I had the pleasure of tracking my car this past weekend, and while it performed admirably for its age and mileage, in the very last session on hairpins I found my steering had gotten very hard. My initial thought was just low fluid, but when checking the reservoir it was still nice and full. There wasn't any obvious noise like a squeal of a belt or a bad bearing. I figured it was still the pump though and swapped it out last night. When taking off the pressure fitting I noticed the spring and piston under it were bottomed out, so I figured I had found my problem. Put the new pump in, bled the system, fired it up and had the cooling fan working what appeared to be fine (2004, so hydraulic radiator fan). Didn't see any bubbles or anything and the fluid level stayed up. I could see the fluid was circulating in the reservoir as well. However, as I go to take off for work this morning I still didn't have any assist at low speeds. It seems sporadic where I might get a hint of assist from time to time, but more often than not I don't have much. Any ideas how to diagnose it next? Was thinking about pulling the line from the fan to the rack and starting it up briefly to see if there was any flow/pressure, but wasn't sure how much of a mess it would make. I hate to replace a rack only to find out it might be something as easy as a hose, but I'm not sure what to try to isolate the problem.