Pikes Peak Int. Hill Climb Turbo E30 Build

[Nsquared97]

Loving these updates, beautiful work!

[rallyfreak202]

Excellent work all around. Keep it up.

[Zodow]

Saftey and some paint.

Another large concern is saftey.
For the seat I really wanted a halo type and it to be fia approved. I chose this guy.

I wanted something new, and in the "affordable" category it was between this the hte. My only complaint is they put the breather mesh stuff on the head supports?? It gets in the way of your helmet when you turn your head. I threw two zip ties over the pad to pull it in some and that worked well.

The only disadvantage I can see with a halo type seat would be trying to get out of the car in a hurry as compared to a non halo seat. I think its worth having to help your head stay where it belongs during roll overs.

I bought the steel fia approved seat mounting brackets... even though I could have fabbed some up, I just wanted it to be legit.

I went with the schroth clubman harnesses. FIA rated for 5 years, although pikes peak has a two year rule for any belt for some reason... and they are not too expensive. They are 3 inch all around... I was originally worried about the hans needing the 3 to 2 shoulder straps but some research later decided that it was okay to go this route. The fear being that the harness would somehow slip off the hans groves.
Google brings up some good articles on the matter.


I went with 4x4 1/8 inch backing plates for the harness mounts and the appropriate angles dictated in the schroth harness set up guide.

https://www.schrothracing.com/sdocs/2009_Competition_Instructions.pdf

You can kinda see the one mounted on the tunnel in this pic, I used also the large washers that came with the eye hook mounts on the inside as an added bonus.


Pikes Peak requires some kind of fire suppresion, the minimum being two fire extinguishers with a metal mount within drivers reach which is what I went for. Next year I plan to have a good suppression system as well. Ace Hardware has a decent metal fire extinguisher mount if you ever need one on the cheap.

My buddy with the neon found a decent deal on sfi roll bar padding and we went with that. Its the thickest besides the fia rally padding I believe.

Paint time
Here's the color! I went the cheap route and ordered single stage urethane online from tcpglobal.
My colors were jet black gloss, Gold Mist Metallic(the silver color), and Camero Gold Metallic


Driveway paint job.




This was about a week or two before the fire started that delayed the race. I really was cutting it close.


I still had a ton of stuff to do at this point, wire the megasuirt, shut of switches, ignition switch/start button, vacum lines and more.


Here's a shot of the straight pipe. It goes back to my side of the car.
Ill be changing up the downpipe/exhaust for next year to make room for some undertrays.


Getting ready for the stripes!





At this point the fire close to the springs had become pretty crazy basically overnight. The race hadnt been postponed yet and this was one of the last things to do so we decided to go for it. We had been lucky as the wind was blowing the smoke the other way, up until about halfway through the paint job ehh!! There was ash flying around in the air and everything! Fortunately we had it in the garage and closed the close one down most of the way and opened up the further one and avoided most of the ash. Its probably still a good 5 foot paint job lol.





Up on the way to Deckers, trees scorched by the hayman fire several years back.






Trmotorsport c1's - not super light but they are cheap and look decent. about 14lbs I believe for the 15x8's. Below are the super skinny 195 star specs that I bought for the stock 14" wheels as practice/ rain tires.


Hoosier 225/45/15's

[Tatiananoel]

Yo, where da updates at?

[kamotors]

such awesome fabrication went into this

[Zodow]

Pikes Peak Drive, Problems, and Starting

Well after working on the e30 pretty much every day besides work can get a little overwhelming and tiresome.
So a good way to get some motivation was to drive Pikes Peak!


This is my least favorite drop off...not that I have a favorite lol, to my knowledge no one has gone off here.


I believe this is from that corner... Scary and badass!




Driving it at slow speed's you really get to see the potential for serious injury/death. Makes you really respect the guys who push for record times. There are several places where the road looks exactly the same and it's easy to confuse them at speed.
One that seems to get guys every year is engineer's corner. Its a pretty sharp corner with a little drop off. There is a somewhat sharp turn right after the "horseshoe" that looks similar to eng. corner and can be easily confused with it fooling guys into thinking they are past it and heading toward halfway picnic grounds at full speed when in reality they are headed toward Engineers. Fortunately most guys realize before going off at full speed, lock em up and usually come out unhurt, car takes a beating though.
Another big one is the two left blind w's before devils playground, First blind left you can go full speed, second you cant... Im sure you've seen the crash(s) on this corner.

Driving the road in the speed limits, and following the cars that go like 5 mph! :-x it takes a long time to get up and down. My buddy Pat and I each managed two trips up in a day.

Wish I could race it every weekend.

So about a month before the race was scheduled to be I realized that I might not finish the car in time.

I had several problems that I had been trying to solve and more would pop up.
I swear I felt like I was building a house at times.
One large problem was the drive shaft.

I had grabbed the driveshaft out of the 95 m3 that had the transmission that I was going to use, so I figured I could use that, checked the length early on to make sure, so I thought I was set. The only unknown being the rear diff mount was a 6 bolt so I figured I could just swap the mount on the diff with a 6 bolt one from the junkyard...



Well the 6 bolt that I found from a 5 series(i believe) would fit on the diff of an e30, but the bolt size and pattern was different on the m3 driveshaft!

So I tried taking off the 6 bolt adapter from the 5series drive shaft and put that on the m3 shaft but the splines were larger on the m3 as well. ehh!

So I grabbed another shaft from the junkyard from e28 I think(i have a terrible memory sorry) and it was all lining up. Right length, right bolt patterns all that... except I couldn't get it apart to replace the center support bearing which was shot. Ended up getting it apart with a vice and a crazy strong ratchet strap to pry it out. figured something was wrong at that last part and turned out the splines were tweaked so there wasnt anyway to get it back together! Back to square one.

I tried to use a 7 series 6 bolt diff flange which fit the m3 part but not the e30 diff. Grrr!

I ended up using half of a shaft from an e30 and half from a e36.

I still would like to use the m3 shaft... But I dont know what I need... Ideas?

Another large problem was getting the engine running and broken in before the race.
My buddy Skylar once again came down from Denver to help me get the beast started. We had a weekend to get alot of stuff figured out. One thing was where to find a tourqe wrench that goes up to ~350 for the crank bolt... all mine stopped at 250... I had looked at a few places in town but the cost was crazy and none of the tool rental torque wrenches went up that far. Fortunately a girl at advance auto of all places let me take one that they sell out as a rental as long as I didn't break it and cleaned it up. Pretty sweet :)

I took care of the last wiring of the engine harness to the mega squirt harness as my dad and Skylar hooked up the rest of the parts and we managed to get it started on the first try with out any big problem that sunday night.
The next day I was having major trouble with what I thought was the base tune as it was running as rich as a diesel, which turned out to be the map hose being hooked up in front of the throttle body not after it... doh! After that was done it ran like it was supposed to :)

[ClausE30]

Well built and on a budget! I enjoy your build thread so far, cant wait for more posts

[StealthiE30]

Epic build thread is epic!! You definitely know your way around cars, you must make a living building racecars. :up: :up:

[canakami]

Wow, awesome work with that hood.

[Zodow]

What steering rack were you using?

Unfortunately the stock one, that is still on the to do list. It wasn't terrible but I had to feel around more, if that makes sense.

[R3Z3N]

What steering rack were you using?

[j0oftheworld]

Proper activities going on in here!

[wannaBMthree]

Here's the slide from an oncoming shot!

Baller build and driving!

Thanks for sharing.

[Zodow]

Oh definitely. I'm using arp's, stock hg, and an o-ringed block.
I just never really saw someone do both or knew that it was possible to get a good seal with metal on metal, but I guess copper is soft and maybe you'd use stainless o-rings with a stock HG?

But yeah, if you're o-ringed you'll probably melt a piston before popped the HG Haha.

Good stuff!

Yea, not too sure on the stock gasket, but that sounds familiar.
I talked with the machine shop guy and for their crazy high compression blown drag cars they use stainless on the head and block with copper gasket and he said most guys do copper with mls as well.

[ak-]

It certainly is not required with an mls but it does help from my research(Mainly at high boost).

The main reasons why I went this way is because the machine shop already had the block for the other stuff and I decided to have them do it while it was all taken apart for a little extra. Being that pikes peak is a 1 time a year deal I didnt want to be having head gasket trouble, which a few teams have had problems with in the past. Just adds a bit of saftey in my eyes.

From what Ive read though, is that most guys will have trouble with stock internals before MLS trouble so who knows. I didn't have any issue with it sealing and I will continue to do it unless I have a problem.

Here's a buncha info on o-ringing if your curious. :)
http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum...s+block+o-ring

Oh definitely. I'm using arp's, stock hg, and an o-ringed block.
I just never really saw someone do both or knew that it was possible to get a good seal with metal on metal, but I guess copper is soft and maybe you'd use stainless o-rings with a stock HG?

But yeah, if you're o-ringed you'll probably melt a piston before popped the HG Haha.

Good stuff!