > I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker 11/26/2019 at 20:15

1

No sunroof. Drains look good as well. Previous owner may not have been a great mechanic but he certainly kept things clean.

Everything is dry in the car but I’ll definitely check the ECU area for corrosion!

stars-pulse-like-venom > Mercedes Streeter 11/26/2019 at 20:25

0

Good luck with the dial back.

I like cars: Jim Spanfeller is one ugly motherfucker > Mercedes Streeter 11/26/2019 at 20:41

0

Weird! I’ve never seen a B5.5 TDI with no sunroof. US market TDIs usually came loaded as they were most expensive.

shop-teacher > Mercedes Streeter 11/26/2019 at 22:52

2

I gotta be honest. Shit like this, is why I have completely lost interest in the Gambler. I could have gotten 2-3 years of rallycross out of that Festiva.

Mercedes Streeter > shop-teacher 11/27/2019 at 01:30

1

I do understand that sentiment. De stroying a vehicle I have only owned for nearly two months is one of the poor decisions I am talking about in my lessons learned.

I chose this Festiva (passing up on much better ones) specifically because it was pretty far gone. Sitting in a soggy yard for three years didn’t do it any favours. It wasn’t quite “Project POStal” but based on my uneducated (I’m no engineer) guess, it only had like a year left before rust would cause a catastrophic failure of some sort. And that was ignoring the alarmingly disintegrated bumper crash bars and overall unibody rust so bad you could poke fingers through in some areas with no effort.

You’re more handy than I am so maybe you could have gotten two or three years out of it. Though before recent events involving my (poor) choice to remove the doors, I only expected to get up to a year out of it before it would no longer be roadworthy at all.

And, this car isn’t actually dead. The owner of the park plans on fixing it up and finishing my offroad kart idea. He wants to go full side by side with chunky tires. I figure this car is better off on a closed course than on public roads, anyway.

At least the Ranger is actually on to living a much cooler life. Transmission got fixed (apparently needed a lot of work) , it was completely repainted, and is living life as a daily making regular trips to Tennessee and back.

The Passat is going back to my old Gambler ways. The car’s like the smart, far too nice to be treated like it’s disposable.

shop-teacher > Mercedes Streeter 11/27/2019 at 06:54

1

Yours is just a specific example of why I am not interested in the Illinois Gamblers anymore. It used to be about the challenge of making a shitty car last, and make it do things it couldn’t. On my first Gambler, pulling the Corvazer off a berm with the Metro, and then us helping patch a Buick’s collapsed front suspension back together with a piece of sign post and bailing wire, was about survival in the face of adversity. That Buick not only survived the Gambler, but it drove back to Iowa, was Dd’d for a while, and Gambled again.

Now people just haul beaters to off-road parks and wantonly murder them while getting hammered. It’s not a rally anymore, it’s a fuckin’ demo derby.

That Festiva had plenty of life in it, and I don’t care what the park owners plans are, it’s dead in the sense that it is no longer, and never will be, a car. The Rally Metro had a lot of rust in it too. That was why XJDano let it go, it couldn’t pass inspection in Missouri anymore. I got more fun out of that thing that I could have possibly imagined, for almost no money. The rust is why I didn’t rebuild the engine. In hindsight, I wish I had rebuilt the engine. The RallyMetro had more to give.

I’m all about doing things in vehicles that weren’t meant for the job. You’re talking to a guy who has rallycrossed a Roadmaster wagon, and ridden a 125cc scooter 492 miles in one weekend. What the Illinois Gamblers have devolved into though, that’s a hard pass from me.

I told Bill the morning of the first Gambler, that I was glad we were in early, because I could tell this was going to get too big and too crazy for its own good. I was right.

Mercedes Streeter > shop-teacher 11/27/2019 at 09:54

0

I can’t argue with that because there’s a lot of truth to it. And now that you’ve pointed it out, I hate hate hate that I’ve contributed to it. Should have just given it away. :(

My first ever Gambler (the one you rode your scooter on) saw half the field destroyed at the first offroad park while the smart did two or three laps of the place with no more than scratches. My Festiva never ran an Illinois Gambler, only two Indiana Gamblers

Of the six or seven Gamblers I’ve been to around the Midwest and down south, all of them had vehicles intentionally destroyed. And from what I see, it’s a nationwide thing up to and including the OG.

Interestingly, Illinois isn’t even the worst for destruction. Ozarks (MO), Detroit, and Southern Indiana are worse. The organizers of Ozarks will throw bowling balls at your windows for being first to camp. Southern Indiana had an actual demo derby, which saw three cars that even I thought had plenty life left completely crushed. And Detroit? Detroit has been such a repeated yearly crapshow that I can’t even begin.

Thankfully the rally aspect is very much still there. My team usually does about 75% of the checkpoints (we did every checkpoint of Southern Indiana). Most cars that aren’t dying have usually seen numerous runs, if not survived more than a year or two of runs.

And there’s still some good going on. In Tennessee and both Indiana runs we donated a lot of money to charity and ran very successful food drives and trash cleanup. I believe the money from scrapping dead cars even went to the charity fund. Illinois promises to do better in those regards.

shop-teacher > Mercedes Streeter 11/27/2019 at 09:59

0

I actually considered offering to buy the Festiva off you, to keep you from killing it.  I'm done with the Gambler thing though. I'll stick to rallycross and riding my scooter.