The backstory cause I think it is cool! Skip this bit if you don't care lol
As a full-time car photographer and filmmaker, I'm around really prime examples of tons of different cars on a day-to-day basis. But we all have to start somewhere, and my "breakthrough" moment/realization that this is what I want to pursue as a career was shooting my friend's early model E30. So since then (2016 I think) I've been obsessed with these things. Skip forward a year or so and I see a nardo grey widebody E30 on Google and immediately had that "I have to have that" thought and always kept it in the back of my head as a fun unobtainable goal.
(current state 2/18/24)
For a while, I dug and dug online to find where the body kit came from, If it was a one-off thing, or any other info I could find and I couldn't find a single thing of much value other than the fact that it was made in Sweden.
Fast forward to 2020: I was working from home, got bored of my VW GTI, so I sold it and was planning to daily my Grand Wagoneer that gets 7mpg... But thanks to FB Market place and positive equity on the GTI, not even 12 hours after I sold the car I was test-driving an E30 that had been posted for about 4 hours and then ultimately buying it the next day...
This is how it looked when I picked it up.
Modest mods: Bilstein shocks/H&R springs, sway bars, cat-back, split-second fuel curve tuner (terrible creation), Corbeau seats, z3 rack, 4:10 lsd, skid plate, completely disintegrated aftermarket subframe bushings, and probably a few little things I'm forgetting.
The story from what I'm able to put together was that the owner prior to the guy I bought it from whored it out as an autocross car, which is all fine, but corners were cut in some areas and it made problem-solving the little kinks a little frustrating. On my youtube, I posted some of the fun I had with the rear end of the car due to it not even having subframe bushings in the slightest bit...
Skip forward a couple of months, I finally got sick of looking at black wheels and threw on some Konig Hexaforms in a 17x8 and some Yellowspeed racing true coilovers.
At this point in the "build", the car was a blast to drive. I put on a Renown steering wheel and a cheap chassis mount shifter along with Condorspeed engine and transmission mounts and I was obsessed with how connected the car felt. After daily driving it from about July to November it started doing some weird fuel cut stuff to where it would face plant at about 5000 rpm, it got super annoying so I went through the fuel pump wiring, relays, fuses, pumps, everything I could think to change or check, i did. It kinda seemed to sort itself out for a while and then all of a sudden the car turned into a paperweight.
I thought the motor was just toast, so impulsively I sourced an M50 swap that turned out to also be a paperweight... I ran lots of other swap ideas through my head but all were very out of the box and way too expensive at the moment and the car just needs to be driven. So I went back to the M20 and went ahead and tried to just get the head rebuilt, and throw on a new head gasket and ARP head studs and it came back to life as nothing had ever happened.
But at this point, I had sold the wheels and suspension to a friend... so it was still useless...
My plan of what I wanted to do with the car changed several times over the months, but finally decided I wanted it to be a very capable, driver-oriented, time attack-styled build. Who knows whether it will ever see a track or not but that's beside the point... I started researching how I could fabricate a metal widebody, and how to mold fiberglass and carbon fiber and all sorts of different ways to achieve that goal. The car was still sitting on jack stands and I didn't really have a clue what i was doing, but that was all for the better anyway.
I was on Instagram scrolling through my feed and I saw that a Drift team of two brothers called 50 States of Drift had the body kit I had wanted for so long on their car. I had no clue any of them had even made it stateside before.
SIDE NOTE: at this point, I had found who makes it and where, and it was so expensive to ship to Texas on top of the price of the kit itselt, I could've bought another really nice E30...
A couple of weeks go by and I saw that they had a spare set that they had just kept as a spare that they wanted to get rid of. So immediately I dove on the opportunity and did everything my power to make it happen. And a couple weeks later...
and then the car sat for even longer... Ill end the backstory here, the "cool" stuff will be in the next post!
As a full-time car photographer and filmmaker, I'm around really prime examples of tons of different cars on a day-to-day basis. But we all have to start somewhere, and my "breakthrough" moment/realization that this is what I want to pursue as a career was shooting my friend's early model E30. So since then (2016 I think) I've been obsessed with these things. Skip forward a year or so and I see a nardo grey widebody E30 on Google and immediately had that "I have to have that" thought and always kept it in the back of my head as a fun unobtainable goal.
For a while, I dug and dug online to find where the body kit came from, If it was a one-off thing, or any other info I could find and I couldn't find a single thing of much value other than the fact that it was made in Sweden.
Fast forward to 2020: I was working from home, got bored of my VW GTI, so I sold it and was planning to daily my Grand Wagoneer that gets 7mpg... But thanks to FB Market place and positive equity on the GTI, not even 12 hours after I sold the car I was test-driving an E30 that had been posted for about 4 hours and then ultimately buying it the next day...
This is how it looked when I picked it up.
Modest mods: Bilstein shocks/H&R springs, sway bars, cat-back, split-second fuel curve tuner (terrible creation), Corbeau seats, z3 rack, 4:10 lsd, skid plate, completely disintegrated aftermarket subframe bushings, and probably a few little things I'm forgetting.
The story from what I'm able to put together was that the owner prior to the guy I bought it from whored it out as an autocross car, which is all fine, but corners were cut in some areas and it made problem-solving the little kinks a little frustrating. On my youtube, I posted some of the fun I had with the rear end of the car due to it not even having subframe bushings in the slightest bit...
Skip forward a couple of months, I finally got sick of looking at black wheels and threw on some Konig Hexaforms in a 17x8 and some Yellowspeed racing true coilovers.
At this point in the "build", the car was a blast to drive. I put on a Renown steering wheel and a cheap chassis mount shifter along with Condorspeed engine and transmission mounts and I was obsessed with how connected the car felt. After daily driving it from about July to November it started doing some weird fuel cut stuff to where it would face plant at about 5000 rpm, it got super annoying so I went through the fuel pump wiring, relays, fuses, pumps, everything I could think to change or check, i did. It kinda seemed to sort itself out for a while and then all of a sudden the car turned into a paperweight.
I thought the motor was just toast, so impulsively I sourced an M50 swap that turned out to also be a paperweight... I ran lots of other swap ideas through my head but all were very out of the box and way too expensive at the moment and the car just needs to be driven. So I went back to the M20 and went ahead and tried to just get the head rebuilt, and throw on a new head gasket and ARP head studs and it came back to life as nothing had ever happened.
But at this point, I had sold the wheels and suspension to a friend... so it was still useless...
My plan of what I wanted to do with the car changed several times over the months, but finally decided I wanted it to be a very capable, driver-oriented, time attack-styled build. Who knows whether it will ever see a track or not but that's beside the point... I started researching how I could fabricate a metal widebody, and how to mold fiberglass and carbon fiber and all sorts of different ways to achieve that goal. The car was still sitting on jack stands and I didn't really have a clue what i was doing, but that was all for the better anyway.
I was on Instagram scrolling through my feed and I saw that a Drift team of two brothers called 50 States of Drift had the body kit I had wanted for so long on their car. I had no clue any of them had even made it stateside before.
SIDE NOTE: at this point, I had found who makes it and where, and it was so expensive to ship to Texas on top of the price of the kit itselt, I could've bought another really nice E30...
A couple of weeks go by and I saw that they had a spare set that they had just kept as a spare that they wanted to get rid of. So immediately I dove on the opportunity and did everything my power to make it happen. And a couple weeks later...
and then the car sat for even longer... Ill end the backstory here, the "cool" stuff will be in the next post!
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