I will begin by saying that this will not be updated regularly. It has taken me 6 years to get to the paint stage and will probably not be finished for another year. Slow and steady has been the plan and rushing anything is out of the question.
This post will have a ton of words and not as many pictures. If you don't like to read, this is not the post for you. My goal here is to make good on my promise to write this build thread, disarm some common misconceptions about these cars and most importantly keep track of where we are going from here.
There is no forum like r3v out there for Biturbo owners so I appreciate you guys letting me take up the space here. That being said...I digress.
Since I was very young, my father and I have worked together on at least 50 project cars. Usually they were purchased for a flip, but we kept a few around when we liked them enough. These included a few 911s, some 944s, a handful of Italians, a 956 speedster kit, '46 Jaguar XK140 drophead coupe, and the list goes on and on. I started modding my first car at 15, which was my '86 Jetta. That's essentially my history that leads to where this all started.
It started for me as I was graduating college. I already had a decent job lined up and bought my first home. I was a die-hard VW kid at the time who had grown tired of the scene and it's shift from quality builds to consistent "hoodride" bullshit. On the way home from H20, a competitor in my class who did not leave with a trophy actually flipped me off on the way home when I passed him. The friendships that came standard were sadly dwindling down to pettiness and the car show scene became more about "let's see how stupid we can be" vs. "how creative we can be."
This was the car after I got home with it's latest mod: a for sale sign.
At the same time, my father and I had been working on another project that had recently been finished. A Citroen CX GTi turbo we picked up from a local collector.
[img] - [/img]
After the car was finished, my father took it to an all Citroen show in upstate NY where a buyer quckly scooped it up. Shortly after he sold that, our long-term XK140 Jag project was sold as well. There we stood with an empty garage, an extreme discontent in the VW scene and nothing to do. A call came in from the same gentleman who sold us the Citroen as he wanted to liquidate his collection and had a few cars to offload. 23 cars to be exact. Now, he had a grey-market 5 series that was rusted beyone repair and I am still kicking myself for not picking it up but I had a desire to pick up an e30 so my search was leading me elsewhere. Until we went to pick up my Dad's choice from the collection, I had no intention of buying anything. As we walked through the warehouse towards his '79 928 manual car, something caught my eye.
Needless to say, it was a 1987 Maserati Biturbo Si. This wasn't your run-of-the-mill carb'd nightmare but the first fuel-injected 222 chassis car that had a solid reputation in the motor department. Earlier that very day, I had read an article in Grassroots about how horrible these cars were and I got an idea. http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/art...erati-biturbo/
I can make this car exceptional.
Here it is the day I brought it home.
And a few hours later...
Now with the car stripped down, we could start looking into what made everyone hate these cars. On the drive home we noticed that there were some accurate statements made by Grassroots in their description of the car.
1. Horrible handling with disgusting body roll. Essentially the same front end design as the e30, with a slightly different rear suspension setup utilizing a MacPhearson strut system.
2. Slow, super bad turbo lag.
3. Noisy interior, between the wind and road noise the 20 minute drive was nothing short of unpleasant.
We removed the suspension and sent it off to Ed at Ground Control with a plea to make this car candle like a true sports coupe. He olbiged and a few weeks later he sent this back to me:
The end result is a set of Koni reds mated to thier legendary coilover suspension with fully functional adjustable camber plates up front and reinforced rear strut mounts. In addition, they modified the front strut tubes not only for the Konis, but increasing structural rigidity as the spindle section was a little sketchy. I owe the folks at GC a ton and will swear them just short of Jesus as long as I walk this earth.
Meanwhile, we needed to sort out the engine issues. The motor was lethargic, especially for an Si car so we opted to take the motor out, and go through it step by step. The good news was the engine had recently been rebuilt and looked mint. The bad news is the water-cooled IHI turbochargers were shot.
After the rebuild, the motor and turbos went back into the car post painting of the engine bay.
As my father worked on the motor, I started on the body work. We had to replace the passenger door due to some heavy rot and the entire front end had to be rebuilt for the same reason. The Biturbo front fenders cannot be removed from the car, so obviously that made things difficult.
At this point I was obsessed. I started reading up on Maserati's history. What made them so special? What went wrong at the building of this car?
Turns out Maserati was on their way out and Fiat picked them up. Fiat decided that Maserati should be available to the masses and the Biturbo was the first mass-produced answer to that dream. The dream they had became a nightmare. In 1990, Maserati was sold again and things got much better when the 2.24V was built. The car recieved a solid facelift with much more attractive bumpers and 5 lug suspension. The solid rotor brakes were swapped for a 4 piston vented setup. The car picked up some extra horsepower as well. The only right thing to do was aim for the legendary 2.24V since it was so close to what I owned. However, the bumpers were not a direct swap and hard to come by. The answer to this: my father was going to build a set of replicas using the factory bumpers.
Since we couldn't get our hands on the foglights either, we hit some junkyards and took measurements. The solution was found in a set of late-model e30 fogs.
The hood of the 2.24V had 2 scoops integrated, so we modified the existing hood to house those as well.
Now the Biturbo e (for export) came original with a low line grey and red two tone for some of the models. I liked the idea but thought the grey was understated. I really liked the charcoal color and decided that a two-tone paint was a must have.
This post will have a ton of words and not as many pictures. If you don't like to read, this is not the post for you. My goal here is to make good on my promise to write this build thread, disarm some common misconceptions about these cars and most importantly keep track of where we are going from here.
There is no forum like r3v out there for Biturbo owners so I appreciate you guys letting me take up the space here. That being said...I digress.
Since I was very young, my father and I have worked together on at least 50 project cars. Usually they were purchased for a flip, but we kept a few around when we liked them enough. These included a few 911s, some 944s, a handful of Italians, a 956 speedster kit, '46 Jaguar XK140 drophead coupe, and the list goes on and on. I started modding my first car at 15, which was my '86 Jetta. That's essentially my history that leads to where this all started.
It started for me as I was graduating college. I already had a decent job lined up and bought my first home. I was a die-hard VW kid at the time who had grown tired of the scene and it's shift from quality builds to consistent "hoodride" bullshit. On the way home from H20, a competitor in my class who did not leave with a trophy actually flipped me off on the way home when I passed him. The friendships that came standard were sadly dwindling down to pettiness and the car show scene became more about "let's see how stupid we can be" vs. "how creative we can be."
This was the car after I got home with it's latest mod: a for sale sign.
At the same time, my father and I had been working on another project that had recently been finished. A Citroen CX GTi turbo we picked up from a local collector.
[img] - [/img]
After the car was finished, my father took it to an all Citroen show in upstate NY where a buyer quckly scooped it up. Shortly after he sold that, our long-term XK140 Jag project was sold as well. There we stood with an empty garage, an extreme discontent in the VW scene and nothing to do. A call came in from the same gentleman who sold us the Citroen as he wanted to liquidate his collection and had a few cars to offload. 23 cars to be exact. Now, he had a grey-market 5 series that was rusted beyone repair and I am still kicking myself for not picking it up but I had a desire to pick up an e30 so my search was leading me elsewhere. Until we went to pick up my Dad's choice from the collection, I had no intention of buying anything. As we walked through the warehouse towards his '79 928 manual car, something caught my eye.
Needless to say, it was a 1987 Maserati Biturbo Si. This wasn't your run-of-the-mill carb'd nightmare but the first fuel-injected 222 chassis car that had a solid reputation in the motor department. Earlier that very day, I had read an article in Grassroots about how horrible these cars were and I got an idea. http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/art...erati-biturbo/
I can make this car exceptional.
Here it is the day I brought it home.
And a few hours later...
Now with the car stripped down, we could start looking into what made everyone hate these cars. On the drive home we noticed that there were some accurate statements made by Grassroots in their description of the car.
1. Horrible handling with disgusting body roll. Essentially the same front end design as the e30, with a slightly different rear suspension setup utilizing a MacPhearson strut system.
2. Slow, super bad turbo lag.
3. Noisy interior, between the wind and road noise the 20 minute drive was nothing short of unpleasant.
We removed the suspension and sent it off to Ed at Ground Control with a plea to make this car candle like a true sports coupe. He olbiged and a few weeks later he sent this back to me:
The end result is a set of Koni reds mated to thier legendary coilover suspension with fully functional adjustable camber plates up front and reinforced rear strut mounts. In addition, they modified the front strut tubes not only for the Konis, but increasing structural rigidity as the spindle section was a little sketchy. I owe the folks at GC a ton and will swear them just short of Jesus as long as I walk this earth.
Meanwhile, we needed to sort out the engine issues. The motor was lethargic, especially for an Si car so we opted to take the motor out, and go through it step by step. The good news was the engine had recently been rebuilt and looked mint. The bad news is the water-cooled IHI turbochargers were shot.
After the rebuild, the motor and turbos went back into the car post painting of the engine bay.
As my father worked on the motor, I started on the body work. We had to replace the passenger door due to some heavy rot and the entire front end had to be rebuilt for the same reason. The Biturbo front fenders cannot be removed from the car, so obviously that made things difficult.
At this point I was obsessed. I started reading up on Maserati's history. What made them so special? What went wrong at the building of this car?
Turns out Maserati was on their way out and Fiat picked them up. Fiat decided that Maserati should be available to the masses and the Biturbo was the first mass-produced answer to that dream. The dream they had became a nightmare. In 1990, Maserati was sold again and things got much better when the 2.24V was built. The car recieved a solid facelift with much more attractive bumpers and 5 lug suspension. The solid rotor brakes were swapped for a 4 piston vented setup. The car picked up some extra horsepower as well. The only right thing to do was aim for the legendary 2.24V since it was so close to what I owned. However, the bumpers were not a direct swap and hard to come by. The answer to this: my father was going to build a set of replicas using the factory bumpers.
Since we couldn't get our hands on the foglights either, we hit some junkyards and took measurements. The solution was found in a set of late-model e30 fogs.
The hood of the 2.24V had 2 scoops integrated, so we modified the existing hood to house those as well.
Now the Biturbo e (for export) came original with a low line grey and red two tone for some of the models. I liked the idea but thought the grey was understated. I really liked the charcoal color and decided that a two-tone paint was a must have.
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