Project GRM Challenge E30

2012 E30 Calendars are here - R3VLimited Forums

2011-12-24T12:33:00.000-05:00

**2012 E30 Calendars are here** - R3VLimited Forums

PAST due for an update.

2011-09-12T01:11:00.000-04:00

I haven't updated in a LONG time. A ton has happened since the last update, so I'm going to try and keep things on the correct timeline... here goes.

Back on May11, we received our custom valved shocks from Bilstein. I assembled them with Ground Control struts, some drilled rotors, Hawk HT10 race pads and stainless steel brake lines.

Mark Massa from ground control provided me with the new front springs some stickers and a cool bottle opener.

While they were out i went ahead and cut off the brake dust shield to try and keep the brakes cool while on the track.

Unfortunately I received my Cometic metal head gasket AFTER assembling the stroked M20 for the magazine shoot... so over the course of the next few weeks, I pulled the head off..

Installed the metal gasket, and slapped the head back on the car.

John and Ben were able to source some cheap high-flow injectors at the junkyard. I went ahead and modified them to fit the fuel rail and prepared them for install.

Other than the head gasket, another "insurance" item on my to-do list was adding a Spal fan I had picked up at the junkyard a few years ago. I mounted it up and it works great. Its wired to a switch on the dash.

Another issue we had had with the car at the 2010 GRM CHALLENGE was uncontrollable boost. It wasn't a bad thing when the car only needs to last 2 days, but now that we were prepping for the UTCC, things needed to be kept under control. So, while everything was apart I added a wastegate flange to the turbo spacer plate we had made last year.

A pic of the new flange mounted to the HX35.

I also had to figure out a way to keep the stock wastegate flap from opening, so i drilled and tapped a small hole on the exhaust housing, and using a small piece of steel and a bolt locked the internal wastegate closed.

My next mini-project was to create a dump tube for the wastegate. Basically this directs all the extra HOT turbo gasses underneath the car. I took some scrap tubing john had lying around and i tack welded this together.

Once i knew it would fit, i threw it on the welding table and did all the final welding.

In order to keep the engine bay temps in check, I wrapped it with heat resistant header wrap.

Its a lot closer to the turbo oil drain than I would have liked , but I was running out of time to finish things up. I wrapped the drain with a Spark plug sleeve and hoped that the temps would stay cool.

Right around this time, I received the used Goodyear Race slicks I purchased online. I was still waiting on my Diamond Racing 16x10 race wheels... more on that later.

Its all in and at this point she's almost ready for the 2011 Ultimate Track Car Challenge!

Jay and Jason stopped by to lend a hand.

A few days later Ben and I did some tuning of stock Motronic... or I should say, Ben did the tuning while I drove, watched and asked a lot of questions.

One of the last things left to do was install a NASA legal seat belt...

Finish up the hood pins, add side-view mirrors and a tow hook...

...place a few of our sponsor stickers on the car.

This takes us up to about 2 weeks before the Ultimate Track Car Challenge held this past July.

Condor Speed Shop Shirts

2011-07-17T21:37:00.000-04:00

Guys, the Condor Speed Shop shirts are here, I have limited quantities, so if you want one, let me know soon. We have white (M,L,XL), grey (L,XL) and black (L,XL)! We also have a handfull of Ladies tank-tops. Email me for availability on these.
Please send $20 per shirt to silence8@aol.com I'll ship on Tuesday before heading to the Ultimate Track Car Challenge.

...and a quick tour of the neighborhood around the shop...

2011-07-12T21:16:00.001-04:00

Hopefully, by now most of you who follow this blog already know, that we've been invited to the 2011 Ultimate Track Car Challenge!

Our goal is to leave VIR with the $500 BimmerWorld Fastest BMW Award. It's less than 2 weeks away, and we need your full support. Its going to take over $1000 to tow the car to Va and back home again. I've designed some stickers so you can show your support for our team, while helping us get there.

These are 3"x3" and 9"x1.25" screen-printed stickers. Please donate $3 and I'll drop one of each in the mail for you. Send a PayPal payment to silence8(at)aol.com with a current mailing address. If you don't have PayPal, send me an email and ill send you my mailing address.

We appreciate your support. Don't forget to follow us on our Facebook page. Condor Speed Shop

Make sure you "like" us to keep track of all our projects!

Facebook Page is up!

2011-06-01T21:10:00.000-04:00

I have a few updates.

First of all I'm happy to announce that Bilstein has sent us a set of custom valved shocks for the UTCC! Awesome! We are very happy to have them as one of our sponsors. I'm currently in the process of installing them now.

Other than that, there's not a whole lot going on since my last update. Ive installed some new hood pins, and i have some spark plug wire heat resistant sleeves ready to go on.

On a side note, I've created a Facebook page chronicling the day to day activity going on in the garage. So if you want to know whats going on on a more regular basis, visit our page and watch us prepare our e30 for the 2011 UTCC at VIR. Tell us how much you 'Like' us today!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Condor-Speed-Shop/209850452380223?ref=hnav

You can also visit the eBay store I've opened. I sell m20, m42, m50 motor and transmission mounts along with power-steering deletes and a few other parts that were originally designed for this car. Visit www.condorspeed.com.

PERFORMANCE BMW photoshoot.

2011-05-01T22:15:00.000-04:00

We had just installed the motor on Saturday, I installed the transmission with no lift and no help on Sunday... let me tell you, its not an easy thing to do... Jay and Jimmy showed up a bit later and we buttoned up the intercooler pipes and all the accessories. We beld the brakes, and installed the driveshaft.
I went to work on Monday, and Tuesday morning came way too soon. The first thing i did was drill the holes for the hood pins and exhaust on the new hood. While Jay and Jimmy cleaned the car, I strategically placed the sponsor stickers. So far we have had help from Turner Motorsport, Bilstein, Mach V, and AEM. I really appreciate their support.

The Performance BMW crew showed up after lunch. It was a pleasure finally meeting Louise Woodhams, after only knowing her via email. She had told me she was interested in shooting the car back when it had the Warbird livery. They flew into Miami and will be in town for 11 days shooting 18 cars, as far north as Raleigh North Carolina.

On to the Pics:

After a long day, the guys and gal relax and admire their work.

In our next update we should be tuning the low compression M20 to work with the Holset HX35.

Checkout our powersteering deletes and UHMW motor mounts for M20, M30, M42, M50, M52 & S52 E30s at www.condorspeed.com

The 2.7 M20 is finally in the car!

2011-05-01T21:25:00.000-04:00

Things aren't always what they seem. I thought the head was ready after we milled it using sandpaper and a granite counter top... unfortunately there were still some deep scratches, and after quite a long fiasco... which involved loosing 4 days before finally taking it to the machine shop and getting it professionally milled. Once it was done, I was finally able to start getting things back together.

I soaked the springs retainers and cups in some degreaser.

Guiness to keep me energized for this task.

Parts are clean and dry.

I used John's modified valve spring compressor to install all the valves.

Intake side done!

Im ready to start the exhaust side. Always make sure you have lots of assembly lube.

Still sporting the smashed hood in this pic.

Ok now that they are all in its time to get ready to install the rockers, rocker shafts and camshaft.

Everything is lined up and ready to go in. THere is a very good step by step on www.e30zone.co.uk.

looking ready to go!

Not bad for a bunch of used parts.

After cleaning all the carbon off the block, we soaked it in transmission fluid.

clean as a whistle.

I put it all togther using the stock head bolts.

The very next day the ARP M20 head studs arrived.... I wasn't waiting to install them

A perfect fit...

Before installing the motor, Jay prepped the sub frame for Turner Motorsport sub frame reinforcement kit.

While Jay did that, I installed a Walboro 255 fuel pump. This should be more than enough for our power goals.

The stock lightened flywheel and SACHS clutch and heavy-duty pressure plate are on and the motor isready to go in.

In a very short amount of time, we were able to get the motor in the car.

Now all that's left to do is clean it up and take it for a test drive.

2011-03-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

So over the past couple weeks we have been working on getting the motor ready.

Our newest Condor team member, Ben Phelps, has been spending some time porting and polishing our race head.

He's just started taking material in this pic, but the final head will have the intake ports matched to the gasket and our previously ported intake manifold.

In the meantime Jay and I were working on sealing up the 2.7 liter bottom end.

Jay finishes installing the rear brake calipers.

Ben was at it for a few days making sure all the ports were even

Looking pretty good

The bottom end is finished and ready for the head.

In order to stay within the budget there was no way we could afford to pay a machine shop to resurface our head, so we did it ourselves.

All it took was sandpaper, adhesive spray mount, a granite slab and lots of elbow grease. It was a lot more work than expected, but between 3 of us we got it done.

John takes his turn.

A quick video of Ben going at it.

The final product... looking good, now all we need to do is assemble it.

stay tuned for more at www.dirte30.blogspot.com

Freaking Awesome!

2011-02-15T21:30:00.000-05:00

Our car is on the cover of the April issue of Grassroots Motorsports Magazine!

Jimmy had been trying to convince me to do the Warsteiner theme for over a year before the 2010 event! I finally agreed, and I'm glad we did it! This project has been a blast, 4 years in the making, with the final goal of not only being in the magazine being on the COVER!!! Thanks to all the guys at GRM! It has been great working with my Jimmy, we have met so many cool people in the process. Thanks to all the locals who come out and help! Jay, Bartley, John, Jason, Ben, Brian! You guys have all been a part of this project in your own way! Thank you, most importantly to my beautiful wife Christina, who has always supported me in everything I do. I love you baby.

2011-02-05T19:28:00.000-05:00

Jason and I were back at the shop this last Wednesday finishing up the rear brake caliper rebuild.

Just like the fronts, he pulled the rubber boots off, slid the pistons out, soaked and cleaned everything, then put it all back together again. It went by quickly and without any major issues.

In the mean time I took the intake manifold off the head

... and grabbed the oilpan from the parts block. The other pan was somehow cracked on the bottom. :0 THe new pan needed an oil return for the Holset hx35 to drain into.
I soaked the pan in some degreaser at John's shop.

I then pulled all the Home Depot fittings from the old pan, cleaned them and re installed them on the new pan.

After a while we needed something else to keep us busy, so we grabbed some spray cans and and John donated his shirt.... super-m20-man was born! You can have your own super-m20-man, all you need are some old hi-temp spray cans and a blown headgasket.

Teardown

2011-01-25T19:49:00.000-05:00

We were back at the shop last Wednesday tearing into our spare m20 from the parts car.

While Jay took care of the teardown, Jason was busy pulling our front brake calipers for a simple rebuild.

Once the brake calipers were out, we pulled the old rubber seals out, they were in pretty bad shape on the driver's side. fortunately the calipers and pistons looked pretty good. Bartley soaked/cleaned up the pistons and calipers, and then we put everything back together.

Once we had finished tearing down the parts motor, we moved on to the original motor that had been in the car. We knew we had blown the head gasket, but we were curious as to what else was going on.

Well, when we pulled off the valve cover we realized where the strange noises might have been coming from…

At some point on race weekend, we broke one of the rocker arms.

I really wonder when this happened. My guess is that it might have been on our last drag run, but what are the chances of this happening at the same time as blowing the headgasket?

Talk about a blown head gasket! 21psi FTW!

As we inspect things a bit closer, we also found that one of our valves had kissed the piston....

Looks like either some detonation occurred, or something got sucked into the motor.

All I know is that the m20 is a strong motor, for it to have this many things going on with it. I'm certain they didn't all happen at once. Its amazing that the motor was still strong enough to give us the 2nd fastest autox time, and a 12.3 1/4 mile run.

This Wednesday, we finishing rebuilding the rear calipers and start putting things back together.

2011 work begins on the race car.

2011-01-10T12:42:00.000-05:00

The past 3 months have flown by. We have all been super busy, Jimmy was busy preparing for his big move to Chile. I bought a house back in Aug, and with all the house remodeling going on, the car has been sitting, collecting dust since the event. Now is the time to get the car prepared for the 2011 Ultimate Track Car Challenge. Jay and I got together this past Wednesday.
I started by putting the car on jack-stands, and pulling the drive-shaft.

The driveshaft center support bushing and guibo both look good. I just need to get some new bolts,
I'm creating a list of all the parts we will need to swap or rebuild in order for the car to be safe.

Jay pull the Holset HX35 from the Manifold while I pulled the wiring harness.

We drained all the fluids, pulled the radiator and all the intercooler piping, turbo and all wiring.

The motor ready to come out.

Since we didn't have a load leveler, we had to get under the car and pull the transmission off before pulling the motor, otherwise we wouldn't be able to angle it enough to clear the firewall and radiator support.

Between the two of us we were easily able to pull it out.

Clean engine bay!

This week we pull the motor apart to check the headgasket.

2010-10-31T16:04:00.000-04:00

Its about that time...
Time for another update. For those of you that have not seen these videos yet. They are both Challenge videos from the Autox. The first vid is of our first 4 timed runs. The second vid is 2 fun runs, in which we were trying to beat our best time.
Enjoy.

12.3 second drag run at the GRM challenge

2010-10-08T08:23:00.000-04:00

This is our first of many videos that I will be uploading. This was our second run of the day. I ran a 12.9 on the first run, The car ran better than expected, and it really hooked up well in first and second gears, compared to last year(thanks John for the drag setup pointers), I hot lapped it and went straight to the line for run #2. Little did I know that we were going to loose the hood on this run ;) We ended up running our best time at the event, a 12.3 sec drag run at 117 mph. The car has an HX35 running 21lbs of boost with a Stock m20 motor. Tuning was done with the stock motronic and a 535 AFM. We blew the Head-gasket on the next run(3rd and final)! Have you ever seen a bunch of people celebrating the ripping off of a hood? Get ready to... (In reality we were happy about our time,...no really we were ;)

2010-10-06T01:57:00.001-04:00

So we're back from our 4th year at the challenge.
We had an amazing time hanging out with all of our old friends, and we were happy to have made some good new ones. Every time we go to the challenge we have the best time hanging with REAL people that love cars and are passionate about wrenching! We are happy to report that we duplicated our results from last year, 3rd overall, and 2nd in the Autox, plus we finished 3rd in the concourse this year, which was no easy feat!

Challenge Winners

Overall Winners: (All 3 going to the Ultimate Touring Car Challenge)
1) Wreck Racing / Ga. Tech Mazda Miata
2) Westside / Hooligan Mitsubishi Mirage GT
3) Condor Speed Shop BMW 325is

Drag Times:
1) PACC Racing, MG MGB: 10.67 sec.
2) Westside / Hooligan, Mitsubishi Mirage: 10.82 sec.
3) Team MiniMe, Dodge Aries: 11.64 sec.

Autocross times:
1) Wreck Racing / Ga. Tech Mazda Miata: 32.303 sec.
2) Condor Speed Shop BMW 325is: 33.118 sec.
3) Hong Norr Honda Civic: 33.564 sec.

Concours Scores:
1) Wreck Racing Mazda Miata: 22.8 pts.
2) PACC Racing MG MGB: 22.7 pts.
3) Condor Speed Shop BMW 325is: 21.95 pts.

Jimmy and i got together to create a build video to document the 4 years it took us to get the car from a normal every day BMW to a full on turbo track monster, which runs 12.3's in the drags. Another sweet prize for this year was winning admission to the UTCC at Virginia International Raceway in July of 2011!

I haven't posted updates to my blog in a while, because we were trying to keep things secret from a certain team that will remain nameless ... I will say that their car looked a lot like ours did (hey!). In any case, we have a lot of respect for those guys, and were flattered that they used our 09 car as inspiration for their build. Hopefully they will return more competitive next year. I will post all the previous build updates, and videos in the near future.

We're off to the 2010 grm challenge!

2010-09-30T15:57:00.000-04:00

Ok, well after an all nighter last night, we are on the road somewhere in central Florida, on our way to Gainesville. We have a good group with us this year, Jimmy, Christy, John, jay and Brian. We want to let you all know that if all works out we will be streaming the grassroots motorsports 2010 challenge live with in-car video. Video will start at approximately 9:00 and can be viewed at Justin.tv/condorspeedshop. Thank you all for the support.

Fill'er up!

2010-08-13T17:07:00.000-04:00

...with body filler! but before we get to that...

Last Wednesday we were back at it. It was only 3 of us, John, Jimmy and I.
John quickly finished the new intercooler pipes. they dont look like scrap but they came off a stock Hyundai exhaust that was given to me. (thanks Eric)

The car sits ready for the bodywork to begin!

Jimmy and I began by taking the panels down to the bare metal.

With all the sanding and grinding, our first paintjob(the warbird) was coming through)

This fender is ready for bodyfiller.

I began laying the body filler & sanding with the file...

... while john finishes up tacking up a small corner near the door jamb.

Once the night was over, I had layed about 2 coats on specific areas. It still needs more block sanding and more filler, but I think that with another work day, we can be ready for primer!

Today, Jimmy had the day off and spent all day working on the car.
He installed our dashboard that we scavenged from the Parts car we had a while back. Its still cracked and not perfect, but its better than the one we had.

He began prepping the entire car for paint, which includes dissasembly, and scruffing the bodypanels with a scotch pad...

...and taping up the windows.

Its looking scruffy!

Jimmy has also spent some time sendig emails to some of the larger manufacturers asking for free stickers. I dont know where we are going to fit all of these!

The past week's work

2010-08-09T00:10:00.000-04:00

We got some more work done this past Wednesday. Not as much as we has planned for, maybe it was because we had so many visitors.... more than the weekly Tuesday night e30 meet! You can see everyone here:

Some of you have already seen this video, but i'll post it for those that haven't.

I spent most of the night trimming the rear bumper some more...

.... and cutting, bending, and welding....

...these brackets to the rear of the car.

Jay was on caulk duty for the first half of the night,

...while Brian supervised... that is, in- between his trips to the toolbox. Brian had bad starter motor in his 325, and had to swap it while we did our thing on the race car. (You can see him and Bartley, in the video, working on the right side of the screen.)

John and Jimmy spent some time pressure testing our intercooler pipes, and found some leaks which required re welding some areas.

Today I spent a few hours finishing up the rear bumper installation...

And chopping up & test fitting the new front bumper covers

I think its coming together rather nicely.

I was so happy with the progress, I thought I'd share how it all has come together in a quick video.

Finishing the front fenders

2010-08-01T19:20:00.000-04:00

This past Wednesday Jay and I were back at it.

While I was working on mounting the rear bumper (more on that next week), he took care of the lower rusty portions of the front fenders. The first step was to cut the rusty bottoms out.

After making some templates out of cardboard, we traced them on a scrap body panel, Jay grabbed the cutting wheel and went at them.

Once the cutting was done, he sanded the paint off and prepped the fenders for welding. I threw them on my welding table and spot welded everything together.

I threw the finished driver's side fender on the car.

It still needs to be bolted in, but this is the general idea of how it will look.

Using the second piece Jay made, I was able to reproduce the same look on the passenger's side.

Widebody metalwork complete!!!

2010-07-23T17:15:00.000-04:00

This past Wednesday night we had a super productive workday. We had a few things on the agenda. 1. Finish our rear suspension work by re-installing the drive shaft. 2. re-install the clutch slave I "borrowed" for my daily driver a few weeks ago. 3. Work on our "TOP SECRET" experimental project. 4. Finish the metal work on the passenger side quarterpanel. 5. get the car started after about 3 months of sitting.

Unfortunately, Jimmy was stuck tightening the drive shaft bots with 2 adjustable wrenches... Thanks Jay, for bringing my tools back ;)

We got a ton of work done because there were 4 of us working on the car at once. After installing the Drive-shaft, Jimmy Aaron and Jay tackled our "TOP SECRET" project, while i jumped on the final cutting & welding of the quarter panel.

Once we finished, we threw the race wheels on it, and quickly lowered it off the jack-stands. That's when the camera phones came out!

Check out the stance on this thing, I can't wait to roll it out of the shop and take a look at it from a distance!

We even propped up the rear bumper with some empty beer bottles :)

I just want to thank the Jay, Aaron and John for coming out and helping Jimmy and I.

Widebody metal work almost finished

2010-07-16T00:13:00.000-04:00

I know its been a while since we've posted any progress, but it just seems like every pic I take of the car looks the same. Its hard to see progress when all you see are welds all the way down the a bunch of seams. but, I can say that this post contains some light at the end of the tunnel for those of you following the wide-body progress.

One of our newest team members, Tony came by two weeks ago to lend a much needed helping hand on our front fenders. He went at it with a grinding wheel and some bondo.

After a couple hours, he had sanded and filed the fender into what you see below. I cant wait for him to come back.

This past Wednesday both Jimmy and another new member, Jay came by to help again. They were working on some "very top secret" upgrades to the car. I can't show you any pics yet... but its good!
While they did their thing, I was able to start the final top section of the driver's side rear fender.

Again, i used some old scrap metal cut off of our old parts car.

It took a good 4 hours but I was able to finish it.

Next week we tackle the passenger's side.

GRM compilation v2

2010-06-25T20:56:00.000-04:00

more widebody work

2010-06-21T17:41:00.000-04:00

I've been slowly doing the metal work for the new wide body. The driver's side is done minus the top panel, so i moved to the inner passenger side wheel well. this was quite a bit more difficult due to the fuel filler cap, since I want to keep the fuel filler in the same location, only pushed out almost 3 inches. I had to box in the wheel well before re-applying the body panels.

This is a close up of some of the work i had to do to the driver's side area beneath the rear bumper.

Work continues... slowly

2010-05-30T19:22:00.000-04:00

I've been busy with some other projects, but in my spare time I have been able to get some work done on the wide-body. Its going slow, but i'm happy with the progress.

The rear wheel doesn't rub at all, even full compression with no springs installed.

I've had to do a LOT of detail work along the door jamb, and tail lights. I pulled the sheet metal out so far that id created a gap in both areas, and i've had to create some compound shapes out of steel, and then weld them in place. Its been very time consuming, but i've enjoyed the precision needed to get it perfect.

I've had to add strips of scrap sheet-metal to the tops of the fenders to get everything straight.

At this point al that is left to complete the driver's side is some detail work near the rear bumper, and fabbing up the top section out of the scrap fenders to close the gap.

Work begins on the rear subframe

2010-05-14T18:04:00.000-04:00

First of all I want to say that in the past few weeks work has continued on the wide-body project, even though I haven't posted many pics or updates. this is just a teaser pic.

On to the good stuff... The local e30 crew come over to the shop last tuesday to lend a hand and some moral support on our rear subframe removal, after hearing what happened to Jimmy the week prior...

He was pulling one of the rear shocks out, when he was hit by a rear axle that was supposed to be zip tied out of the way. A 4hour wait at the ER and some drops of superglue took care of the damage.

Once we got the entire subframe out, John went at it with a clamp and some home made pieces to get the stock bushings out...

Everyone had their own opinion on how we should get them out.

... eventually, Bartley was the winner, and we agreed to Bar-B-Q them out.

John had the honor of carrying the torch most of the night. ;)

Nice and clean.

Next week, we will put it all back together.

Rear spring spacers & subframe mounts

2010-04-30T17:20:00.000-04:00

For the 2009 grm challenge, we needed to raise the rear of the car by about .5 inches, so what better way to do it cheaply than by using plywood.

After about 6 months of autox and flat towing in the rain, the plywood spacers were beginning to rot. I had some leftover material from the motor mounts we made earlier this year, and I designed some custom spacers made specifically for our springs. My dad was nice enough to fab them up last week.

A quick test fit shows that they fit perfectly!

I can't wait to test them out at our next autox on the 9th, as long as jimmy and I get the car back together in time.

Another much needed upgrade we've been working on was some Rear sub frame mounts. I took a bunch of Pictures and Measurements from a buddies set of polyurethane mounts before John Installed them on his car.

With some scrap brass tube my dad had lying around his work, and a small piece of UHMW I bought online, we were able to come up with these.

I think they will work perfectly!

For those interested:
Ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE or sometimes shortened to UHMW), also known as high-modulus polyethylene (HMPE) or high-performance polyethylene (HPPE), is a subset of the thermoplastic polyethylene. It has extremely long chains, with molecular weight numbering in the millions, usually between 2 and 6 million. The longer chain serves to transfer load more effectively to the polymer backbone by strengthening intermolecular interactions. This results in a very tough material, with the highest impact strength of any thermoplastic presently made.[citation needed] It is highly resistant to corrosive chemicals, with exception of oxidizing acids. It has extremely low moisture absorption, has a very low coefficient of friction, is self-lubricating, and is highly resistant to abrasion (15 times more resistant to abrasion than carbon steel). Its coefficient of friction is significantly lower than that of nylon and acetal, and is comparable to that of Teflon, but UHMWPE has better abrasion resistance than Teflon. It is odorless, tasteless, and nontoxic.

Videos from the easter autox.

2010-04-24T21:05:00.001-04:00

Easter 4-4-2010 PCA Autox at bank atlantic.

This was run 3 of 4 in heat #1. This was the first run back on the stock Motronic and 535 AFM after trying a completely new setup with a Volvo MAF.

This was run 4 of 4 in heat #1. THe car was a little loose, but was still the fastest run up to this point. This was the second run on the stock Motronic and 535 AFM.

Final fitment

2010-04-18T19:46:00.001-04:00

Today went a lot slower than expected. After yesterday's quick
cutting and mock-ups, I expected to get to the shop today and tack
everthing in place... I was wrong. The first 2 pics are yesterday's
final fitment. What I realized today, is that with the suspension
fully compressed the tires would rub on the fenders. I pulled
everything apart, and removed the rubber undercoating, and rolled the
insides with a hammer. After a lot of trys, using rivets and tack
welds, I was able to get a fitment that followed the body lines, and
doesn't rub at full compression. The next time we work on the car,
I'll weld everything in permanently.

Friday I was at the junkyard, and was able to score this nice BMW e36
rear bumper. With the flares, it fits perfect, as if it was meant for
the car. We've been wanting to add this bumper for a while now, but
because of the style of our old box flares it wasn't possible... Until
now.
Oh by the way, I've been looking at another grm team getting ready to
compete in the challenge for the first time. They are also building a
bmw e30, and it's slowly becoming surprisingly similar to ours... I
don't know if I should be flattered or be angry that they are taking
many of our ideas... Whatever, Bring it on Vorschlag! We are looking
forward to meeting and beating you guys at the challenge!

Is it coming together or coming apart?

2010-04-17T14:34:00.000-04:00

I'm working on the rear quarter panel widebody. It's coming together a
bit differently than I imagined, but I'm happy with the look so far.

Rear fiberglass fenders are off.

2010-04-13T07:56:00.001-04:00

This is a quick update from some work we did last week. We drilled all
the rivets off, and popped both fiberglass fenders off the car. We are
ready to start cutting as soon as I get a new sawzall blade.

Autox time

2010-04-04T20:30:00.000-04:00

So John came over Saturday to tune/ burn chips for the new Volvo MAF conversion for the turbo m20. He has already come by once, on Friday to tune, but we wasted a lot of time chasing some connectivity issues between the Chip burner and the Laptop. I was planning to test it out at the April 4 autox. He must have burned the chip and installed it in the car a total of over 50 times in the past 2 days!... talk about being persistent, this guy never quits.

While John was burning/testing the chip, I ran to a friend's shop to mount and balance some old tires on the 15 x 10 race wheels. We are currently running 275/35-15 Hoosier A-6's, and we finally reached the belts on the front two at our last event at Homestead. I have a set of R-6's(leftover from the 2008 challenge) but they are only 225/45-15. Paul, tried to mount them on the 10" wide wheels, but they were too old, and wouldn't stretch the full width of the wheel, so he ended up mounting them on my old Sportmax 15x8.

I ended up competing on the15x8 with 225/45-15 in the front and the 275/35-15 mounted on the 15x10s in the rear. I really thought I was going to have a lot of problems with under-steer, but the car felt very neutral. throughout the event. I did have some issues with the MAF conversion and ended up switching back to my 535 AFM/ Ebay chip combo. I forgot my camera, but managed a couple pics with my iphone

I borrowed a friend's digi camera and mounted it ont the windsheild, so I should have some vids of my runs by mid week, but for the time being, you'll just have to settle for some fun videos Jimmy and I took after the last event. Enjoy ;)

Widebody Take 2 part 3

2010-04-04T19:35:00.000-04:00

In this update I finish up most of the metal work on the front fenders. I wanted to make sure both fenders were exactly the same, so before welding the driver's side fender seen below, I traced the top panel on some scrap poster board.

I took the tracing, cut it out, and used it as a template for the passenger's side fender.

Once it was mocked up, I welded the panels in place.

...and temporarily shot the welds with some left over olive drab spray paint. They turned out pretty good. i still need to cut the rusty sections out of the bottoms, but that's for a different day.

Widebody Take 2 part 3

2010-03-29T22:43:00.000-04:00

Today we got some work done on the front fenders. I cut another piece of poster board to test the fitment of the top panel. I'm still not happy with the shape of it in this picture.

We finally got the paper fitment perfect, and the next step was to trace it on the metal and cut it to fit.

Jimmy working on the fender.

This is the final fitment.

It's perfect.

I'm really happy with the transition between the panels.

There is about 3" of extra clearance.

Spot welds.

The other side will be finished on our next work day, which will be before this Sunday's autox.

Widebody Take 2 part 2

2010-03-28T21:22:00.000-04:00

Once the passenger's side was completely finished, I took measurements and mocked up the driver's side to within 1 mm of the same measurements.

there will be about 3" of clearance on each side over the stock fenders.It will be the same clearance as what we had on the original widebody kit.

This was my Saturday morning work space for my welding and grinding. I used a cutting wheel for all major cuts, and a dremel for any precision cuts, or hard to reach areas.

Unfortunately as I layed up the donor fender, it wasn't flexing like the other side, and I noticed it had some shoddy bondo work that will need to be repaired.

Once I got the fenders completely installed, I was ready for the top panel. I made a simple cutout from some poster board i had laying in the shop.

It looks too flat.

After some more cutting, I came up with a version that is a bit more rounded.

I still don't think i'm there yet. This has a bit too much arch in it.

Tomorrow we have planned another work day, and I'll cut a new template that will follow the body upper lines a bit better...

To be continued...

Widebody Take 2

2010-03-25T23:42:00.000-04:00

We were never happy with the way our fiberglass widebody turned out. It was a rushed job we completed a couple weeks before the 2009 challenge. We diddn't have the time to smooth it out, so we used undercoating to hide some of the inperfections, and painted the car a dark color to hide the rest...

Now that we have some time, and we've gathered some fenders and quarter panels from the old parts car we had a few months back, we are ready to give it another shot. I've been thinking about ways that we can make it work, and have it still look clean at the same time.

The first step was to remove the old fiberglass from the stock fenders.

Once the fiberglass had been separated from the fender, Jimmy mounted the right side back on the car and cut it in some very specific places so we can fabricate our new steel widebody fenders.

While he was cutting, I cut the new fenders to size.

We positioned the new fender with some clamps...

...and adjusted the fitment until the tires had enough clearance so they won't rub.

Once we got it positioned exactly where we needed it, Jimmy took the wheel so he could start the other side, and I began to spot weld it all together.

You can see the extra clearance we will have so we can run our 15 x 10s.

So far we're super happy with how this is turning out!

March 21 Homestead Autox

2010-03-22T19:48:00.003-04:00

It was 6 am when Jimmy and I met at the shop to pull the car out and load everything in the back of the truck.
We grabbed the Jack, Jackstands, a bag of tools and race tires before hooking the car up to the truck for the hour long flat tow to Homestead Speedway.

We watched the sun come up on our drive down the turnpike.

Once we arrived, we both registered as drivers, and prepped the car for inspection.Both our front tires were already corded, but luckily the inspector didn't notice.

What a blast! I love driving this beast around the track!

Another one of our e30 buddies was there competing with his track rat.

We each got 5 runs.

Once the dust settled, I missed first place by a tenth of a second

In the end, it was a super fun Sunday, spent doing what I wish I could do every day.

Videos:

Getting ready for sunday's autox at Homestead Speedway

2010-03-18T21:00:00.001-04:00

The Shop

2010-03-07T23:20:00.001-05:00

The Shop
Originally uploaded by Ocell

Chris came over today, and took this badass shot while i was cutting some metal. i love it.

Street tires

2010-02-28T21:55:00.000-05:00

I took the old wheels we used in the GRM Challenge back in 08, I mounted a new set of street tires on them, and mounted them on my Daily Driver. you can see pics here www.rede30.blogspot.com. I took the old wheels I had on it and mounted them on the race car. They look pretty good.

Autox preparation continues.

2010-02-21T20:23:00.001-05:00

At the last PCA autocross, I had to bail on one of my runs because the entire gauge panel popped out halfway through the course, and was flopping all over the place. I cut up our existing panel of carbon fiber, and using the original heater controll panel I mounted all of our gauges. It came out pretty good.

To Do list before the next event...

Today I tested the compression on our spare M20, and all cylinders were within 10% of each other.

More work completed.

2010-02-20T18:05:00.002-05:00

Well, while I was working on the suspension, I noticed our front sway
bar mounts were coming apart. I made a quick trip to the junkyard, and
was lucky enough to find a convertible with urethane mounts... I paid
less than $3 for both! While I was there I was able to find a one way
valve for our broken brake booster.

Motor mounts replaced.

2010-02-17T22:50:00.002-05:00

After destroying both stock mounts, I bought some material and had it
shipped to my father up in Va. I took the measurements, and using a
lathe, he was able to make these super cool solid motor mounts for me!
I even have trans mounts to match! Thanks dad!

Finally the front suspension rebuild is done.

2010-02-17T22:43:00.003-05:00

i've also just figured out how to post directly from my phone which will be super cool now when i'm in the shop and too tired to upload photos to my comp, then sit and post!

Suspension work continues

2010-01-24T22:06:00.001-05:00

Saturday I spent the day at a friend's shop, John, from 90 Inclusive. He was nice enough to lend me his spring compressor which I used to remove the springs from the rusty parts car struts, sorry, no pics. I then cut them up to use as new center sections on our current struts.

Once everything was cut, and the surfaces prepped, I was ready to weld them together.

John took a quick snapshot of me using his Tig to weld the new collar on the strut housing. I forgot to take pics of the finished pieces, but I will upload some this week.

Rebuilding suspension & motor mounts

2010-01-23T09:23:00.001-05:00

I took out both motor mounts, and they had both sheared completely. I was planning on replacing them with hockey puck s, but i dont think the hockey pucks will be thick enough. Plus hockey pucks are $8 at Sports authority, and I need 4, 2 for engine and 2 for the trans. If anyone has some old pucks they'd like to get rid of, please let me know.

While I was at it yesterday, I decided to go ahead and redo the front suspension. I was never very happy with how it turned out. The top screw of the bilstein doesn't reach the strut housing and wont hold it in securely. I kept the front suspension from the parts car, and i'll be using it to cut and weld the new strut housing.

Today should be a busy day

Houston, we have a problem.

2010-01-17T21:30:00.003-05:00

Today, after trying to chase a no-start issue, I spotted something very disturbing, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves...

The motor is already an inch out of place in these shots.... That means that it needed to move a total of 2 inches over, towards the passenger side to make these dents.

It turns out that at the last autox, I broke the motor mounts. Probably because of the cold front we had. It was in the 40's that morning.

...not good.

Soul

2010-01-13T23:37:00.003-05:00

The DirtE30Originally uploaded by Ocell

Shot by Chris Owens at the Jan 2 autox, He's captured the spirit of the car in one beautiful shot.

Check out his photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ocell/

We're rich and famous!

2009-12-29T22:25:00.005-05:00

Well, in all honesty, we haven't exactly won the lottery, or through a stroke of good luck, become famous, but our hard work has paid off, and we've got what we've never thought was possible, Grassroots Motorsports Magazine (www.grassrootsmotorsports.com) has an article about our car in their latest issue! Its actually about the car as it appeared in the 2008 GRM challenge. I've uploaded the low resolution proof for those of you too cheap to go out and buy the real thing! Enjoy, and go out and tell alll your friends!

Last autox event of the Year!

2009-12-16T17:09:00.005-05:00

After all the issues we had at the Bank Atlantic autox, we wanted to finish the year off with a bang, and that's just what we did. Jimmy and I signed up for the Homestead autox. After our spectacular radiator failure at the last event, we made sure the car was running "tip top" at this event. Jimmy spent some time the week before replacing the busted radiator and hose, he tightened up the shifter with some o-rings our friend Bartley gave us, and when Sunday morning arrived, we hooked the car to the back of the truck, and were off to Homestead.

Christy, like always was at home helping us swap wheels.

We had lots of good help when my sister and her family showed up!

Our newest pit crew member hard at work.

A drive-by video I shot of Jimmy driving using my phone.

A better quality in car video of one run.

We had some stiff competition in our class, a Mitsu Evo IX, Subaru STI, and a Corvette Z06!

When the dust settled, we had the best results to date an an autox.

Back in the saddle again.

2009-11-16T22:24:00.006-05:00

We heard that the Porsche club was holding an autox a few miles from where we live. We signed up and were ready to go at 8 am.... not without the usual few glitches, like getting to the event and realizing the keys to the car were still at home! Christy was nice enough to go pick them up for us while we prepared the car for the tech inspection.

We both signed up, so we had a total of 8 runs each. 4 in the morning set, and 4 in the afternoon set. Jimmy's first 4 runs went without any issues other than the car running very hot due to a broken fan clutch.

Little by little he chipped away at his times, and between both the morning session and the afternoon session, he ended running a best time of 54.486.

Because of the broken fan clutch, we were running on borrowed time... with coolant temps in the 230's.

My runs were after Jimmy's and unfortunately the car had no time to cool down.

I spun on my first run, running a 60.081. On the second run I ran a 52.991, but hit a cone, so a second was added. My best time came on my 3rd run, a 52.451, good enough to put us in 14th position.

On my final run of the morning session, I cracked the hose connector off the radiator

We thought that was the end of our day, but fortunately Bartley and his son Sven were kind enough to lend us a spare radiator they had in their garage down the street. We swapped radiators, filled up the coolant, and made it just in time for Jimmy to go out and do his second session.

On Jimmy's final run, the car burst the lower radiator hose. With no spare, that was the end of our day and I wasn't able to do my last 4 runs. Even with the cooling issues, we had a blast, and were able to hang out with some really cool people, while giving the car a good shakedown. We know what we need to improve on, and what needs to be replaced/repaired before our next autox on December the 13th in Homestead. Our fastest time was good enough for 14th out of 52 cars in our class.

A bunch of our buddies came out to the event to support us and take some pictures(thanks Rolando). Christy fired the grill up and cooked some chicken, It was a nice day in the parking lot ;)

Parts cars are never boring!

2009-11-10T23:25:00.003-05:00

After a hard days work, actually only 3 hours , we decided to have a bit of fun... as if completely dismantling a car isn't fun ;)

If you look at the second bounce, the tire left the ground, before the spring popped out!

Prep for 2010 begins!

2009-11-10T15:25:00.008-05:00

Its been a little over a month since the 2009 Grassroots Motorsports Challenge. We have had time to relax and do everything we didn't have time to do in the months leading up to the event. Needless to say we are still motivated, and have big plans for 2010. The first step of our plan includes finding a good parts car where we can source some good metal panels for our new widebody. We recieved really good feedback on our fiberglass fenders, but I was never happy with the undercoating treatment that we had to resort to because of time constraints. I really would have liked to finish them correctly by smoothing them out with fiberglass filler and a light coat of bondo. Rather than strip them down and finish them, and still not be 100% happy with the shape, we are planning on creating a steel widebody similar to the e30 M3 widebody, only much more extreme.

Some friends of ours purchased this non running automatic 325is for $250. They want it for the LSD, wheels, headlights, spoiler and complete interior. Once they are done with it they offered it to us for next to nothing. Its got quite a bit of rust, and the paint is pretty far gone.

At this point the stripping has just begun, We have only pulled the front fenders and trunk lid for our challenge car.

A few days later we were back at it with a cutting wheel and a sawzall. We cut out both Quarterpanels and the inner wheel wells in one piece.

We also cut out the rear section of the roof panel for our sunroof delete mod that we will be performing in the near future.

I also took the headliner and quarterpanel windows for my 318is project which can be seen here, www.rede30.blogspot.com.

At the 2009 Grassroots motorsports Challenge

2009-10-26T15:18:00.010-04:00

Day 1 Thursday morning we were all packed up and on the road by 10:30 am. We had a 6 hour drive to Gainesville ahead of us.

Things went smoothly for the first 5 hours.

About 60 miles from Gainesville, the driver's side front of the car began to bounce. We pulled over to see what the problem was and discovered our tire was grossly disfigured! We jacked the car up swapped the wheel with our only spare.

Check out the lump on it!

We had a good laugh and put things back together.

Day 2 At the event. The first thing we did after getting the car through Tech inspection was get in line for the Concours portion of the event.

Later that day we did all of our Autox runs

Bartley and his son Sven were nice enough to meet us at the event, and give us a hand whenever we needed some help.

Day 3 Drags.

Andy Nelson set the fastest time of the day in his Beetle.

Team Gutty's CRX was fast on the Autox and on the drag, and ended up taking the overall win.

Some Drag pics

Below is a Vid of the Awards ceremony showing Jimmy and I receiving our 2nd place Autox plaque. I want to thank my dad, Carlos Mendez, for taking the time to create our aluminum adapters so we could run such wide wheels and do so well.

A pic of our plaques!

Day 4 Heading home with a 3rd place finish, already planning for next year.

3rd Place overall!

2009-10-12T09:54:00.006-04:00

We have returned from the challenge this year with great results, we placed 3rd overall out of 55 entrants! I have compiled a list of pics we have found on the internet. Jimmy and I here checking the car before one of the autox runs, with one of the professional drivers that really wanted to drive the car, but we had already chosen another driver.

Autox pictures from one of our runs
We chose Allan Mc Crispin as our driver. He has won a few national autox titles, and was really able to squeese every last bit of power and traction out of the car. Our best time was a 30.776 which put us in 2nd place. We were only .214 of a second behind the first place car ran a 30.562.

Video

Video taken by a spectator of one of our autox runs.

Drag Pictures

We spent the entire day Saturday at the drags, I must have made 30 passes on the car trying to get into the 13's. We were having traction problems in firs gear, and coldnt run more boost than what the stock wastegate allowed. Next year we will be more prepared.

Videos
This is one of our drag runs taken from inside of the car

This isnt a run of our best time of the day, which was a 13.847, but its a nice vid taken by another spectator.

If you have taken any of these pics or video, please let me know and i will give you the credit

light at the end of the tunnel

2009-10-05T10:49:00.004-04:00

To start off, I've been designing a retro looking logo/sign for the side of the car and for our t-shirts. I really want our theme and the car to have a vintage look to it this year. We are going as the Condor Speed Shop car. The condor is the national bird of Chile, and idea of a condor came from both Jimmy and I being Chilean. Please comment on any thoughts and feelings you think this logo can invoke once painted on the doors of the car.

First thing we had to do was cut our exhaust off since it was about 1/4 inch off the ground. Now it dumps straight down. (there are jackstands under the car!)

I finally finished our harness bar. Jimmy painted it black, and it looks great.

Getting our first look at the car out of the garage.

Our vintage red interior, paired with the Iron gray color helps bring our Oldschool speed shop theme together.

We did an alignment, and put on the front end

Wiiide body!

Shakedown

2009-09-27T23:03:00.002-04:00

so we've been working hard on the car all weekend, and today, we were finally able to take the car on our first shakedown run.

New tool! A pipe bender!

2009-09-24T17:27:00.002-04:00

SO i picked up a pipe bender over the weekend. I went to McKenzie Steel in Ft. Lauderdale and bought some flat 1/4 bar and some steel tubing for my next project. Can you guess what it is?

Front fenders installed and textured.

2009-09-11T09:25:00.004-04:00

We were able to install both front fenders, because we are starting to run low on time, we realized that we would not be able to finish the fenders how we originally planned, so after some creative thinking by Jimmy, we sprayed them with some undercoating. This will hide some of the imperfections.
I'm not 100% convinced that I like it yet, but its all that our time constraints will allow.

We were able to get the Rear driver's side mounted. It needs some smoothing, and a few coats of the undercoating.

More weight reduction and FG work

2009-09-04T16:49:00.005-04:00

Because we've taken the weight reduction so seriously in other aspects of the car, we decided to do the same with the doors. While I was on Vacation Jimmy was hard at work. He completely cut out the inner panels, saving about 5-7 lbs.

While I was away he also painted all 4 of our basset wheels flat black.

Our next step before permanently mounting the FG panels is to make room for our new wheels. In order for them not to rub I had to cut into our steel 1/4 panels. I cut out a 2" strip off the top side of the wheel well.

At this stage, using my hammer and dolly I joined the inner and outer sheet metal you see pictured below. I then used my welder to re-join the two panels. It was a long arduous process, but it came out perfect. Unfortunately I don't have pictures to show. Jimmy then slathered the welded areas with some caulking, and our next step will be mounting the fenders.

The Fronts have turned out great. We still need to permanently mount the rear portions of the fenders, but these pictures show how the fenders have turned out.

Fiberglass Mock up

2009-09-03T09:28:00.002-04:00

Well, we finished the first steps of making our wide body fenders. In the following pics, we are trying to get an idea of how things are gong to look, and how far out we need to go to cover our new wheel/tire combo.

2009-09-02T10:55:00.004-04:00

Well, I've been slacking a bit on the posting front, but that doesn't mean we haven't been up to much. About 1 month ago we received our new wheels, and test fitted them on the car. The pictures speak for themselves.

Jimmy also spent some time working on removing our heavy stock battery and re-routing it to the passenger seat area.

New Front Suspension

2009-07-24T16:54:00.002-04:00

While we were waiting for our wheels to arrive, I wanted to take advantage of the time we had, and we decided to scrap the H&R Race Springs for some custom coilovers. We ended up saving about $100 from our budget. I took the stock struts and cut the spring perches off. I then sectioned the strut in order to lower the placement of the threaded sleeve. I have done the same on my street car without lowering the perch, and the lowest setting is not low enough for this car.
I then Re- welded the parts back together in the new order. Basically i cut out a 1" scction from below the perch and moved it above the perch. It was a lot of work, and if I had to do it again, i'd probably only grind off the existing perch and weld i a new one instead of cutting everything apart.

A lot of time was spent griding in order to get the sleeve to slide on with no problems.

I shot them with some green paint, and they are good to go.

Work has started again!

2009-07-23T16:52:00.002-04:00

Well, it has been a while since i posted any updates, but we've been busy behind the curtain acquiring parts and coming up with a game plan for this year. These are the plates I designed, and my dad machined out of some scrap aluminum. They will allow us to bolt up some wide-5 wheels (15x10) to our 4x100 bolt pattern.

We got our new Hoosiers! Got them for free too! 275 35 15. Look at the difference between stockers and those!

A quick shot of where we expect the offset to be on the rear. I used my DD because I was working on the wheel bearings, and already had the wheel off.

Another quick shot of where we expect the offset to be on the front.

How wide can you go?

2009-05-06T15:50:00.007-04:00

We're back and we're working on the car big time now. We want more grip for the autox, and we still want the car to look good, so we have devised a plan that will blow your mind. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Kirkey seat install

2009-05-04T15:49:00.007-04:00

We've had this seat sitting around since last year's challenge. I'm sure Jimmy is smiling below because its not in his garage anymore! We picked up this seat for cheap because it was used, and the previous owners didn't fit in it any more. It was mounted in a fiero that I believe now competes in the 24 hours of lemons. You can see the large aluminum panel we had to cut off of the back of the seat.
We took apart our driver's side seat, and we are using the stock seat rail as the base for our custom seat slider.
We cut all the unnecessary brackets off the slidersWe picked up some 1" x 1" steel bar and cut it to fit the sliders. This will keep the sliders aligned. We're using the L brackets that came with our used seat.
I had to mount the L-brackets backwards in order to keep our square tubing square whileI welded it to the sliders.
Jimmy heats up part of the slider in order to bend it more easily.
Completely welded, with all mounting holes already drilled. We had to drill them before welding.
It all bolted together quite easily because we took our time and didn't make any mistakes.
Here I am tighetening the seat rail bolts
There it is. A used Kirkey's seat, some square bar and an old seat rail.

New steering wheel & homemade hub!

2009-04-29T23:00:00.007-04:00

I ended up pulling this steering wheel off of my daily driver because it would not de-activate the turnsignals when turning. Its a great match for this build because of the low cost of the wheel, and the DIY hub. I think it definitely looks more at home in this car!I have copy/pasted the original post from my other blog below so you can see how I created the hub.

So, I found an old steering wheel at the Junkyard. I really liked the retro look of it, so i bought it for less than $6!

I brought it home and began looking for a hub that would work. Everything i found was $$, and I really didn't feel like paying $60 for a new MOMO hub. I grabbed the stock steering wheel, and decided to cut it up into a custom hub/adapter.

I began by separating the wheel from the stock aluminum hub. I had to cut and grind a lot of parts off including the airbag wiring and horn wiring.

After about 30 mins of cutting, I spent some time sanding the surface smooth on my belt sander. I then drilled 3 holes on the hub and 3 matching holes on the steering wheel. THis is the finished product.

Here is a side shot of the clearance i have between the wheel and the column. I'm really happy with the final product and the way it makes the car feel even more responsive.

I used some stainless nuts and bolts to install the wheel. I am still planning on refinishing it, and wiring up the horn.

Autox Video

2009-04-29T14:22:00.005-04:00

Well we took a bunch of video footage during the challenge, but I've been too busy to compile it and convert it and re-size it.... I had some spare time today, so I created this short video of one of our autox runs.

Turbo BMW e30 at the 2008 GRM Challenge autox from Carlos Mendez on Vimeo.

Chop top?

2008-12-16T22:47:00.003-05:00

Well... ive been thinking about what to do for next years GRM challenge, and I had this idea last year, but jimmy and I decided against it, I don't remember if it was because of time, or better judgement. In any case I decided to do a photo-chop. let me know what you think in the comments section.

New Drag Video

2008-10-21T09:46:00.003-04:00

AngryCorvair has again uploaded one of our drag runs! Thanks.

New Autocross video

2008-10-19T22:23:00.004-04:00

Thanks goes to AngryCorvair for uploading this video of one of our Autox runs.

16th out of over 51 competitors

2008-10-06T14:10:00.002-04:00

...and we won an award for "Best Visual Package"

Day 2 Drags

2008-10-06T11:59:00.006-04:00

So after a long 1st day, we got up early for the drag portion of the event. We drove out to the track, and unpacked all our stuff. We removed the autox tires from the front, and unfortunately did not have drag slicks for the rear so we ran the autox tires at 20psi. We ran into trouble early. The car would not start at 8:30Am. We began to check and double check all of out connections and sensors. 20 minutes turned into 1 hour. We checked for spark, we had it, we checked for fuel, we had it, we checked the injectors, we swapped ECUs, we were running out of options. 1 hour turned into 3 hours. We had a lot of help from some friendly challengers and spectators. It turns out that after trying to start the car so many times, we had fouled the plugs. The girls went out to pick up a new set and when they returned we installed them and the car fired right up! ....it only took about 5 hours!

So we were ready! We only had a couple of hours left to get our runs in for the day, so I jumped in the car and drove it straight to the drag strip. My first run was a 14.2 at 104mph. I was not to happy, but i know the car had more in it. I was spinning the tires all through 1st and 2nd gear. It even got squirly in the beginning of 3rd.

We did 2 more runs, but the car began to act up again, and was popping and sputtering in higher rpms. After the 3rd run it cut off, and wouldn't start again. I had to push it back to the pits. Fortunately Jimmy and another challenger in a miata was nice enough to come give me a hand and tow me to the pits.

It turns out we had blown off the rubber hose connecting to the throttle body. After re-attaching it, we were back in business!

9 runs later, we had two 14 second passes with a highest trap speed of 107 mph. With more traction i I think this car can definitely run low 13's. One of the 14 second passes was run starting in second gear with a trap speed of 104 mph! I want to give Bucky Thomas props for porting the intake manifold, and really creating a monster out of this car. The throttle response is amazing! Without the high airflow I doubt we'd have such a high trap speed.

We ended up staying at the track after everyone left, bar-b-qing and drinking a few beers!. What a day, we had a blast, and did respectably well.

Stay tuned for more pics and more videos of the runs!

Day 1 Concours and Autox

2008-10-05T20:40:00.007-04:00

So we woke up early Friday morning, and we towed the car to the track. Christy snapped some pictures of us going to get the car through tech inspection.

After the car passed Tech, we cleaned it up and went to get in line for the concourse portion of the event. We wanted to do it first before we got the car too dirty from racing it.

Once it was all said and done we placed 13th out of 54 entrants in the concourse.
Out of 25 points in each category we had:

judge 1
19 interior

21 exterior

20 engine

20 overall

judge 2
21 interior
21 exterior
20 engine
22 overall

judge 3

17 interior
22 exterior
23 engine
23 overall

judge 4

19 interior
22 exterior
22 engine
21 overall

We are super happy with our score, and we know exactly where we can improve next year.

Back at the pits we were getting ready for the autocross. We topped off all fluids and checked tire pressures.

After 5 runs, our best autocross time was a 43.91 second time which placed us in 17th place. We had issues with not having enough grip in the rear tires. I think it was because we removed so much weight the car would not plant it self well. With more time and some more testing i think we could have definitely gone faster. We also were running less boost than last year, so that is also something we can remedy for 2009.

The Day before the Challenge

2008-10-05T20:35:00.004-04:00

So we woke up early Thursday Morning and pulled the car out of the garage. It was the first time we looked at it after completely painting it. Wow it looks so nice! I think the paint scheme came out great! We snapped some quick pics, and started packing for the long drive up to Gainesville....

Unfortunately the car started up and ran for about 2 mins before cutting off and not starting up again! We didn't know what had happened or why it cut off, but we messed with it for about 5 hours that morning before loading it onto the trailer... It still wouldn't start, but i figured we might as well go and see if we could fix it there. Christy and i drove the truck(thanks Matt) and jimmy drove up with Mariana a bit later. When we arrived I immediately began checking things in the parking lot. I re-soldered the AFM extension hoping that that was the problem, but still it would not start. There were a bunch of people walking around the parking lot that night, saying hi and looking at this years challenge entries. One of them was Johnny with the Yugo, He started fiddling with the coolant temp sensor connection, and viola, it fired right up! Thanks Johnny!

Goodbye MegaSquirt.

2008-10-05T20:03:00.005-04:00

During all of the paint prep, my buddy Carl Osterman and I were spending a lot of time trying to get the MegaSquirt to connect to the laptop. It was all wired in correctly, and when tested with a stimulator, it works fine, but for some reason, when we try to upload the firmware, it only works 10% of the time. The few times that we were able to get the firmware correctly uploaded, we would begin to update the settings in Megatune in order to start the car, and when trying to burn to the ecu, the connection would fail, and the Megasquirt would crap out. THen it was back to square 1...trying to upload the firmware again. This went on for about a week, 4 hours a day(after work). I was so fed up and frustrated, that with only 5 days left for the challenge, I decided to abort our Megasquirt plan and go back to the stock Motronic computer. We wouldn't have all of the tuning optios we had with the Ms, but Jimmy and I had run thi stock ecu last year, so we knew how it worked. christy cut the holes out of the carbon fiber panel for the gauges.Jimmy getting the AFM ready to be put back on the car now that we were not using MS.
almost all buttoned up and ready for the event... THe car had not been started in about 9 months!

looking nice!

We then taped off the sections that were gong to be red and yellow, and I painted them in the following nights. Christy and Mariana, cut out some stencils that I designed, and we sprayed the bombs on the fender and the Iron Cross on each quarter panel. THis shot was taken the morning that we left for Gainesville.

Time to paint!

2008-10-05T19:08:00.010-04:00

So with less than a week before the Grassroots challenge, Jimmy and I began to prep the car for paint. I had an Idea for the look we wanted to achieve. I did a quick photo-chop of our idea about 5 months ago. You can see it below.

So we began the bodywork, sanding, and paint prep. It took us about 2 days. The body was relatively straight, there were a few door dings, and we had some damage on the roof from removing the sunroof panel. I repaired those areas with bondo, while Jimmy, Mariana, Christy and Sue helped sand and scruff the areas that needed to be painted.

We painted the car in my small 1 car garage. You can see the covered tool benches and washer and dryer in the background. THere was not much room, but we did the best we could with what we had.
The first coat was the semigloss olive green color. Jimmy got it from Sherwin Williams. It's an oil based exterior paint. I shot the entire lower half of the car with 2 coats. We used less than 1 pt. We didn't take any pics of it, but you can see the next step where i have covered the green with tape and paper, and already sprayed with the semi-gloss black. It sprayed on surprisingly smoothly with the $14.99 spray gun from Harbor Freight!

I hung the hood and trunk from the garage door in order to paint both sides at one time.

smoothing & painting the engine bay

2008-09-10T16:11:00.005-04:00

Well, before re-installing the new wiring harness, we wanted to smooth out the engine bay, so we cut out all the extra unused brackets, and smoothed out any imperfections in the metal with some bondo. We taped up the engine and fenders, prepped for paint, and painted the engine bay army green...this might give you a hint of what our car might look like in the very near future. Jimmy also painted the valve cover bronze. Our intake manifold and turbo were off at the time. I think it looks very nice.

MegaSquirt

2008-09-10T11:38:00.003-04:00

In order to squeeze more power out of our motor we decided to buy and build a DIY ECU. We chose MegaSquirt because of its low cost and large online support. I began with a box of resistors capacitors and diodes. After what seemed like 100s of hours i completed it and this is what it looks like.
So after performing the wire tuck with the body harness, I pulled out the engine harness and re wired and taped it in its new layout in order to tuck these wires as well. We hope to have a visually wire free engine bay.

April 08 Wire Tuck

2008-08-20T12:10:00.003-04:00

Our first order of business was...to perform a wire tuck. We wanted the engine bay and cockpit to be completely wire free, so without hesitation I began with the under dash wiring harness. I stripped the entire interior of all wires, and only left what was absolutely necessary. Next I moved to the engine bay where i pulled out the chassis wiring and moved it so that it goes through the fender. It was a lot of work but it think it will be worth it to achieve the look that we want.

March 08 Work Begins

2008-08-14T16:40:00.005-04:00

So once the challenge was over Jimmy and I drove it around for a while, I took it to work a few times, and Jimmy made some good videos of it on the road (you can see those linked on your right), but eventually it started stumbling and running like absolute crap. We parked it for the winter, and it sat until March of 08. When i was finally motivated to begin working on it again, i went outside to push it onto the garage, and this is what i found!

Challenge Autox Pictures

2008-08-14T09:17:00.007-04:00

Once we were in Gainesville, our first priority was to get the car ready for the competition. So Friday morning after waking up at 5am, we drove the car from the hotel to the track. It was about 15 miles, where Jimmy and i did some tunning. We basically adjusted the boost controller so the boost would come on smoothly. At the track we swapped our street tires with the Toyo RA1s, and did some last minute adjustments on the car. I took it out for a quick spin on one of the side roads, and it died on me! I had to push it about 1/4 mile back into the pits! After getting some help from jimmy, and poking our heads i the engine bay we discovered we had a huge vacuum leak. We plugged it up and were ready to run(we still had another vacuum leak that we could hear but couldn't find). I made a couple passes on the autox course, and at one point we were in 8th place!... That is until the professional drivers took the course. We ended up letting a few of the pros drive the car, and they really drove it hard. My time was about 2 seconds slower than theirs, and when the dust settled we placed in 11th on the autox course. Next up was the concourse portion of the event(pictures from last post). The drag portion of the event was rained out, so based on the concourse score and the autox score, we placed 11th in the final. We had a blast and learned a ton about what to do and how to prepare for the challenge in 2008, We have huge plans for the car(think lighter, more power and more grip).

The Day of the Grassroots Motorsports 2007 Challenge

2008-08-08T08:47:00.005-04:00

After three months and no less then 400 combined working hours we had finally gotten the car ready. Both of us will say that it wasn't easy; Our body's reflected the hundreds of work hours that were devoted to getting the car to competition level. Although the car was still lacking a few more hours or work we were ready to take on the world. The event was held in Gainsville approximately 4 hours to the north of fort Lauderdale. Upon arrival we were quickly humbled by the massive amounts of incedible cars that we saw when we turned into the parking lot of the event hotel. Excitement became doubt and concern for our car now named the "dirtE".

The Week Before

2008-08-07T15:35:00.006-04:00

As we got to within a week of the Grassroots Motorsports Challenge of 2007, things really started to come together. It was a very hectic time, we were working on the car every night until very late, but we managed to finish up all the loose ends.

We painted the entire front end of the car after fitting a later model BMW front lip.

We also put a fresh coat of black on the rear spoiler and painted the Borbets Bronze. They were nice looking wheels.

THis was our work space where we spent a good part of 2 months!

Our Interior was finished. We stripped it of any extra weight and installed some light weight door cards, and a couple gauges.

Turbo and intercooler were installed and the car was ready for competition.

Jimmy taking a break after a late night.

Our custom tow hitch fits perfect! We finished it the night before we left. Now we are ready to go!

Intercooler & Turbo Installation

2008-08-07T15:12:00.004-04:00

Well, I found some more pics from our build. You can see the finished, stripped interior... we ended up covering the doors with some black matte board. You can also se a pic of the slotted rotors that came with the car(one of the few things we liked about the car when we bought it hahaha). The 3rd pic is our junkyard Volvo turbo. In the 4th picture you can see Jimmy and I fitting the intercooler, we ended up holding it in place withheavy duty zip-ties!

Final Build Before the Challenge

2008-08-06T22:55:00.004-04:00

We dont have a a lot of pictures from the rest of the build, but basically, after gutting the car, and removing what we thought was a lot of weight(more on that later), we picked up a Volvo T3 TURBO (.42/.48.), an intercooler from the same Volvo 740. Also from our local junkyard, we sourced a TD manifold, and some JEEP Cherokee 27 lb. injectors. A buddy sold us some H&R springs, Another good guy sold us some used Bilstein shocks, Toyo R comp tires and used Porterfield break pads. We picked up a used APEXI boost controller and an AEM wideband gauge.

Weight reduction begins!

2008-08-06T11:53:00.006-04:00

In early August of 2007, with only 2 months until the Grassroots Challenge we began work on the car. The first day of work begins by putting in new sparkplugs, a new timing belt, used distributer wires, and a bunch of other engine parts we sourced at the junkyard. At the same time as i did that, Jimmy began stripping out as much unnecessary weight out of the interior, including the door panels, headliner, rear seats, A/C heater box and sound deadening material. Its amazing how much stuff is in these cars!

The $700 car.

2008-08-06T11:23:00.009-04:00

On July 28, 2007, after searching for almost 3 months we found this gem in Tampa. It needed a ton of work, but for the price it was a steal. It had 122,000 miles on a broken odometer that supposedly broke only 5 months prior. No records of timing belt replacement or any kind of maintenance other than a jiffy lube sticker on the windshield. It took us almost 5 hours of wrestling with the steering wheel to get her home. Anytime you went over 40 mph the entire car began to shake uncontrollably. The steering wheel had to be held at 3'oclock in order for the car to go straight. If you let go the car would shoot to the side, it was crazy! It seems that the car had seen some action off road with the previous owner. The good thing was that the engine was in good shape, it did not overheat, or make any strange noises. When we got her home we began to scour the internet and junkyard for parts. The first item on our long list was to do the timing belt and perform the basic maintenance, along with a complete stripping of any part that was of no use for us...