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

[irish44j]

Just a few days left until the first rallycross. As noted earlier, Red46 is building me a new/custom skidplate, but he had some issues with his supplier and his latest shipment of steel was late. Though it's on the way, Oregon is a long way from here via ground shipping so it's not going to be here by the weekend.

So, with that in mind, time to cut and modify the old skidplate as a stopgap. Remember, this is 1/8" stainless steel, so it's pretty damn thick. I went out and got some fresh heavy steel-cutting jigsaw blades since I have to shorten it substantially - else it would stick out several inches past the bumper, which woud not only look dumb but would also probably take out someone's knee in the paddock.

So, time to cut. generous cutting oil, very, very slow. Took me about 15 minutes to make the full cut (and two blades) being as careful as I could with heat and speed.



The front holes could be re-used since the brackets on the main bar are in the same relative position to the bend. The rears, however, had to move back several inches. While I may have been able to do some measurements to determine the position, the plate is a bit warped/bent and wasn't confident I could accurately do that. So I put the bolts into the weld nuts on the subframe, screwed them in, and then coated the heads with a little brush and some Testor's model paint that was sitting in my cabinet. Then i installed the front bolts and jacked the rear up until they pushed against the bolts, leaving a nice round blue dot at the drill points.

After some slow drilling so as not to kill my bits, had two holes and as it turns out they lined up perfectly. So, the old skidplate is now on. Not all that pretty, and since it's bent there's less clearance at the back of the pan than I will want for stage rally, but should be fine for now.







So with that (and tightening the clamp on one radiator hose that had dripped a few drops out), I think I'm ready to rallycross this weekend. I'll do one last once-over of all the nuts and bolts I can think of to make sure everything is tightened to spec, but hopefully will be all good to go, and not suck!

So, to the few of you who actually follow along on this build, next post should hopefully have some pictures of actual motorsports :)

[TeXJ]

NICE! you made some great progress on this!

[rzerob]

The skid plate looks good. I bent mine when I hit road construction and it took about have a hour beating it with a sledge to get it right but now you would have a hard time telling. I would keep this modified one to run on the especially bad courses that way if it got beat up further, who cares.

I am interested to see how much better you do with the more hp. Next year boost?

[irish44j]

The skid plate looks good. I bent mine when I hit road construction and it took about have a hour beating it with a sledge to get it right but now you would have a hard time telling. I would keep this modified one to run on the especially bad courses that way if it got beat up further, who cares.

I am interested to see how much better you do with the more hp. Next year boost?

not a bad idea to have a spare. But, I'm not worried about the new one being beat-up too lol....

The only thing i don't like about this cut-short version is it doesn't protect the radiator core support at all. Not that it's a likely place to get hit, but I do like the "lip-up" end that it used to have (and the new one will have), for extra protection (and because it looks cooler, of course ;)

yeah, I'm interested to see as well lol. I'm hoping it won't screw up my handling or driving too much. Definitely not going to boost it though. For a lightish RWD car, 200hp is pretty close to the limit of how much you can realistically put to the ground, especially with an e30 rear suspension. Power wasn't much of an issue with the M42 other than in a few key areas (like hills), and now I have almost double the torque. The real issue will be smoothly putting it down and keeping the car straight.

[econti]

at what point are you going to bin the valance and go prerunner spec? because that point should be now as it would look awesome

[irish44j]

at what point are you going to bin the valance and go prerunner spec? because that point should be now as it would look awesome

meh, probably never. The valence provides a level of protection for the radiator, especially if you catch someone and are getting rocks flung at the front of the car :)

I honestly can't think of any or many stage rally cars that have that kind of front end. I'm not even entirely sure it's legal. Stage organizations tend to like cars to look "like the cars they are" lol.

[irish44j]

Lots and lots of gasoline today, ugh.

Ok, so first off the Porsche has been occasionally cutting off at idle/stoplights after hard driving. This is pretty typical textbook DME relay going bad (it doubles as the fuel pump relay). Basically, when the fuel pump is on its way out the spikes in voltage cause the DME relay to overheat and kill the fuel pump until you let it sit for a minute and cool off.

So, figured it was time to address the fuel system at the back of the car, as well as the relay (I had bought a cheap Uro one previously, but apparently it didn't work very well). Since fuel hadn't been an issue, car still had the fuel filter and pump that came on it, which are who knows how old.

Anyhow, first of all got in a new relay. Unlike the stock/stock replacement ones, this is a solid-state relay. It costs a bit more than the stock one, but shouldn't be affected by any overheating.

note that the first one was made in WEST Germany, that's how old it is...



Then, on to the back of the car for new pump and filter. This isn't a terribly hard job, but it is kind of tight accessing some of the fittings, and you do get fuel dumped right on top of you lol.

The fuel that came out was pretty dirty looking, so this filter may be pretty old.



I actually cut it open to see, but nothing visibly notable other than some rust flakes. The tank last I checked looked clean, so this may just be from the filter itself.



So, new stuff in. This summer I'll also have a new pressure hose made. this one isn't leaking or anything, and won't cause a fire like the engine bay ones if it does, but it does look "original" to the car so probably due for a change



Now, back to the e30. I had noticed occasional buzzing from my (almost new) Bosch hi pressure fuel pump. Not the constant buzz like when a pump is going bad, just very occasional as if it wasn't getting full fuel flow. So I checked the low-pressure "lifter" pump in the tank, figuring the little screen filter must be clogged.

hmm...the bottom of it is missing.



oh, there it is....:/



so, fished it out with a grabber tool.



Anyhow, looks like it totally broke off, probably from our hard fuel tank impact at NEFR last year. Interesting. And the impeller is gone, probably someplace in the tank. I don't have a full spare assembly, and nobody local had one. So, I just took it out completely and put a hose down to the bottom of the tank in its place. I don't *think* this will be an issue (car started up and ran fine afterwards), becuase the main purpose of the lifter pump is to prevent vapor-lock in the over-tank lines in high-altitude and tropical-weather driving. Not really an issue for me, at least not at the moment, so hopefully can do without it. Since it hasn't been working for months apparently, I guess it isn't very necessary.

So yeah, lots of gasoline smell in my garage today.

[irish44j]

So, all packed up for tomorrow's season opener rallycross, in which there are 16 cars in my class (almost all of which are fast drivers) and 65 total entries. So, we'll see how this goes..



Also, it turned out that my buddy Jason was heading down through Harrisburg, so he stopped off at Rusty's house, and grabbed the Integra wheels rusty picked up for me for $60. "Rally Mail," as we call it.

I decided to take the Porsche to pick them up at Jason's about 20 minutes away, to see if I had fixed the stalling/fuel issue. Seems that I have, No stalls and I pushed the car pretty well.



some curbing, but otherwise they look pretty decent for a $60 wheel. I may or may not use these for a street wheel (and sell my Euroweaves since they are wasted on a rallycar that doesn't get driven often). I also got a set of Mini Cooper 15s down in N.C. (another fellow rally driver picked them up for me), so now I have two sets of 15s. I want at least one more before I start unloading most of my 14" stuff...

[irish44j]

Will do a short recap of today's first rallycross of the season, and a longer one later. In short: In the morning, I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to drive this car with so much more power, and it showed both in my mediocre times and my cone count. In the afternoon, made a few changes to the car setup and to my driving approach and smoothed it out and put up some pretty good times in a field of very fast movers. In the end, dug wa too big a hole in the morning and only managed a 6th place finish (out of 15 or so entries in the class), but the engine held up well and with some adjustments to the car i think it can be pretty fast.

Here's some vid of one of my better runs, if you're interested (with good engine sound and a bit of transmission whine).

https://youtu.be/zCOGdSBMWCo

topic reminders for myself
- fuel pump
- trailing arm
- tire change
- weight
- transmission

[econti]

Does it actually -feel- better with the big block?

[TeXJ]

do you ever get concerned over oil starvation due to cornering Gs?

[irish44j]

Does it actually -feel- better with the big block?

It's a whole new world of power. The power is instantly there anywhere in the range, anywhere on course - so it's a big change from the M42 that needed to be way up in the revs to have any torque, for sure.

So yeah, power-wise definitely feels like a freight train. And it sounds great :)

do you ever get concerned over oil starvation due to cornering Gs?

rally-x doesn't really have that kind of high-g, long corners that road courses do. I can't say I'm terribly concerned. I almost think it's more of an issue using the e36 oil pan, which (IIRC) is a bit shallower than the e34 pan. I could be wrong though.

[irish44j]

ok, so recap of the first event. Saturday was 75 degrees and beautiful. When I left my house at 530am Sunday it was 60. At the mountain, the temps quickly went down and it was really windy, in the 40s all day but felt a lot colder (and so much blowing dust)



Anyhow, one of DC's largest events ever with almost 65 drivers registered. MR class as expected was big, with over 15 drivers registered. Making it even more intense, we had all the front-of-the pack regulars from last year - Nick D in the M3, Sennett in his M52 e30, Stephen and Chris in the 325i, Neil and Eric in the 325i, and others. So right there is about six guys who have won at least one event in the past year or so. To add to that, Jeff Geier, who was one of the faster guys two years ago, returned from his year-long adventure motorcycle trip around the continent and got right back into going fast in his co-driven 325. Aaaand, Jeremy Sitar, one of the fastest guys in Appalachian region 2 years ago, returned to rallycross in his e36 328i. To add to that, Dan Gugger left his M10 e30 at home and showed up with a Porsche 944 on fresh rally tires. Plus we had a couple Miatas and a couple BRZs, plus a few other newbies. So that's a lot of fast movers, any of whom can win on any given day.

Huge group....65 cars coming up the hill to grid



The MR crew





From the start, I knew it was going to be tough. With the M42 it was quick and balanced, and you coudl pretty much just put the pedal to the floor and go. On my first couple runs, I found out the hard way that the torquey M50 isn't going to have that, as I almost spun a couple times and killed a few cones in the process. My times weren't awful, but they weren't great either. I was running soft DMack gravels up front and hard DMack gravels on the rear, and keeping the tail under control was quite a bit of work, as the car would over-rotate in anything tight. This was exacerbated by only having replaced one trailing arm, while the other one was still 1/2" toe out, giving some tendency to snap oversteer under braking.

By lunch break my cones and some sloppy driving overall put me out of contention, something like 15 seconds behind the class leader, Nick. So, people ate lunch...





Meanwhile, I messed with the car. I switched on my Maxsports (much softer tread and sidewalls) to the rear in place of the hard gravels, and I strapped two spare wheels/tires into the trunk to get some weight in the back.

So up we went for afternoon runs. And whadya know....I worked on modulating the throttle more and "point-and-shoot" more coming out of turns with later throttle application, and on the 2nd run of the afternoon I had the fastest time in the class for that run. The rest of the afternoon runs I ran pretty consistently. A few people had faster runs and I did pick up another cone, but overall the car felt pretty good and I started to get the hang of what it wanted to do. Overall I think I picked up some time on most of the class, and finished in 6th place. So, not terrible considering the lousy start and the huge amount of talented competition.



Nick won, beating Sitar by 2/10ths of a second and once again hitting no cones (neither of them did) - though Nick, remember, I know you hit one that didn't get counted, because you said you did ;) But, it only counts if someone calls it in!

So, this isn't autocross so what you did on one or some runs is irrelevant. However, for the sake of metrics I did a quick look at just the afternoon runs at the top of our class:

Nick: 334.3 seconds (no cones)
Jeremy: 331.6 seconds (no cones)
Chris H: 335.1 seconds (no cones)
Eric E: 336.9 seconds (+1 cone = 338.9)
Stephen: 335.8 seconds (+2 cones = 339.8)
Me: 333.8 seconds (+1 cone = 335.8)
Jeff G: 338.3 seconds (+4 cones = 346.3)
Neil : 339.6 second (+1 cone = 341.6)
Josh S: 341.1 seconds (+3 cones = 347.1)

Takeaway: If you are pretty quick and hit no cones, you will probably be on the podium

Sooo....on raw time alone I was faster in the afternoon than everybody except Jeremy, and he was absolutely flying. The one cone i did get was on my last run with Julian riding shotgun where we were kind of goofing around late in the course and I overshot the turnaround. So, afternoon *could* have been a bit faster, to boot. So, I feel pretty good about the afternoon driving - looking at the numbers I was a bit better than I thought I was. With some fine tuning hopefully I can get back into contention at the next event, just have to calm down on cones and be consistent.





So, some takeaways and notes:

I need the "rally weight" in the trunk with these M3 springs, just like I did with the M42. Two tires seems to be about right, with a mostly-full tank of fuel. Now I have enough power to not worry about weight.

Front springs felt GREAT. I went up 25lbs of rate, but they actually feel way better than they did before.

Refreshing my braking system paid dividends, as the brakes felt really good and were only tranction-limited in one or two spots.

The drivetrain feels VERY responsive in all ways. I will note that with sold motor and transmisison mounts, man, my tranmission has substantial increase in NVH. Even the brand-new throwout bearing I can hear easily with the clutch pressed, With the clutch out and in neutral, there is a high level of layshaft/input shaft bearing noise from the transmission. It was likely there before, but I had soft poly mounts on it before rather than UHMV through-bolt ones. Getrag transmissions from e30s are known to have noisy bearings at high miles and it isn't said to be a major issue, but boy it is very apparent now. Also an audible gear whine that I couldn't really hear before. Just to test whether it's just the extra NVH from the sold mounts vs. something actually wrong, I'll probably throw some stock mounts in this week and go drive around and see what it sounds/feels like.

Diff: The 4.10s are just too short. Luckily this course was more technical than the usual Panthera courses (the two big straight hills were too torn up and rutted to run), so I could do the whole course in 2nd, but on a "typical" course here I would have needed 3rd a few times, which I'd prefer not to do. So I will almost certianly put my 3.73 LSD diff back in the car. It was a bit too long for the M42 that liked to rev, but should be just about right with this engine.

I pulled that diff off the shelf and tested the breakaway torque on the LSD, and it was taking close to 60lb-ft to break away - so that says it's locking up right about where it should.

So, will get that diff and the other trailing arm in this week. My new skidplate should be in tomorrow as well so will get that fitted up this week.

random: This newcomer e30 was just an M20, but the previous owner had planned to put a Yamaha Taurus SHO engine in it with ITBs, so built this hood to fit it (and never fitted the engine).

[irish44j]

Not much to show tonight. My new skidplate from #Red46 came in. Ben builds a nice selection of stainless steel rally/rallycross skidplates for e30s (including ones with engine swaps) and other cars. This one is substantially larger than those and built to my specs, just like the one that's been on the car for years. They're really nicely done and very heavy-duty - so definitely check them out if you need a skid for your rally or lowered or regular e30. www.red46.net

He also laser-etches the logo into them, which looks cool in a subtle way



Just for fun, I shot the front half of mine with some translucent red paint. I know it'll get scraped off pretty fast, but I like color, so why not





I need to take the other one off and make some marks to drill the mount bolt holes, which I'll take care of sometime this week.

Also put together the new bearing and hub for the second reinforced trailing arm, which I'll put on this week. I have a bunch of cans of red spray paint (from Pat Henry, leftover from when he painted his Comanche), so in the interest of not wasting money, pretty much anything under the car gets painted red.



While I have that out, I'm going to swap out my 4.10LSD with my 3.73 LSD to try to get better gearing for rallycross. The 4.10 will probably be the one to use for stage rally, but don't have one of those anytime soon and want the car set up best for rallycross at the moment.

I need to retrofit some mount studs to this diff like I have on the 4.10. Likely will just cut down and re-use the wheel studs I just replaced on the hubs for this purpose, which is how the 4.10 is set up.

[irish44j]

Things I hate: anything that requires messing with the trailing arms...





I really want to thank the designers at BMW for their thoughtless design that for some reason put the fuel filler right in the way of removing one of the trailing arm bolts - necessitating removal of the filler hose. This isn't that hard, but if you have more than half a tank of gasoline in the tank, you're gonna have to drain it or spill it (I did plenty of both).

I mean, would it have really been that hard to move it over toward the center of the car a few inches??





Anyhow, trailing arm #2 off, and the reinforced one on (with new bearings, new brake pads, etc).



While in there, I dropped the 4.10 diff out



And put the 3.73 in, for better gearing for rallycross (I will still use the 4.10 for stage, I think)



Note: the dog was no help at all...



A look back at the plated trailing arms and some of the car's underbody protection



Also started getting the new skidplate fitted, but got tired of working on the car and called it a day, so will finish that up later.