Pitchblack Motorsports Rally e30 318i (now with M50) - and some Porsche 924S stuff.

[tzdevill]

Feb 28 March1st for us. It will be a shakedown for Sandblast for the rally car. it is also going to my be my daughters 1st event. She will piloting my Father in laws 72 super beetle.
http://www.motorsportreg.com/events/...3#.VOIESeNdWHg

[irish44j]

Feb 28 March1st for us. It will be a shakedown for Sandblast for the rally car. it is also going to my be my daughters 1st event. She will piloting my Father in laws 72 super beetle.
http://www.motorsportreg.com/events/...3#.VOIESeNdWHg

Nice! Any word on if you guys are running a 2-day event at VIR again this year?

[tzdevill]

They are working on scheduling that.

[irish44j]

So I am officially *PRETTY FUCKING EXCITED* today.

Was sitting aroudn the house watching the kids and decided to browse CL, out of the blue, to see if anyone posted up some cheap race seats in the middle of a snowstorm.

Found a post for a pair of Sparco Evos for $400 "including two four-point harnesses". Call the guy excitedly to set up a pickup, then notice that he has $400 EACH. Still a good deal, but not in my current budget. So I ask if he'll sell without the bases (for a 370z) or harnesses for a lower price. He says "fuck it, my wife wants these out of the living room...come get it all for $400."

So I get in the car and head to Georgetown, thinking this is way too good to be true.

But it isn't.

Two 2010 build-date Sparco Evos. Passenger one is pretty much mint. Driver's one has a brand-new cover on it (and the old cover with one small tear included), plus a box of spare plastic parts (for the harness pass-throughs) still in the Sparco bags.









Bases: They have nice adjustable side-mounts, bolted to a very nice slider base for a 370Z ( a trackday-style base with the harness eyebolts in the base, which of course is not legal for most road-racing)..





To boot: The harnesses aren't 4-points. They're Sparco 6-point camlocks that don't expire until the end of 2015.



All of this...$400.

The plan:
Eric is going to buy my current seats for $200.
Sell the 370Z slider bases (those list for like $200 each new from what I can tell)
Sell the harnesses to someone who wants them for this season at a good price.

I figure I'll come out ahead on the money side, and still have two very nice, FIA-certified seats that are legal for stage rally, and are way lighter than my current seats.

I really am pretty psyched about this score. I never find the good deals on CL. Finally did for once!

Oh, and some Italian guy wrote on them

[DER E30]

Score!!! Those look dang nice!

[TeXJ]

Awesome find!

[irish44j]

after a quick mock-up, determined that it would be VERY difficult to adapt the 370z bases to work on the e30, so need to get those up on the Z forums and sell them (they go for $140 each new) and dig up some e30 bases. Since I can't bolt the sliders directly to the floor due to the shape and width of the e30 mount pads, the options are:

1. put in a pair of "crossbars" to mount to.

2. buy a base made for e30.

The former is obviously cheap, but I also need to somehow attach stock seatbelts, which are currently (and stock) attached to the seat base itself. I could just weld tabs to the floor, but that seems like it might be a hassle due to the fitament.

e30 base is the easy button, will see if I can score a couple up cheap. I have a month to get these into the car so not a big problem for the moment.

Also put the old cover on the seat that had the new cover on it, and cut the harness holes (one minor mis-cut, but nobody will notice hopefuly). Might as well just keep the new covers in the bag until I need them. The old cover has a wear point near the elbow, but some duct tape or a patch should take care of that fine I think.

[irish44j]

Also, got the scale out and weighed things real quick.

Sparco Sport (adjustable) with sliders and base bracket that I currently have in the car: 54.5 lbs each.

The new Evo with sliders and the very heavy 370z base bracket (which will be replaced with a lighter e30 base): 36.5 lbs.

So, there's another 36lbs. gone off the car :)

[kts]

So jealous of that deal. Nice find!

[irish44j]

So, heading up in the morning with the guys to the Waste Management Winter Rally in Wellsboro, PA, to crew for Ozgur Simsek's Sentra and another team and hang with some friends who rallycross/rally.

Gonna be a good time I think, but I have a large duffle full of my best mountaineering and extreme skiing gear in the car - the heaviest I've ever packed for any 2-day trip, ever.

The temp there at wake-up time tomorrow: NEGATIVE 10 degrees. Daytime high temp is about 10 degrees, but with 20mph winds. And we'll be outside, for the most part, all day.

Needless to say, I will not be in the e30, but in my WRX with its very excellent heater and heated seats.

[irish44j]

So let's do some updating now that I'm back from the Waste Management Winter Rally (aka the mini-SPTR in the snow). Before I talk about the rally weekend, I'll hit my car update from this afternoon, since it's not as interesting as the rally.

After giving it some thought, I decided for the time being to use sliders on the new seats, and to modify the 370Z bases to work for me. So after some cutting, some welding, some measuring, and some drilling....

cutting and welding


main base in:


base with mounts (yes, one bolt is missing in the pic)


passenger seat in:


I'll eventually hard-mount the base to the chassis when this car moves to rally someday, but for rallycross, I prefer sliders (that, and they're legal so why not use em).

Learned a few fitting lessons that will make doing the driver's seat a bit easier maybe next weekend.

ok, so on to the rally.

I originally was recruited to crew for Ozgur Simsek's team that was going to run an e30 in addition to their Sentra SE-R. In the end the e30 wasn't ready in time so I went anyhow to help out with the Sentra and get some experience in the rally scene, meet some people, etc.

In addition to talking quite a bit with Ozgur and the other crew guys, several WDCR rallycross folks were there rallying (Adam Kimmett, Jared Lantzy, Matt Rhoads, and a few others).

We met them up there in -2 degrees weather, with snow forecasted. We were also going to crew for another new team with a Ford Escort, but they blew their clutch slave cylinder late night before and unbelievably no parts store within 100 miles had one in stock. They ended up withdrawing, which was too bad. We spent some time messing with that car over at a local Subaru shop that was working on James Quattro's rally car prepping for the next day



So won't bore you all with details, but it was extremely cold there (wind chill something like -20), and snowing. Car passed tech and seemed to be running well, but as luck would have it, the engine blew pretty early in the first stage and that was it for us running the weekend. Not sure what happened, but probably a rod bearing. Not much we could do anyhow, seeing as it's a JDM engine in that car.

So car went back on the trailer, and we spent the rest of the day spectating. All in all it was a good time in spite of the broken car and wickedly cold weather. WDCR rallycross chair Adam Kimmet, co-driving with Jon Kramer, won the overall in their Subie - but my favorite car out there was Jared Lantzy and Jason Smith in a Volvo 240 in place of the Subie they usually run. They finished last (not surprising for the only RWD car in very snowy/icy conditions), but apparently had a good time.

Anhow, learned quite a bit about how these run, and some of the inner workings of things, and got a good chunk of knowledge to keep in my pocket when building my car further.

And some of my favorite pics from the weekend:

The car going through tech


Alvin Fong's Evo bumper, and cold looking landscape.


Greg Roumiantsev's Evo (later retired due to a broken radiator)


Our team


Greg Healy's beautiful Group 5 Z


A couple Fiesta STs running with Broken Motorports


Snowbank > Neon


Jared and Jason in the Volvo




My wannabe rally car






more pics in this album if anyone wants to browse:

http://s78.photobucket.com/user/iris...?sort=3&page=1

[TeXJ]

Nice man! We have nothing like that down here in Dallas.

[irish44j]

So in my hour of "noise time" after work before dinner and the kids bedtime, I got down to doing some cutting, grinding, and welding and modified the 370 seat bases to bolt directly up to the OEM seat bolt holes, so that's good. Just seemed like less of a pain than trying to sell them and buy/make some other bases.

In any case, I did mount them up with sliders - for the time being. For rallycross I prefer them since I like the seat further back when driving to/from events. Once the car is built for stage rally, the sliders will come out and I'll bolt them directly to the car. After fiddling around with the side-mount height I got them to the position they'll likely be most comfortable without my helmet hitting anything.

I stuck the one new cover back into the bag and put the old one on (which has a tear on one side), and will just put a patch on it. No reason to put a brand-new cover on a rallycross car just because of cosmetic stuff, right?

Anyhow, they are mounted solid and I have clearance to slide all the way forward and back, and they are about 1/2" from contacting the B-pillar, door, and trans tunnel - but they don't touch anywhere, which was what I was going for.

As you may notice, I'm keeping stock seatbelts since harnesses aren't technically street-legal and I'd just as well not get a stupid ticket. For the passenger, that's all they get (with a CG lock). My side has the same harness I've been using with the other seats, and everything is arranged so the seatbelts fit correctly but don't interfere with the harness.

So, that's that for now. Eric Helgesen is buying my old seats for their rallycross e30 to replace their stockers....

[irish44j]

Oh look.....winter is STILL not freaking over. And here we go with another round of lame marginal winter storm that shuts down this region.

Well, at least no work for me with the government closed.

The garage is 30 degrees, so not feeling like doing any work. But I had to run some errands about 20 miles out. Nothing better to do and all day, so left the WRX (on its fresh Wintersport 4D's) in the driveway and took the e30 (on not-so-fresh Winterforces), with the trunk loaded with heavy rally wheels/tires and a big gearbox in the back seat area.

Good a time as any to test out the new suspension and work on my throttle-steering, left-foot braking, and practicing "never lift" driving, lol.

Roads were slick....very.....saw a few dozen accidents, a few flipped cars, and a snowplow in a ditch. People around here are morons. In these conditions with the WRX I pretty much could have driven the speed limit everywhere.

e30, not so much. Gripped fine and I got confortable in the conditions pretty quickly to the point that I was pretty much passing everyone on the road (even a snowplow, whose driver gave me a thumbs-up). I will say, this car gets a lot of looks and amazed stares when its out in the snow amongst the SUVs and 4x4s everywhere.

In any case, it was an enjoyable couple hours of driving and didn't wreck the car so I guess that's a plus. Some pics, as usual...





stopped into work. The only other person there at the time was in a Jeep, and apparently she didn't have a pleasant drive in, lol..




On the way back, some Yahoos came off a side street as I was at a light. Passenger was hanging out the window yelling something at me. His driver tried to showboat a bit and promptly spun around into the median, and then spun again when trying to get it back on the street. That was pretty damn funny...





Anyhow, now I have to leave the car outside so it can melt before it comes back in the garage :P

[TeXJ]

Nice! I actually got to do some driving around the snow this past two weeks. It's Dallas so we only get ice/snow once a year!