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

[irish44j]

moving on to the front section of the car. After pulling out stuff got the flap wheel out and smoothed out some areas that needed some cosmetic attention in preparation for painting.




After pulling out Jim's footrest, found some rust. This area for a long time had a leak from somewhere on the firewall that I've since fixed, but years of water dripping and probably getting caught behind the footrest, combined with that part of the floor taking a beating from below since it doesn't have an underguard (yet), the metal there was probably kind of beat up.

I found three or four small holes, one right above the exhaust collector, one kind of above the frame rail, and one outside.




All were pretty small, so just cut them out with a hole saw and patched them with some fresh sheet metal.




The one section overlapped with the side of the frame rail, so just put a crappy little patch on the outside as well.




Anyhow, then seam sealed it and then doused in some undercoat.




So good as new. Then got going on painting the front passenger area and some other small stuff in the vicinity. Didn't paint over the undercoat yet, figured I'll do that in a few days when it's good and dry.







A bit out of order, since last night I re-wrapped the door bar padding so I put that on already. I know, super-exciting.




Also put some new grip tape on the footrest since it was sitting there




And, since you guys know I like to do goofy cosmetic stuff. Well, I have like three rolls of burgundy vinyl for some reason. So out with the knife and had a bit of fun with it....because straight beige everywhere is kind of no fun at all....but don't worry, I'm only going to do the backstays (which have always been red), not the rest of the cage lol

[Bearmw]

...Keep On Trucking! all day. I love it.

[irish44j]

Not all that motivated today, but got a few things done nonetheless. For those of you who like the chain-link tiedown things, here's some more of that. Two of these welded to the ends of the harness bars on the cage. This is for front attachment points for our helmet net in the back. Since it's going to be over the spare tire now, it needs to be able to be detached quickly (currently it's wrapped around the bars and isn't quick to remove. So, it'll have carabiners holding it at all four corners for quick removal.




I have a couple DOM tubes on the way to do some lower rear bars from the foot of the cage to the rear shock tower, but those won't be here for a few days. Since I didn't feel much like any cutting or real welding today, I did more painting. Basically the main hoop, crossbar X, backstays, and other nearby areas. Since this paint takes a couple days to fully dry I like to do things sectionally. The next few days I'll mostly be working up front in the car so don't need access to the back until it's dry.







Also, made up some coroplast door cards for the rear doors. They've always been just gutted and empty, which doesn't really hurt anything but just looks like crap and annoys me since they just get filled with dust and other crap. Coroplast weighs almost nothing and I have a huge sheet of it sitting around from another project, so what the hell. It's white, so after I cut them out I gave one each to my daughters and let them do some artwork on them. So, now the car has rainbows and princesses and tractors and stuff. :)

[rzerob]

Awesome upgrades. The chain link mod is definitely something I will be using in the future.

[irish44j]

Chain link tip is super handy, will 100% be using that on my e36

I do wish I was less half-assed when I weld stuff though. I know it's all strong, but never looks pretty, even on chain links lol.

----

This morning wrapped up the exhaust modifications by setting up a couple of hangers on the muffler. I didn't end up using the old mount tabs that I had welded on when I got this muffler, nor did I use the OEM-style handers. Instead, decided to use two more of the rod-style hangers that I used on the other parts of the exhaust, with weld-nuts into the car. Basically this means I can drop the entire exhaust with an impact gun (17mm) at all four locations and two people can simple drop it down in one piece.





And yeah, more pictures of ugly welding. Like I care.

The bolts come through the trunk floor, which is cosmetically somewhat annoying, but whatever. That open area in the middle of the trunk is just for piling crap in during travel or heading to a rallycross or whatever, so doesnt' really matter. Can still fit two tires in the trunk with this setup.



So here's an outside shot of the muffler location, offset from center and tucked up nice and secure. Man, I really do like the easy access to everythign with the spare well out of the way



Also semi-permanently sealed up the trunk vents with some seam sealer and coroplast. For years I've just taped it up with aluminum tape, but that eventually gets broken and dirt comes in. I'm really trying to totally seal the trunk from dust/water.



So with that done, I went ahead and painted the rear seat area, c-pillars, rear deck, rear roof, and the lower areas of the backstay tubes. Left a few bare areas where I plan to attach tubing or other items. Always fun climbing my 6-foot self in there in between the cage backstays sitting on my side to paint in there lol.

[econti]

Chain link tip is super handy, will 100% be using that on my e36

[irish44j]

As for car stuff today, continuing on with my interior revamp. First thing was a little morning project which is more as a test case than anything else. So got a bit of steel out and started cutting and bending (mocked up in cardboard in advance)





So there will perhaps be two of these, but for the moment just doing one since I want to see how the routing is. Anyhow, it's just a bracket to hold the end of ducting tube that will run to one or both of the rear NACA ducts when the car is NOT being driven someplace dusty (i.e. not for rallycross, generally). Could be nice to add airflow during long rally transits on the road. Anyhow, just tacked it in place so I can test it out, we'll see how it works. Having the rear doors open means I also have to make some kind of bracket for the other end of the tube that will "mate" with the ducts in the rear door windows. Still working on the best way to do that, but I have ideas..



So, silly things out of the way and back to the less interesting stuff. Took out the seats and other interior stuff. Also snipped about 50 zipties holding wiring in place, etc. I plan to clean up the main power loom that goes to the battery in the back, since it's always been a bit of a hackjob. More on that once I finish other things and can properly route (and protect) those big fat wires.



Then hit the trunk area with seam sealer on all the welded areas and holes I plugged. Also did the bottom side, so hopefully everything will be sealed well from dust




While that dried, started on the exhaust. Basically, I added a 6" straight section to where I cut it off in order to be able to clear the diff going more toward the center of the car and still leave some room there. Then I (basically) took the S-shaped pipe and cut it off the muffler and rotated it about 90 degrees, so instead of going "out and up" it now goes "in and up" more. Then tacked it all together with the muffler where I want it. I'll have to fab up some hangers since I can't use the stock ones any more. In any case, this gets the muffler a good 6" higher than it was before and more importantly gets it away from basically everything, so I have full access to the diff, axles, tiedown points brake lines, etc. coming in from the back of the car. So the muffler is tucked in nicely as high as it can go and still clear the bottom of the bumper. It's off-center, makes me think of an e28 stock muffler now :)

I'll have to pull the full exhaust to do a complete weld job probably, but even just partially welded the muffler is easily holding its own weight from the hanger under the rear subframe, which is like 3 feet forward. This exhaust is heavy as heck, but it's also strong as heck.





So a few small things left to do in the trunk area. You may recall a while back i did this same little trick:



So basically you use chain links welded to the floor at 2 (or 4) points directly parallel where you want to hold something down. Then you can just run a Titan Strap between them, put the object above it, and secure the strap around the object. So, I welded down six total of these - two are for holding down the spill kit bag and the other four are for holding down the first aid kit.



With all that done and the seam sealer dry (this is much later today), I went ahead and painted up the trunk area. So, if you follow my Raider build, you'll recognize the color as what I used for the roof and skidplate. It's rustoleum Professional "sand" color with a bit of black mixed in to flatten it out/darken it a tiny bit. I still have 2/3rds of a gallon of it an nothign much else I can use it for, so the entire interior of this car (including the lower half of the cage) will be done in that color. I figure it will look fine, keep the car light feeling inside (and I hate white interiors since they always look dirty), and being sand color will nicely hide the coat of dust that's always all over this interior lol.





Don't mind the white area - I had to finish something there so didn't paint there yet.

So, that's where I'm at. Plugging along...

[irish44j]

Solid, steady progress & great commentary. Nice bulkhead removal too, too often that gets left rather ragged.

Since we will probably be doing stuff during service stops, etc that would be near it, it was pretty important to make it not only fairly clean looking, but also no sharp edges. It's already filed down around the edge with all the pinch seams where I cut it off hammered flat, and they'll be covered with seam sealer. Also have a few other things to do to that parcel shelf setup, like add support bars in the middle so it doesn't rattle around. Kind of doing this part of the car with a vague plan of what I want done, and makikng it up as I go along :)

[irish44j]

Yeah, it's been kind of a forgotten thread since there have been some big gaps in both racing and work on this car, especially as I went full-in with the Raider project for about 6 months. Now with the Raider mostly done I'm curving back toward upgrading this car a bit over the rest of the year. Future project will include building some actual gravel coilovers for the front (probably over the winter), among a few other things.

The one upside of not having any rally this year is the money I put aside to pay for rally gets to go to other automotive project uses :)

[MR E30 325is]

Thanks for keeping this thread going. I enjoy the updates!

I'm with Mike on this one. Been enjoying your detailed posts for years and years now. One of my favorite car threads of all time.

[mike.bmw]

Thanks for keeping this thread going. I enjoy the updates!

[roguetoaster]

Solid, steady progress & great commentary. Nice bulkhead removal too, too often that gets left rather ragged.

[irish44j]

And also, a couple pics someone took last weekend

[irish44j]

So with that rallycross in the books and the next one (at least for DC) not scheduled until October, time to do some work on the car (note: if a rallysprint pops up in September I'll probably go, or may hit a Susquehanna region event). Anyhow, I've been putting together a mental list of some structural and arrangement upgrades I'd like to do on the car, and got busy today with the cutting tools.

So before I get into it, there are a number of end-goals for the stuff I'm doing here:

1. relocate the spare tire into the back seat area to get its weight in front of the rear axle rather than hanging out at the far rear end of the car where it makes more of a pendulum effect.

2. relocate the battery to the passenger side to counterbalance the weight of the driver's side exhaust. Based on measuring my arch heights, the driver's side is definitely a heavier than passenger.

3. make a number of things more accessible, including the diff, diff mount bolts, rear strut towers, etc.

4. finish up certain cage/reinforcement aspects that I didn't do previously, for a variety of reasons

5. relocate the muffler and rear exhaust to a less vulnerable position.

6. do all of this while keeping a more or less net-zero weight increase, or at least keep it close.

So, let's jump into it. First thing out came the grinder, sawzall, and jigsaw and cut out the rear seat bulkhead as cleanly as possible. It's not terribly heavy, and has little structural value in a caged car (in my opinion), and it's in the way of some of the above things.




It's funny cutting it out, since we built the cage with it there so certain things were not accessible at that time. We didn't plate the front side of the rear shock towers, and apparently didn't manage to paint parts of the rear crossbar either due to it being hard to access. All in all, looks pretty sloppy back there, especially after years of dirt and crap collecting there.




So one of the reasons for this is to allow the spare to sit down flat in the back seat area. To get it out, just tilt it up toward the front and roll it directly out the door (there's plenty of clearance under the backstays). This should put its weight in a better place. Here's a general mockup of where it's going to sit, and I'll use a similar hold-down system as I was using with it in the trunk.




I also plan to put two additional cage bars in, running from the backside of the bottom of the main hoop going back and upward to the shock towers (which I'll finish plating/reinforcing first). This will complete the "box" structurally, in theory, though who knows if it's really needed. That's coming later once I find some 3' DOM tubes.

Hard to see. but in the 2nd photo above you can see two holes kind of in the middle right behind where the bulkhead used to be. Those are access holes for the upper diff bolts. Better than doing it from below the car, but was still hard to get to them way back under the trunk. Now they're easily accessible.

With the spare moving to there, now I can do something I've wanted to do for a good while:







The spare well makes arranging the trunk the way I want it, more difficult. Plus it hanging down puts it in the way of all kinds of stuff, including the diff, and forces the exhaust to be in the OEM location. So with that gone, time to put in a delete plate. I have a giant sheet of 12-ga steel out back from the Raider skidplate build, so off to the shed with the jigsaw. Unfortuantely, the sheet is only 24" wide (8' long), and i need the patch piece to be around 27" long, so I decided to cut it out as two pieces:







I'll weld them together and put a brace crossbar below it going to the frame rails so it's very strong.

Then I cut out the exhaust from just under the CV axle, where the pipe starts to curve. The plan will be to basically flip it and angle it more upward so i can tuck the muffler more toward the center of the car, behind the diff, and higher up to give it better protection from stuff hitting it.




And with the spare well gone, there is a TON of room under there now. I'll also probably cut out the lower valence under the rear bumper, since now it's basically a big under-car air brake/dirt collector.




So, last thing today was some test-fitting and deciding on future trunk arrangement, before I weld anything up. Also you can see a bunch of small holes in the photo above (from various old eyebolts I fitted and removed, or other stuff). All of those have been just sealed with aluminum tape for some time, but I'll patch them permanently now. With the trunk open to the cabin now, I want to make sure it's fully sealed from dust, water, etc.


battery will move over to the right (you can see the box sitting there, and the white patch on the left is where it used to be). This location will also make it easier to access the battery terminals and/or remove it when needed. It was a pain to get to it sitting up under the rear deck.




So, that's where I am at the moment. I have a few smaller things to do up at the front of the cabin as well, but won't do that until all this stuff is wrapped up.

[irish44j]

Ok, let's do a wrapup on last weekend. This was events 3&4, a doubleheader with DC rallycross at Summit Point Motorsports Park. The sign-up list had 89 drivers for the weekend (about 75 each day, with some people only doing one day), which was by far our biggest event ever. Upside is seeing other new people, downside of course is less runs. Anyhow, the weather was great on Saturday and we set up to run the "Barn Course," which back in the day I was pretty good at but recently I've been less successful. It's a fairly smooth, high-speed course.

(actually Sunday's) grid and non-grid area during the first run group. Lots of cars







One of the reasons for the high turnout is a local car club joining us as part of a "$1500 challenge" of sorts, where they all bought "grampa" cars for that price and are doing various racing with them. So we had a crown vic, about a half-dozen 90s Mercedes (including an S360 and and S500), some Volvos, a Camry wagon, a Corolla wagon, and a few other randoms. A couple of them were pretty quick with good drivers but overall not all that fast, as to be expected. However, they were amusing to watch:










Also there was a Galant VR4 on Sunday- I've never seen one of these at a rallycross or much of anyplace in years. Turbo, AWD, 4-wheel steering....and it actually finished the event!




And....a "Paco" Miata with big ass tires and a turbo 1.8. It was amusing, and the owner was just there for kicks, but it literally finished dead last of like 70 cars on Saturday, even being beaten by 10 seconds by the S500 giant Benz. Looked to have pretty much no suspension travel and must have been a tight squeeze on some gates lol




So MR, as usual, was the largest class at the event. All of the usuals were there (except Josh S, who was busy doing his duratec e30 swap as documented in another GRM thread). By my count there were four prior season class champions and about a dozen others who had won individual events in the recent past....so yeah, a ton of fast dudes. Nonack also showed up again with his BRZ (among 4 total BRZs that came this weekend), and Mike Golden had his MR2 back in shape to join Michael Stock's MR2 (also documented here on GRM). All in all we had 17 cars in MR on Saturday on a BIG course (averaging about 80 seconds in length).







Also good to see Dan Gugger back with the 944




with Stock's GRM MR2




We all went out hard, expecting fewer runs than normal. The two "2nd drivers" of co-driven cars, Eric Eisele and Chris Helgesen, jumped out ahead with much faster first runs (seeing the course while riding with their higher-ranked codrivers helps..) and the rest of us played catch-up all day. Eric's first run was almost 2 seconds faster than anyone else in the class. My 2nd run was the fastest in the class, but I nudged a cone and it fell over (I watched it happen....), putting me 2 seconds back.


Also, having the roll-out shelter on the rig has been well-worth it and much less hassle than putting out a pop-up




For the rest of the day I put down runs that were the fastest or among the fastest in the class, but among the top 5 in the class, only one other cone was hit (Eric's, on a very fast run) and in the end, that was the decider. Eric took first. Nick wheeled his M3 into 2nd place, and I was just behind him, with point leader Stephen Nichols 2/10ths behind me in his e30. All in all, BMWs took the top 5 spots, followed by Nonack, who drove fast but was hurt by three cones over our 8 runs for the day. Golden was really moving in the MR2, battling for the lead for most of the day until an unfortunate snap-oversteer/understeer on his 6th run caused him to wipe out a cone wall for +6, dropping him from 1st to 8th.....

I do want to note: Even with almost 80 cars on an 80+ second course, we still got 8 runs. That's a testament to how smoothly DC rallycrosses run!

So, on to Sunday. We lost about a half dozen cars to attrition overall, and several others weren't there for other reasons so we were down to 60 cars, with MR losing two or three drivers (the Helgesen boys, whose Volvo had some wheel bearing issues) and gaining a couple in a BRZ. Sunday we ran the "Tree Course," which is substantially smaller and only about 40 seconds long. It's fun, but also kind of boring and tends to get torn up faster due to its softer and more powdery dirt. The fact that it's surrounded by trees played a role as well, as wind is more blocked so dust hangs a lot longer. While we were running 4-5 cars on course at once on Saturday, Sunday's course only allowed 2 cars at once, and just barely....so, a lot less seat time.

We all went out of the box hard from the start, with Chris Helgesen, Nichols, and Golden jumping out to a slight edge. All in all, the top-9 drivers were within about 1.8 seconds of 1st...so, really close. Again my 2nd run was the fastest in the class (or close to it), but I picked up a cone (no idea where, I didn't think I was close to any), and in this class that pretty much killed my hopes of winning. For the rest of the morning I hammered down. My 3rd run was fastest in the class, and 4th run was 2nd fastest, but at luch I was sitting in 5th or 6th thanks to that cone. In the afternoon, everyone went out hard again from the start and in my first two runs I jumped a couple people (Nick, Chris, and Neil) into 3rd, but the guys in 1st and 2nd were running the same times I was so couldn't gain on them much. Mike Golden had been leading the class after his first afternoon run, but his MR2's rear skidplate was hanging low and caught the finish line tube, which then wiped out 5 cones at the finish, ending his day. As they tried to repair it, report of lightning came in from the main racetrack and we were forced into a 30-minute delay. So we stood around and sweated.





The day was late already so at that point they just called it so everyone could get going home (6 runs). In the end, Eric took first again to sweep the weekend, with Nichols just fractions of a second behind him, and me 1.6 seconds back. Neither of them hit cones, nor did Nick, who finished behind me. Take away the one cone I hit and I would have won the event. That's how good this class is. I'll also note that the last run of the day saw Nonack crushing it and putting down the fastest time of the afternoon for the class and the 2nd fastest of anyone in the entire run group - only Adam Kimmett in his Mod All subaru was faster.

So, two third place finishes, which leaves me 3rd in overall points, with Stephen still in first and Eric in 2nd, with Nick a bit back in 4th. We have two more doubleheaders, but not until October-November, and those will be at Panthera where I've done a bit better and my (and Nick's) extra power should be helpful on the hilly courses there vs. Eric, Neil, Stephen and Chris with their M20s. Of course, can't rule out Golden (2ZZZ-swapped MR2 with about 200hp), Nonack (BRZ on proper suspension and getting more dialed in every day), or a couple other guys. It's always anyone's game in this class - and I will continue to say that in this country, no MR regional class is more competitive than here in DC.

Side note: Shawn Roberts won PR nationals last week, so congrats to him. Not surprisingly he also won both days in PR at this event. Pretty sure in the past 5 years or so he has only *not* won PR on one or two occasions. Pretty much like clockwork.




Side note 2: Eric's winning car, you may recall, is the one that used to be in my shed that I sold to them. Now I'm starting to regret it (j/k), since they've build it much better than their old "cracking-in-half" e30 from prior seasons lol.




Side note 3: A couple other stage cars there as well.

Gupta's Protege




Side note 4: Upon leaving I couldn't get the Sequioa's rear gate open. Figured it was the handle bent again (already replaced once), so had to load heavy stuff through the roll-down rear window. Spent 3 hours today sweating inside the truck trying to get the tailgate open, since the handle was fine and it was actually the mechanism seized, which was a REAL pain in the ass to get open. I basically had to use a mirror to pry stuff inside the door on the backside of the mechanism to unlock the latch. And it started pouring right in the middle of doing that. For as good as Toyota is at making cars, the latch and mechanism design on the Sequoia is absolute garbage.