Rally/Hillclimb 325iX Turbo

[Fraser]

Sometime last summer (2021) I decided I hadn't yet made the car annoying enough to drive on the street so started pulling it apart to give to my cage builder friend. Somewhere along the line I had done a gripforce clutch, bigger injectors, messed with the tune a lot, messed with the suspension a lot...it was running pretty well.

It took me a while to figure out the oil cooler arrangement....





Broke some more shit rallycrossing.... When people are like "ix's are fragile, don't do anything fun with them!!" they're mostly wrong, however the front diffs are definitely to be treated with care...


Pulled the interior and glass to send it to cage guy- it was great time to clean up some rust under the carpet and just give it a fresh start from a decade of dirt and abuse



Et voila! ARA legal cage, seats and harnesses, dash back in, other random rally goodies

[decay]

yikes. i can't imagine what a pain it must be to hunt down another one of those front diffs.

[Fraser]

yikes. i can't imagine what a pain it must be to hunt down another one of those front diffs.

It's easy when you have a couple on the shelf already in the shop...

[decay]

It's easy when you have a couple on the shelf already in the shop...

sorry- enthusiast mindset- way to be forward thinking, buddy :)

cage looks great, i'm almost betting you could pull a bill caswell and throw it into a WRC event.

[Fraser]

Alright it's been a long break, I'll try to pick up where I left off...

Spring of '22 the car was ready for it's first CHCA season, not a ton of mechanical stuff done since its rallycross days other than cage/seats/safety stuff. Passed tech, and we were off and running. While totally outgunned in the catch-all Rally AWD class by built to the hilt Evos and STi's we had pretty consistent finishes and the car held up amazingly well for an entire season's worth of hillclimbs. We made every single practice and competition run of the season save for one where I lost fuel pressure halfway up a run at Land's End. I had cut a ditch too hard a few corners before and unseated the fuel pump relay from it's socket. Lesson learned, more zipties....

[Fraser]

So we did manage to sneak out a 4th in points finish for the '22 CHCA Hillclimb season, which was way more than I could have asked for considering the cobbled together and inappropriate car for the class and a rookie driver/co-driver team...

The car held up really well but there were a lot of things that needed to be addressed over the winter, mostly little stuff that had been nagging me over the last few years of beating on the car.

-The rear upper spring seats were really looking bad, I had used a standard track setup coilover spring and adjuster for a long time and repeatedly bottoming the whole assembly out had started to collapse all the sheet metal in that area- the car had lost an inch or so of ride height on one side over just the last year of rallying it. It wasn't going to last another season. I don't think I have good pictures of the area before I started to dig into it but you can get the idea...pretty standard e30 problems.




I'm not any kind of sheet metal expert but got into a fairly good rhythm of spot welding the new pieces in and finishing with liberal application of weld through primer and seam sealer...



I had the standard rot in the battery tray, hacked out a bunch of that and sealed it back up as well as my skills could allow....

[Fraser]

The trailing arms had also succumbed to the beatings of the last few years, I added a bunch of plate to them to reinforce the collapsing spring seats and to the underneath where they were starting to feel pretty thing from constant sandblasting. The plate on the bottom was probably a little overkill and just added a bunch of weight but oh well. Nevermind my ultra fancy toolbench that looks like a BBQ grill...





That was sort of the final chore of cleaning up the rear end stuff. Once the sheet metal and trailing arm reinforcement was all dialed it was finally time to reassemble the subframe and get it ready to go back in the car...



The implement paint from ACE is tougher than shit and comes in fun tractor colors...like John Deere green and International blue. I wanted a little more compliance for dirt use so went with standard Condor UHMW everywhere but the trailing arms where I used stock OEM rubber bushings.

[Fraser]

At this point I still had the trans/driveline, fuel tank, and subframe out of the car. One of my goals while I had access was to run the rear brake lines and fuel lines inside the car for safety's sake and reinforce the fuel tank so I could do away with the old bedliner skid pans I had been using. They worked well for protection but collected a ton of dirt and rocks and were really kind of a pain in the ass to remove and reinstall.

My old fuel tank looked like a smashed beer can, I spent about 5 minutes considering cleaning it up then bought a fresh one from Rockauto....



A few of the other rally guys were using kevlar to reinforce stuff, like fuel tanks and skidplates. It looked like something I could figure out, so with a few tips from the collective and an order from US Composites, I gave it a shot. For a first run it turned out really well. I used 4 full layers of 5 oz Kevlar and a couple straps wrapping around the top of the tank to really secure it all, though those were probably unnecessary considering how the epoxy resin sets up.



Running the fuel lines inside the cabin was pretty straightforward, though the little things like making this little bulkhead box to get the lines from the pump into AN lines/fittings is the sort of thing that should take a half hour but takes me all day....the box goes to 90* AN fittings, lines through the cabin, then bulkhead fittings at the firewall. I moved the fuel filter to the charcoal can bracket (charcoal can and evap stuff finally removed) and the plumbing is nice and clean to the fuel rail and from the return. I'm still using the stock fuel rail and feed/return lines as they seem to be just fine for the power numbers the care makes.

In these pictures you can also see the line for the rear brakes running in the same area, yes I should have used a bulkhead fitting where it goes through the sheet metal there but ran the line through a grommet instead. I used an off the shelf ChaseBays rear line kit for the sake of not fabbing it all myself and easy replacement in the future. Adding a bulkhead there would've complicated things a lot. You can also see in the first pic that there is still carpet in the car- I tried to retain that for as long as possible for noise (I still have this dumb idea of taking it out to cars and coffee once in a while or something, but it's pretty miserable to drive on the street)....I finally gave up and the carpet is gone. Still have a stereo though....

[Fraser]

The brake master cylinder on this car had been slowly leaking internally for as long as I can remember and, as with most things bespoke to the iX model, an oem replacement is ridiculously expensive. So obviously when you can upgrade for the same price as OEM replacement it's time to upgrade. I used a dual MC from CompBrakes in the UK, this is a bolt in replacement for e30s and doesn't get much easier. I did have custom length lines made as it was simpler than bending and flaring a bunch of copper line and made having replacement lines in my spares box very simple. So the entire braking system is softlines now, there are arguments for and against doing it this way but so far so good.

The CompBrakes setup is boosterless and runs a standard balance bar arrangement with a remote bias adjuster I mounted under the dash.




Keeping with the theme of "iX OEM parts are really expensive sometimes", the steering rack had been on it's last legs for far too long and is another bespoke iX part and unrealistically expensive to replace. Also it's the worst ratio of any e30 rack, which is really saying something. Since the iX subframe and rack arrangement is completely different than standard rwd e30s, none of the typical rack upgrades are an option. Luckily an outfit called Bavarian Allrad is sort of local to me and basically the only option for a short ratio iX steering rack. He modifies the subframe to accept an e83 (?) X3 rack and the rack itself to clear the oil pan and uses a combination of x3 and e36 tie rods for a bolt in remedy for the terrible stock ratio. It went in without drama, other than necessitating adding an 1/8" spacer to my motor mounts to create a little clearance between the rack and oilpan.

Here you can see the fancy steering link included that does away with the crummy rag joint and oem u joint arrangement, sorry for the terrible photo:



And old crusty rack and subframe compared to fresh new parts. If you look closely you can see a fist size chunk missing out of the front of the old subframe....been like that for years, still not sure exactly how that happened...

[D.Martijn]

I also have this rack fitted; I did the modification of the subframe and rack myself.
I was wondering if you could take a picture of the front left CV axle, how much room do you have between the CV and the steering rack?

Thanks!