'88 325is M30 street car-->S54 -->S50 -->M54 Enduro Race car

[Jb325is]

Anyone have any experience with the Castro airbox?



I was planning on making one but we don't have much aluminum around the shop that I can use, so I'd have to order material and there would be a lot of trial and error... I think in this case I might be ok with just spending the $300 to get something that works, but I want to make sure that they fit alright with ABS first.

[stonea]

I know Jordan ran it on his 318is M54 restomod and he seemed to love it

[Staszek]

Anyone have any experience with the Castro airbox?



I was planning on making one but we don't have much aluminum around the shop that I can use, so I'd have to order material and there would be a lot of trial and error... I think in this case I might be ok with just spending the $300 to get something that works, but I want to make sure that they fit alright with ABS first.

Im in to understand this too, I am looking at the same box.

[kronus]

yes, they are made with ABS in mind

[Jb325is]

Took the car out for a shakedown today @ a local PCA autocross, no real issues thankfully. I didn't really mess with setup or anything, and wasn't super competitive with a few of the super cereal autocross guys that were there but I was pretty happy with it overall. Z2 Star Specs are pretty awesome, and the brakes on this thing are too much for autocross with the Hawk DTC60/60. but I still had fun. Car is headed to Barber Motorsports park next weekend for 2 day DE, pretty excited about that!

DSC_0056 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

DSC_0024 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

[Digitalwave]

Glad the shakedown went well!

[Joeyz31]

Glad to see you were able to get it done in time to do a shakedown. It has been awesome to see the progression of this car. This is honestly my favorite stage at this point.

I am looking forward to hear your thoughts on the balance of the car now with the MCS's and & M54 vs how the car was set up with the s54.

As much as i love the s54 and want one, this seems like such a nice balance of fast but not too fast for this chassis and reliable as well.

good work as always and look forward to more updates.

-Joey

[Jb325is]

Thanks!

So far my impression of the M54 is tons of torque but really falls on it's face up top. I'd really like to get it on the dyno soon to make sure we don't have something else going on, but it basically feels like you should shift it @ 6k because nothing is happening after that. I am pretty excited to get it back on the scales though to see how the front to rear split is looking now. If we can get it tuned and make a little more power up top, I will be really happy. As of right now the s50 felt faster, but I don't think it actually was.

As for the MCS's, I know they will work great, because I work with them a lot on other cars but we haven't quite gotten our dialed in yet. It felt really rigid on the Conti slick, but that is a super stiff and not very sticky tire, so we're really going to start tuning more on the Z2's because that's what the car will be on most of the time. I only have damper tuning experience using feedback from pro drivers on a much better chassis than the e30, but we'll get there.

Starting to prep the car for this weekend- check out the dust from 8 autocross runs on with the DTC-60's

DSC_0095 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

[Jb325is]

We took the car to Barber Motorsports Park this weekend for a two-day DE. Really amazing facility and a super fun track, definitely a must for any of you guys in the Southeast, and I'd say worth the tow from a good distance as well.

Alex and his dad towed the car down and ran Saturday/Sunday, I came Saturday afternoon and ran Sunday only. Apparently the car was pretty diabolical on Saturday, but after stiffening the front bar and putting some more front brake bias in the car it was pretty good by the time I drove it. Since Alex can actually drive the car at the limit, we did some mid-session shock sweeps and actually ended up making a pretty big improvement on power-down that should translate to other tracks. Still just getting into messing with the dampers and don't really have a solid baseline yet. We're kind of locked into ride heights that I'm not crazy about right now so it looks like we'll be converting to coilover rear so we can have some adjustment range to mess with rake (way too much rake currently). More to come on that.

The Direzza Z2's were really impressive. They ran 5 sessions Saturday, 9-10 sessions Sunday, and really weren't even that scary when I drove them during the lest session of the weekend in 90* weather. It's so much easier to identify and feel the different stages of grip,slip, and loss of traction with these tires, I found them much more enjoyable than the Continental slicks we were running... And I don't think they're much slower. I was clearly not tire limited though, as I ran my fastest lap of the weekend in the last 10 minutes or so. Such is life in the Novice group though.

The only issue we had this weekend was brake shudder, which seemed to be ABS related. Barber has some pretty big undulations and curbing that you use a lot, some of them under braking, which causes wheel lift that freaks out the ABS. As this happened during a session, and the brakes heated up, the car developed a pretty sketchy feeling shudder under heavy braking that felt like really badly warped rotors. However, I pulled the ABS fuse mid-session and the brake shudder was completely gone... Put the fuse back in and the shudder would come back. Not sure what to think about this yet, but we'll figure it out. I think it's something to do with my weird ABS sensor set up due to the e36 hubs on e30 spindles. I'm running e30 sensors to an e36 hub, and e36 hubs have a round profile on the ABS ring as opposed to square on the e30. I'm going to do some investigating on this, but if anyone has any input feel free to share.

DSC_0176 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

DSC_0183 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

DSC_0197 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

DSC_0226 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

DSC_0141 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

Missed this shot- but check out the spider
DSC_0195 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

[jeenyus]

man this car has come through a roller coaster of a journey. awesome work. you've probably changed my mind on ever wanting an S54 to be honest. It's hard to come by someone doing the swap that seamlessly does it like you can with an M5x or something else. thanks for all your experience!

[kronus]

Z2s are a really nice tire. we use them for back-to-back 14 hour races all the time.

[MX339]

So here's my video from what I think was my fastest lap on Sunday morning. If it is, it was something like a 1:43.8 which isn't great, but it's not terrible considering we had done absolutely no setup work and haven't had it on the scales since we put the M54 in. The shock changes we made later in the day calmed the rear end down quite a bit, even with hotter track conditions so I'm curious to see how it'll feel on a cooler track.

[Digitalwave]

The car looks like it really loves to rotate, especially off-power! This thing is a big inspiration.

[wazzu70]

Im really curious if some better cams can help the M54. I really want an S54 like everyone else and their mom, but the weight saving of the M54 and the cost make it pretty appealing. Especially for a street/HPDE car.

How much more aggressive are the ZHP cams to the std? I think for the cost of the ZHP units you might as well just get Schricks or Catcams, ect and get a hotter cam.

[paynemw]

I love this thread!