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

[irish44j]

Doing some little stuff in prep for WMWR. Rerouted some wires in the car (intercom, GoPro, etc) to put them in more convenient locations. Also installed another tie-down on the inner rear driveshaft tunnel to use as a forward mount point for a ratchet strap (along with the two stock rear seatbelt eyebolts) so we can strap down the toolkit in the back seat area rather than the trunk, which is getting more difficult now that we're going to start carrying two spare tires. Forgot to take any photos, so will post some later...

Also got the decals for WMWR in the mail, and they look great. Sadly they required removing my NRS banner and Black River Stages cars. With us running in three different organizations (ARA, NASA, SCCA) is't like a game of musical chairs swapping out all the required numbers, decals, banners, etc. I have a few ideas about how to make this easier, but those will come later.



Also need to cover up the NRS header since SCCA did not provide one....



Also got my hands on another full set of 14" weaves for $100. So now we have three sets of 14" weaves, which I like for rally (both the looks and the design being stronger than bottlecaps), to go along with the 3 sets of bottlecaps (for winter tires/beater rally tires, and spares) and the Euroweaves (15") for my street Star Specs. Need to figure out where to cram all tese things in my garage!

[irish44j]

Not much to update other than we are now licensed/registered for American Rally Association (ARA) - So now that we've done that, we're pretty much locked in to doing STPR rally (the big one) this summer, since it's the only ARA rally in the mid-Atlantic.

The last few weeks have been spent working on the Porsche project and repairing various things that are starting to go wrong with the WRX at 150,000 miles (steering rack, center diff, turbo inlet, etc).

But today I did do something I've been meaning to do for a while. In past events, especially when running lights (particularly if the heater or engine fan are on) we've gotten a voltage drop with the stock 60A alternator where we weren't getting a positive charge. Since we're running some considerable amperage, that's one thing I wanted to upgrade. After a bit of research I figured out that the stock 105-amp alternator from the 92-94 e36 318i (the M42 cars) is a direct fit but with substantially more amperage.

So, picked one up a Delco unit and installed. With all accessories running (all lights, fan, heater, etc) still charging almost 14v on my voltmeter, so that's exactly what I wanted.

[irish44j]

Today we registered for the Wellsboro Winter Rally, an SCCA event. This is the one that had no snow (and lots of rocks) last year, so we're hoping for more snow this time around!

IN the meantime, we had a 60 degree day here today to bring in the new year, so that meant car work!

First I went to do the inner tie rods on the e30 and discovered I ordered e36 inners instead of e30 inners.....I have an e36 rack, but use e30 tie rods. So delay on that one!

Instead, I set up my new purchase, an 18" cherry bomb. On stage and track, the car is just too quiet. I can't even hear it with the STilo helmet on, and I like to hear it. But on the street I want it relatively quiet and not droning. So the solution was to cut off the muffler and weld in a flange on both the car-side pipe and then matching flanges on both the cherry bomb and on the muffler I already had on the car. After a couple hours of work, here's the result....the CB sounds good, like a 4cyl race car should sound. I also sedt it up so both would still use the factory exhaust hangers.









and with the old muffler back on



Also did some work on the WRX.....new rotors and Hawk HPS 5.0 pads. I've used HPS for years, and the 5.0 is just as quiet, but has a LOT more initial bite. I really like them in the little bit of driving I've done on them so far.



yeah, it was time to replace


On the downside, I confirmed the WRX steering rack is leaking from the input seal (145k miles, and this is a problem that usually happens a lot earlier), so will probably get a reman rack for it and try to make it last 50k more miles before I look for a new car...

[irish44j]

Damn I knew I should've gone to that event at Englishtown! I always go there to watch and go drifting. William Petrow (and all of Broken Motorsports) is the man! They are always out drifting and generally having a good time. Glad you got see Sneaky Pete's too, I try to convince my non car friends to go to the track and use the "well there is a bar right next to track" to persuade them hahaha!

I don't know if you saw this gem or not, but it made me laugh, since I know Bobby from drifting at etown.

http://jalopnik.com/this-rowdy-240sx...cussion-region

lol, yeah I saw it. I chatted with Bobby for a while the night before. It makes me kind of sad that with all that blooper-ism, he was still basically putting down the same times that we were, lol....of course, having twice our horsepower probably helped with that, especially on the track section where our lack of power really showed. Of course, most of those mistakes in an actual stage rally would have resulted in a tree hit or other major damage, and we were trying to drive "as if there were trees instead of cones" so as not to get into bad habits :)

[ccsdo5]

Damn I knew I should've gone to that event at Englishtown! I always go there to watch and go drifting. William Petrow (and all of Broken Motorsports) is the man! They are always out drifting and generally having a good time. Glad you got see Sneaky Pete's too, I try to convince my non car friends to go to the track and use the "well there is a bar right next to track" to persuade them hahaha!

I don't know if you saw this gem or not, but it made me laugh, since I know Bobby from drifting at etown.

http://jalopnik.com/this-rowdy-240sx...cussion-region

[irish44j]

Also here's some great drone footage of Paddy Brennan's Evo running the full course - gives a good idea of what it looked like overall

[irish44j]

Also here's a video of the course at speed. Just skip to about the 3-minute mark since I forgot to crop it well...

[irish44j]

NASA RallySport Englishtown NJ

Last weekend we towed up to Englishtown, NJ for the inaugeral NASA Rally Sport rallysprint at that location, organized by William Petrow (known for his combination drift-and-rally 240SX, among other things). Unlike many other rallysprints, this one was set up at Raceway Park, using both the road-course track (usually used for track days and drift events) as well as the large motocross complex next to it. The layout was a 2-mile overall course, with about 50-50 on paved and dirt, starting and ending on the dirt section with the track section in between. The track has a number of setup options and the organizers set it up with a number of chicanes and tight features to limit top-end speed (since nobody would be on track tires). Indeed, we were torn between running snow tires (which would have more grip on the tarmac) and gravel tires (which would lack tarmac grip but be much better on the rough dirt areas). For the dirt areas, we didn't use most of the large motocross jumps, instead the course was routed around the big table-tops with a TON of technical features both fast and slow speeds. It was substantially longer and more complex than any rallycross course I've ever been on, exacerbated by the fact that the big tabletops and jumps obscured most turns so you couldn't "look ahead."

Some pictures of the track and dirt areas:





Because of the long course and blind options, there were classes for both solo drivers and for "with navigator," so Jim came up to call the notes. There were no notes made, so he jotted them down during a recce run (both directions), and overall they worked pretty well (aside from one turn that we called out wrong on the notes and proceeded to repeatedly take too fast until we remembered to fix it). The course had a few small jump areas, some banked areas, and several kicks and ran in some places right along the fenceline and other large obstacles. Not as much crash danger as a stage rally, but a LOT more than a rallycross - which is why only logbooked rally (and track) cars were allowed to run. The track section, of course, had concrete walls as well as tire walls and some other obstacles (tires and giant foam blocks).

The night before we unloaded and then had a few beers in the on-track "bar" which is really an old barn with some heaters, lol



Parked with Petrow's 240SX


The turnout for this event was about 20-25 cars, amost all of which were experienced rally drivers - including some of the fastest guys in the region like Jon Kramer (Impreza), Paddy Brennan (Evo), Barry McKenna and Michael Gillespie (Mk1 Cosworth Escorts), Lajos Jonas (M3), Brian McNamara (Impreza), and a bunch of other cars, including Alex Jagger and Ryan Symancek in Alex's 240SX Drift/Rally car, and Tad Uzzle in the Mazda2 that we ran against at the winter rally last year. Also there was a local (Bobby Calhoun) in his Lexus V8-swapped 240SX drift car. Bobby was actually suprisingly fast in the dirt areas and very fast on the tarmac, but eventually hit a wall at high speed and wrecked the car near the grandstand area. For the most part, there was only minor damage to other cars (some bashed fenders, lost bumpers, etc) other than Constantine Mantoupolis's beautiful vintage Audi S2 rally car, which had a mechanical breakdown on the recce lap and couldn't run.









You can see Jonas's M3 and Contantine's Audi in the background



Also a Ken Block clone and a legit Lancia Delta were there hanging out



We started out a bit cautious, and the e30's low power was a real liability on the tarmac track, especially with the lack of traction through the corners with the skinny rally tires (which did allow us to do some drifting, at least). As the day went by I got a better feel and we were more confident in both the track and blind dirt areas - and we were happy to see that every single run (a total of 11, each about 4 minutes long), we were faster by a few seconds, and never had a run slower than the previous. So that's always the goal, right?

Werkes Automotion photo


Emanual Mozes photo


In the end, we finished 11th overall and were only about 10% slower than the fastest cars out there. Granted, a lot of the drivers were there for seat time and were doing a bit of showboating - but it's not like rally drivers to just let off....and on our later runs once we got in a groove we were pretty competitive with most (though not all) of the 2WD cars out there. More importantly, we didn't break anything on the car and got a lot of experience using it on the tarmac surface with the gravel tires, which may come in handy later.

Emanuel Mozes photos




Chris Ludwig photo


Stephen Nichols photo


Also thanks to Stephen Nichols and Amanda Pemberton for coming out in the cold and wind to crew for us. Happy that you didn't have to do any fixing!



We did miss out on the final DC rallycross the day after (too much towing and too much stuff to do at home, so I had to bail on it. However, since I already clinched season points for the class, at least it didn't hurt the season effort). Next up: Wellsboro Winter Rally in February (unless anything local/interesting comes along in the meantime!)

[econti]

That looks like the best fun

[irish44j]

Last weekend I went out to Summit Point Motorsports Park with the rally car for the "Refrigerator Bowl" - which is basically an autocross but on several of the road course tracks. No cones, no course working, basically each run is about half of one of the tracks, with a few curbed chicanes to keep speeds down. We ran on Jefferson circuit (which I had never run) and Shenandoah Circuit (which I have hundreds of laps on, but it was reversed-direction for this, which was weird).

Car went out "as-is" except with the swaybars on, and my 5-year-old 195-width Star Specs. The courses were a lot of fun and out of 80 cars out there (almost all of which were either "sporty" daily drivers or autocross cars) I actually finished 40-something on Jefferson (more open course where my lack of power showed) and low 30s on Shenandoah (a more technical course where handling is rewarded).

Here's some vid of the two courses in case you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUVwGqbZ5MQ&t=2s

And some pics:

Alan Claffie caught me running up the hill on Jefferson


Off-camber, over a crest, in a rally car = wheel gapz!



A couple of the rallycross e30s on the tarmac


And some BMWs better suited to the tarmac


New Focus RS, and a CAM car...nice


At lunch went down and watched some action on the Main circuit


Anyhow, that was fun, and was also a good prep for the NJ rallysprint coming up, which is half on a paved track, and half on a dirt motocross course next to it. Decided I really dislike front sway on the track too with this suspension (and definitely on the dirt, as previously noted), so today took it off entirely. Rear I'll leave on and just disconnect one side.

WIth temps dropping into the 40s, today was a good day to switch over to the winter tires (Altimax Arctics) and hide my Star Specs away out of the freezing weather. I also ordered up two more Altimax Arctics so I'll have 7 total wheels/tires for the rallysprint and Wellsboro Winter Rally in February



Also, the black 924, now stripped of everything I wanted, went away last week. Two fellow rallyists - Robert Pepper, who lives near me, and Charli Tameris, who lives up in NY - took it for use as body/glass spare parts for their 944 rally cars. This is kind of a quid pro quo for me that I'll be able to get parts from them in the future (especially interior stuff that they don't need for their rally cars).

Their German rally cars are pretty sweet too

[irish44j]

So a quick update about DC region rallycross #7. I came into this event guaranteed at least a tie for the season points championship (with an 8th event remaining) - so basically I just had to finish in the top-8 or so to get a point. With that in mind, and the fact that I'm doing a "track-autocross" next weekend, I decided to re-install the sway bars for the tarmac. That said, I've never had the sways on with this current spring setup so wanted to see if they performed well at all on the dirt.

Swaybar install is as easy as ever, so I jumped in the car to test it out and.....the clutch pedal goes to the floor. Strange since I had just moved the car there an hour earlier. Under the car, a puddle of brake fluid. Dammit. It was pretty easy to trace the fluid to a blown seal on the clutch slave cylinder (which wasn't even new when I installed it 5 years ago, IIRC). With a day before the event, I had to get something pretty quick. I decided I might as well do the master and the soft line while I was in there. In retrospect I should have just done the slave and left the rest alone, because the master turned out to be a major hassle. Difficult to get to, difficult to get to the bolts, difficult to get to the feed hose, and with a cage in the car and fixed seats, it takes some contortion to get in there.

So after an hour on my back, head and shoulders scraping on the floor nonskid...it was in. While I was at it I installed a new braided clutch line from Condor Speed Shop that Carlos overnighted to me (thanks!). So it all works fine now, back to normal. Yay.



On to rallycross. NIce weather, nice courses, nice conditions. The whole MOD RWD crew was there, with 11 or 12 cars registered, including Josh Sennett, trying to finish an event in the M50-swapped e30, and Nick finally with the e36 M3 ready to go. Of course Eric/Neil were there in their e30, battling for 2nd in season points, Eric H/Stephen in their e30, a BR-Z, a couple Volvos, etc. SA front-runner Mike Golden sheared a couple wheels studs before the event and asked for a co-drive, to which I said yes.

Anyhow, the long and the short of it is that the car is terrible on grass/dirt with the sways. Damn near uncontrollable, understeering heavily on lower-speed turns then snapping to oversteer with no warning. And it would NOT rotate on command except at high entry speeds with heavy trail-braking. So I was entering corners faster than usual just to try to get the car to snap, which it did inconsistently. And it was awful in slaloms - could not get it to "dance" the way I always can.

So, the long and the short of it is that even pushing as hard as I could, the best I could manage was 3rd, almost 10 seconds behind Eric Eisele and 4-5 behind his codriver Neil. Too bad since the courses would have been excellent for my normal setup.

Interestingly, Mike Golden (who did poorly when he drove my car last year) finished just tenths of a second behind me in the end. I guess as a Subaru driver he's used to the understeer, lol....

All that said, I locked up the points championship for the second straight year, so that's nice.

This coming weekend I'm heading up to Summit Point Raceway for the "refrigerator bowl" autocross, which is set up on two of the tracks (Jefferson and Shenandoah circuits), has very few cones, and no course working. I thought about taking the WRX but nah...taking the rally car with the old Star Specs on it. Should be interesting, and probably very slow haha...

Oh a few other things...

rusty e36s don't like rallycross (though he ran the rest of the day with no rear shock)





Also, don't use steelies for rallycross. This is the second time a car has had this happen in the last few events....

[irish44j]

Hah, yeah that was such a debacle....A 9-hour tow to get there and then we got like 4 total runs over two days....but the free-for-all on the circle track was fun. That clay infused with wax is NASTY though when wet. We literally pulled like 100lbs of it off of the car that day and over the next months. Stickiest, nastiest stuff I've ever seen.

Too bad Ryan didn't show the video of when I blew by him and Justin (in the two Justys) on the track, haha....

Btw, Ryan just entered an e30 (with limited success) at Empire State Peformance Rally, and now they're going to use it for Chumpcar. So he's turned to the dark side to some extent :)

[Wschnitz]

Spai'd you on latest drive episode.

[irish44j]

Today put the rear swaybar back on. I've been runnning without them for a couple years now and I like how the car handles and turns-in in the dirt/gravel. But with a track autocross in 2 weeks figured I want the sways on there to check body lean a bit. We have a rallycross this weekend, but I"ve clinched the points for the class already so probably a good time to see how I like the car with the sways on (with the stiffer springs), since I've never tried that combination. So took care of that.

As luck would have it, I was going to test drive the car, turned it on and my brake warning light was flickering, and then the clutch pedal went to the floor. Dammit. Fluid level was low (not low enough to get air into the brakes, thankfully, but low enough that the clutch line was sucking air. Looked under the car and sure enough, brake fluid dripping on the bellhousing. So looks like the slave cylinder is shot....not bad since it's the same one I put on there 5 years ago.

So with a rallycross on Sunday, got online and ordered up a new slave and clutch master (might as well do them at the same time), and also will touch base with Carlos at Condor Speed Shop and try to get my hands on a stainless clutch line fast so I can just do the whole system.

Sucks that the car is out in the driveway near the street, so guess I'll be working in the leaves and acorns. Thankfully it's supposed to be fairly warm this week...

[kts]

I just got home and checked the mail and saw the latest issue of GRM in my mailbox. Flipping through I was like "hmmm that car looks familiar!" Congrats on getting your car in there, pretty darn cool!