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

[irish44j]

Other broken stuff:

trunk latch ripped out (fixed with the one off my parts car)



spare tire well dented up about 3" (will need the sledge for this)



cracked upper oil pan (will require dropping the subframe to replace...ugh) to go along with the shattered lower pan



In the meantime, raised up the front suspension about 1.5"



And in the rear took out the IX springs and put the e36 M3 springs back in with new 1/2" spacers....time to get some height



inside edges of my rear tires shredded....more likely from the heat generated on the very long street transits and the fact that e30 rears camber negative when the trunk has weight in it.....



front skid support bar was bent beyond fixing



so I cut it out and replaced it with new DOM tubing piece



reverse drill press!





and via different methods flattened the 3/16" stainless skidplate





and other stuff....plus everything everywhere is covered in dust...gonna take a leaf blower to the car this weekend lol

And one last great pic

[irish44j]

Sooo....got the new lower oil pan on and filled the car up with oil, and everything fired up fine, engine sounds fine, etc. Nice, right?

Until the next day I see a puddle under the car. Thinking I must have not tightened the drain plug. Nope, it's tight. Get my light and mirror out and look around and....crap! There's a 4-5-inch hairline crack on the front edge of the upper oil pan.



For a second I thought about JB weld or just having it TIG'd, but I have a spare engine here so what the hell, let's just put a good pan on. Unfortunately if you know M42's to do that you have to either lift the engine up about 6", or drop the front subrame and steering rack. Since the bar for the skidplate probably would prevent me having enough clearance for the former, time to do the latter.

Support the engine...



Remove the steering rack, unbolt the rear control arm bushing "lollipops" and unbolt the subframe and it drops right down...





Steering rack was so dirty and covered with oil from the rally, that was no fun. Then taking off the lollipops and one of the bolts shears off....SHIT.

For those of you who know e30s, it's a pair of captive bolts inside the frame rails with a "collar" to locate the lollipop..



After trying a few things (heat, PB blaster, vise grips, etc) with no dice, I decided to cut a hole in the floor behind the pedals to see what I could do from the backside (and/or drill it out from the top). INteresting, the section is boxed inside the frame, but somehow it was totally full of wet mud.....and this rally didn't have any mud, so stuff got in there and couldn't get out. No wonder the threads were all rusty..



Before drilling it out, figured I'd try one more thing since there was still a "nub" on the broken bolt. welded another bolt to it, and I think the heat of the welding and the PB blaster broke it loose and I was able to slowly wrench it off. *WHEW*



Also noticed more rust on the frame rail just forward of that, behind my skid brace. Probably again filled with mud. Luckily not a structural area really, so I'll clean it up and patch it.



pulled the upper pan off my parts engine and cleaned it up, and removed the cracked one from this one. Waiting on some new gaskets and stuff..





Also ordered a new fuel tank and a new hub. So that should be fun to do......



Also used my HF ultrasonic cleaner to clean all the nasty (dirt/oil) oil pan bolts



So yeah, that's about it for now. This isn't gonna all get done in time for the rallycross this weekend (also have to weld in some new exhaust and a few other things), so I'm going to co-drive with Eric Eisele in his 325i since Neil can't make it. Should be interesting competing in a 6cyl e30 on the big Panthera course. May also take some runs in Nick's e36 M3....TBD.

[econti]

Did you find an opening for the mud to get in?

[irish44j]

Did you find an opening for the mud to get in?

I mean, there are definitely frame openings....drains and plugs on the top inside the car. There are plenty of ways for mud to get jammed in there, but the boxed design probably doesn't let it flow out as easily. There's mud everywhere in this car lol...

[irish44j]

ok some more repair and rallycross updates.

I continued on with repair of the e30, I think when we left off I was waiting for some gaskets or whatever. So that stuff came in.....



Also a new gas tank came in (amazingly cheap, I guess nobody wants the "small" e30 tanks these days so they're available for $130 or so....will get around to that sometime this fall or winter, we'll see.



Also replacing the front left hub/bearing, which is pretty crunchy now...

And got the subframe, oil pans, and steering rack back in place (with new tie rod ends). I also put some new motor mounts in. You may notice they're OEM-style mounts replacing the urethane ones we had on there, which I think are ready to go. Why? For the time being with no stage rally coming up soon I will be driving this car some distances to rallycross and frankly it's nice not to rattle to death. Obviously our sponsor Condor Speed Shop sells UHMV motor mounts, but for rally I think these are just too stiff and I want some compliance in certain areas to avoid breaking stuff. So got some OEMish ones from FCPEuro, which has lifetime warranty on everything they sell. So the plan will be just to send these back in for replacement after the rallycross season, and then keep doin that for a while to see how they hold up.

Also had to remember to grind down these little appendages on the rear of the upper pan to clear the M20 flywheel....



Then took a break to address a sudden major vibration in my wife's CX-9 after a recent trip to the beach. Guess the slide pins on the front calipers were sticking and overheated them during the trip, because the insides of both front rotors were totally trashed. I literally inspected all of this 5k miles ago but will admit I did not grease the slide pins at that time (we bought the CX-9 about 10k miles ago)



Also managed to slash my finger open on one of the little brake pad clips. Doesn't looks big, but I'm on blood thinners so I soaked through a bunch of paper towels and band-aids before I got it to stop lol



Then took the exhaust off and cut off the broken sections



And welded in some new pipe in my usual non-attractive manner...



And patched the "access hole" I made in the driver's floor with some sheet steel, self-tapping screws, and seam sealer. Just didn't want to get down behind the pedals to weld, would have been too much effort for the same result..



OK so on to rallycross. With the car down and a DC event today, I called in a favor to many people who had borrowed my car over the years when theirs were broken. Eric Eisele (last year's class champion) offered up his since his co-driver Neil Cox couldn't make it. So off I went in the Porsche to West Virginia....trailing fellow rally driver Robert Pepper in his Macan GTS...

(and um...well you know old Porsche speedometers are not accurate...of course we were going the speed limit)


So here's the car I drove. It's a 325i with header and puts out nice power. No power steering though, and a pretty nebulous e36 rack that is dead on center. So the opposite of my car in many ways. Eric knows how to drive it and use the power



Jim and Amanda were there with the Miata, and Stephen of course is leading the class in his e30 (me 2 points behind) coming into today's event...





Did I mention Pepper actually competed in the Macan (his stage car is a Porsche 944), along with his daughter Zoe. And they beat several Subarus lol...



Took a photo of the P-car



and some other stuff...



me and Eric, who is trying to do his best Grumpy Cat






So anyhow, it was the "big course" again (about a mile long) so having a power car would be nice. Eric's car is a handful without power steering. My car is very light on its feet with not very heavy steering, so I'm used to being able to one-hand it sometimes. Not this car. Two hands, death grip on the wheel so as not to break a wrist on snap kickback. I thought it would take a while to get going in his car, but I went hard out of the gate and actually led the class for the first three runs. On the fourth and final run before lunch, I put down a real flyer, best time in the class for the day I think....BUT....I went too wide on one turn and got two cones (the only two of the morning).......

Someone even got a picture of me about to hit the first one...



So that dropped me from 1st to 3rd at the lunchbreak. Unfortunately, over lunch a giant pop-up thunderstorm came up and along with booming thunder and lightning DUMPED rain for an hour or so. After it tapered off a bit, Adam called for afternoon runs, so we headed back up the mountain with it still raining. Unfortunately, the surface had turned into ice-rink slick mud, and the Miatas in particular were having all kinds of issues just getting up there. WIth this course having a lot of off-camber turns into hills, it woudl have been really sketchy jsut getting around certain corners, so they called off the afternoon and we drank a few beers, chatted, and everyone headed home early (running back through the same storm on the way home.....)

So.....3rd for this event, with Stephen 2nd (he got a cone on his 4th run too). With our cones, Nick drove a bit slower, but totally clean as he often does, and snuck ahead of us for the win. So he has two wins now (and two out-of-the-points finishes, I think). Same old in this class, anyone can win or finish 7th on any given day. Stephen is still the points leader, and so far I have a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd (plus a dropped event that I missed)....so...we'll see how I can do in my own car in 3 weeks at the same venue.

The e30 is running now, with exhaust, so most of the work remaining is banging out dents and doing other minor stuff. The car will be ready to run in plenty of time I think.

[irish44j]

Well I guess I'm overdue for some updating.

A few weeks ago we had our last rallycross for this season at Panthera (a few more at Summit Point upcoming). The weather was great and I drove the e30, back together, up for the event - not exactly excited to try to catch the more powerful cars on Panthera's big hills again. The usual huge MR crowd was there...





The car was running fine, but I'd noticed over the past week it occasionally would fail to crank on the first try, but always worked on the second. I figured it was a worn key tumbler, since that same thing happened 6 or 7 years ago, you may (or may not) recall. Anyhow, didn't seem like a major issue so off I drove to W.Virginia. Had no problems until I stopped at Sheetz right near the venue and.....the car wouldn't start. At all. Luckily a competitor was there and for some reason jumping it let it start up and it ran fine. My voltmeter showed full charging. Didn't know what was up.

Got to the venue and no issues, so we drove up to start the event up on top of the hill. As I was moving to grid, I beeped the horn at someone and the car died and would not start again. Rolling down the hill and dumping the clutch did nothing either. The acc lights would come on but it seemed to have barely any power, and nothing was working except my one dedicated power line from the trunk (which runs our rally electronics).



Not having time to diagnose, I decided this would be the week to try a smorgasbord of cars, so in I jumped with Josh Sennett for my first run. His M50 car is powerful and fells pretty damn good and I started off fast, but in a section with a kink through some wet grass I got on the power too early and around I went. Damn. Event over from the very start. Lost 15 seconds getting back on course. In this class, that's not something you can come back from.

I drove his car the second run as well and laid down a fast time (faster than his time, I think). Next run I jumped into Nick's M3, which is sooo smooth and powerful and tight handling, though the brakes seem to suck for some reason. I ran another pretty good time and if not for the spin I would have been right in the mix. For the next run I decided to see how a stock-ish M42 car does, so jumped in with Jesse. He has stock school-bus steering and stock M42. Man, I was really slow in that car. Mine doesn't have any more power than his (and might actually weigh more), but having responsive steering and brakes and suspension makes a huge difference for how much you can push the car I guess.

At lunch, towed the car back to the paddock (second time I've had this view....)



we fiddled around with things and somehow the car decided to start again. Hmm. Ok, planned to just not turn it off at all for the afternoon. As we headed up after lunch, got to the top of the hill right by my worker station (working first) and.....it dies again. WTF.

So for most of our work-duty time, the other guys at my station covered while Chris Helgesen and I fully trouble-shooted the electrical. The e30 has a main power cable from the trunk battery, plus a smaller dedicated circuit for the DME, with a fusible link in it to protect the DME. It turned out the main cable was getting full 12V, but with any load on it the smaller cable would drop to about 3V (though it was at 12V with no load). Only guess is that the fusible link was bad and somehow acting as a resistor. After much sweating and cursing and getting dusty from passing cars we managed to splice some wires and get the DME onto the main circuit. So the car ran. I also took this cool photo of Brian Battochi going by at high speed



In any case, the car worked fine all afternoon, and I pushed as hard as I could to try to make up some time but to no avail. Too many cones, and just not fast enough with the hilly course. IDK where I ended up...maybe 6th or 7th (amazingly, still managed to beat half the class even after the spin). Josh Sennett held off Nick for his first ever event win, which is a good thing for the points race from my view. This event will hopefully be my 2nd and final drop event, so with the final 3 events at Summit point (no hills and more technical courses) I hope I can get some high-points finishes and try to win the class. I'm currently in 3rd for points with nobody all that close behind me, so I can pretty much drive all-out for the rest of the season unless Sennett continues to put up big points days.

So yeah....that's that. The weekend after I got home I re-wired the entire secondary circuit from the battery to the kill switch to the distro block, with a pair of 8ga wires for added backup, and a new fusible link in a changeable box (will carry a spare from now on). Everything seems to work fine again, so hope that's that.

[irish44j]

well, that's not that....

Ok, so I guess I'll do an actual e30 update, not that there's much to say. However, after the electrical fiasco at the last event, I was sure I had solved the issue. No such luck. The last couple times I've tried to start the car, nothing.....and then it would magically work after a few tries. I went to drive it and on a hunch I jiggled the key and everything turned off....so that's key lock tumbler #2 that has died on this car. So time to go full "racecar" with no ignition key....

The easy way would be just to set up a starter button and splice all the power lines together and use the master kill switch for shutoff/run. But Jim suspects that this setup is the reason the track e30's alternator seems to go bad more often than it should, and that there should be an actual power on/off switch. So I did that as well. Anyhow, a bit of simple wiring and it's all set and works fine. One less thing to worry about



Speaking of things with starter buttons, after 170,000 miles and 10 years the WRX was turning into a money pit, so I took advantage of some year-end deals, quickly sold the Subie, and picked up a new commuter ride (which will stay mostly stock).



I sold off the cheesy stock "tuner" wheels within the first few days and got something more "adult" looking and with some better tires (BFGwafflesComp 2 A/S). Since I have no plans to lower this car, I actually got a slightly taller sidewall (45 series vs. 40 series stock), which both increases my ground clearance a bit (recce ride?) and fills the wheel wells nicely. Only other thing this car will get in the foreseeable future is some mudflaps (going to cut out some cheap RA's) and some tint. Otherwise, time to commute..

[TeXJ]

nice daily! Still a sweet e30!

[irish44j]

Return to Summit Point

Finally back to some rallycross, after the rain ended for a while.



Back to Summit Point we went last weekend for a doubleheader (two single events). Pretty cool to be back here where I first started rallycrossing 8 years ago. With the weather dry, Saturday's competition took place on the Barn Course, my favorite course (and the only one of the old three courses still in existence today). Barn is a very long, very fast course that, when dry, packs out as hard as tarmac to the point where it gets rubber marks all over it.



Due to it being a reschedule, a few of the regulars were not there - including my codriver Jim, points leader Stephen Nichols, and Josh Sennett, who has been coming on STRONG in recent events. But, still some dangerous fast-movers, including Nick in the M3 (2nd in points), Chris Helgesen (and his son Thomas) in their 325i, and Peter Grasso in his very powerful 325i. I think I can take all of these guys in the handling department (more on that later), but they all outpower me by a good amount.



After walking the course it was pretty clear I was going to have a hard time, as the course was set with three long straights where all the higher-power cars would be able to pick up a good amount of time on my little M42. I had hoped there would be some slaloms in these straights but no suck luck - straight as an arrow. So I'd have to try to make up the time on the more technical back half of the course, which was pretty windy. However, windy in terms of slow turns requiring power for exit.....not really much in the way of slaloms or offsets, which I'm fast in.

With a relatively low turnout (~40 cars), we were sure to get a lot of runs, especially with a good breeze keeping dust off the course and good visibility on the flat course allowing a lot of cars running at once (4-5 at a time on course).





So off we went. From the first run it was clear this would be an uphill battle for me. I thought I was driving pretty well but was off the pace by a bit, especially to Grasso who was really enjoying the open course setup. We did something like 7 runs in the morning, and by lunch Grasso was up by 4-5 seconds, as I recall, with Nick behind him and me a couple seconds back in third. The course had a lot of grip already, so switching to my Maxsports from the DMack gravels was unlikely to change anything. I also picked up a couple unfortunate cones. The afternoon course, oddly, was unchanged and in the same direction, which is unusual. So more of the same, with little opportunity to pick up time unless someone screwed up. We did 10 more runs (17 total), and they didn't screw up. Grasso ran away from Nick and I, and we battled for 2nd but I couldn't quite catch Nick. So third for me in the end, with Nick 2nd. Thomas actually finished a few seconds behind me, so he's learning fast since he's only had a driver's license for a couple years. He even beat his dad for the first time ever.





Interesting comment by course workers that I was much more "sideways" than the other e30s coming out of turns, which is unusual for me. With all the grip I was pretty surprised, especially if the higher-power cars were keeping it straight. Hm.

On to Day 2, and we were on a new course...well, new for this year, but we did run it in crazy mud months ago (the event I won by a large margin). But it was dry now, with pretty good grip. Fortunately, it was MUCH more technical with basically no places the power cars could use their power to any real extent. In short: just my kind of course. 2017 class champion Eric Eisele made it out to this one and he's always a major threat to win. e30 croo out in force.



I jumped into the lead right off the bad with a fast first run. With a lighter car I tend to go out a bit harder than the power cars do, since I have a bit more agility it seems. Eric and Chris were right with me though. Nick and Grasso seemed to have a bit more problems with the tightness and very technical transitions. As the morning went on, Eric and I separated ourselves from the rest of the pack to some degree, with him holding a slight lead on me thanks to (again) an unusual amount of cones for me, even though I was running faster times. I couldn't get the ass-end of the car in check and kept sliding it into cones when coming on power out of turns.

The afternoon course was reversed and had some "pucker-factor" sections due to high-speed offsets and some heavy braking and switchback zones. I thought it was a blast, but kept picking up cones with the back of the car.

I also managed, according to a course worker, to knock down a cone with a rock shot from my rear tire 6 feet away (which counts). More on that in a bit. We ran 7 in the afternoon, with me putting up the fastest times in the class on most runs, and Eric putting up runs almost as fast, but with way less cones. On the day, I had 9 cones, he had TWO, in 12 runs. That dude rolls CLEAN.

Coming into the last run, I was sitting 0.3 seconds behind Eric with nobody close behind me. Now remember that rock-thrown-cone. Without that I would have a 1.7 second lead and could back off a few percent and hopefully run clean (though you never know), since there didn't seem to be much room for Eric to go much faster. But being behind, I had to "send it" so to say. Through the S-curves at the back of the course, not pushing particularly hard I once again lost the rear end and kicked out a cone. Once I did that I knew I had to go full-send on the hopes of picking up time. Unfortunately, I managed to pick up a second cone. In the end, it was the fastest run for the class for the day (I think), but not enough. Eric was only about 1/2 a second behind me (he was pushing too) but kept it clean, so he won. Chris H. was third with Nick finished in 4th, just edging out Grasso.

I thought I drove well, but the car was uncharacteristically loose at the rear end, which has been a recurring problem for the second half of this season and resulted in a high cone count, even when I've tried to mitigate by adding trunk weight and changing back to the IX springs. hmm.

Anyhow, with Stephen missing the event, and Nick getting a 2nd and 4th and me a 3rd and 2nd, the points race shakes out (with our drop events) with Nick in 1st, and me 3 points behind going into the last event. So, my only chance is to win the last event and have him finish 3rd or worse. That's a tall order, guess we'll see what November's course looks like.

E30 croo loves our luxo-toyota-suv rigs :)





Now....

After the event, Keith Pizio commented to me that he thought one of my rear shocks was blown since one of my rear wheels was hopping a lot. Interesting. The car didn't FEEL bouncy inside so I haven't really checked the rear shocks since NEFR, but perhaps that was a cause of my loose rear end. So I pulled the rear shocks (keep in mind, these were used at NEFR, which really beats up suspension).

Sure enough, both rear shocks were blown. One was still "kinda" ok, and had some damping pressure to it. The other one was totally gone. ZERO pressure in it, and the piston was literally clanging around inside the cylinder. Well.....I guess that explains why the rear end of the car was such a mess for the last couple events. I had assumed it was the M3 springs with no spare tire weight in the trunk (the stage setup), but guess not.





So, I have my spare set of Bilsteins installed and I imagine that will setting things down. I've been so busy working on the Porsche, selling the Subaru, and buying the GTI I admittedly slacked off on even so much as checking much on the e30 in the last few months, other than to fix the electrical gremlins. So, that was pretty dumb, and it almost certainly cost me the win on Sunday, if not Saturday. Lesson learned.

[irish44j]

Adding to the above post...here's some vid of the Saturday course and the Sunday morning course, in case you want to watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj_D4Yd-laQ

[Fraser]

Wow awesome course! We're lucky to ever get out of first gear around here....

[irish44j]

Wow awesome course! We're lucky to ever get out of first gear around here....

I was repeatedly banging the rev limiter in 2nd in mine (so, close to 60mph) on both courses, and my car isn't nearly as fast/powerful as many others out there!

The guy in the S2000 was running the whole courses in 1st though, hahah....

[95maxrider]

I don't know why I haven't been getting email updates on this thread, but hopefully this gets them going again! Those CC wheels look great on the GTI, good choice!

[irish44j]

I don't know why I haven't been getting email updates on this thread, but hopefully this gets them going again! Those CC wheels look great on the GTI, good choice!

Thanks, though now I know why VW sells the car with black/dark wheels....the stock pads are excellent but they dust like CRAZY. I have to clean these wheels every few days lol...

[irish44j]

Man, I've been slacking over here (if you want to catch up, I have a more detailed thread on Grassroots Motorsports forum). Anyhow, thought I'd post up a few updates...

I did this, which is not as good as I'd hoped, but Nick's M3 could not be caught.



Then, to try to prevent 2nd place from happening for a 3rd year, I went and got this



Which has this



Which is now here



And so now for a month or two of boring rebuilding and refreshing before it goes into the e30. We are running Wellsboro Winter Rally (WMWR) again in about 10 days. We won 2WD class there last year, and the weather this year looks to be yet another mud+ice+snow mess, so we'll see how this goes.

Once it's over, it's time for engine swap (and new gas tank to replace the one heavily dented at NEFR). The M50TU will be going in with the G240 transmission (which is a direct fit) for the time being, since I have two of them and this e34 came with a shot automatic transmission (ew).

So yeah, that's the quick update!