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Found a bit more sound deadening/heatsheilding lurking in the transmission tunnel, this little lot pictured is a good few kilos itself..
And a bit more on the underside of the bonnet had to go, albeit lighter foam based material. The large hinge mechanism and pivot bar pictured is also off and in the scrap pile, replaced at the front with bonnet pins. The rear is going to stay on the original slot and wheel combination as it is not too heavy, makes putting a large removeable bonnet back in place easier, and saves the cost of more pins!
Still undecided as to whether or not to trim the inside strengthening from bonnet/doors/boot. It will save a few more kilos but it would not be as easy to return to standard if it was ever entered into the PBMW Race Series. Still eligible for some other series though. I will sleep on it for a bit.
Here is the 320i engine that was originally sourced locally. Cheep, cheerful and again, would keep it as a possible PBMW car for one day in the future (and easier if the car was sold as a race/track car). The stripdown started...
But then in a moment of madness a 2.5 engine arrived. It just seemed daft not to when local and good value. Easily changed back to a 2.0 if ever needed. The title above suddenly seems a bit random as this '318i Race Car' is now a 325i track car..
The standard steering on an E30 is over 4 turns lock to lock. Charming as it is (in an old fashioned 'twirling the wheel' way) it is not great for spirited driving. The BMW E36 rack is an easy upgrade and considerably quicker lock to lock. The spacers required are available from our shop here and with a bit of tweaking the pipes can be adjusted to fit. This E36 rack required a fair bit of cleaning..
The fuel tank was dropped for inspection. A very common trait is rust around the filler neck. Indeed when buying my first E30 the owner's advice was not to put more than £20 of petrol in it when filling up "as it just spills out." Hmm.
Thankfully this one had just surface corrosion and had not rotted through. Caught just in time it was removed and treated.
More refurb work, the brakes needed changing to 325i specification. Here are the lovely looking calipers...
325i front suspension struts are also used, these are stiffer on the larger engined cars (plus 318is and Touring models) at 51mm OD rather than standard 45mm.
Brake dust guards removed:
Caliper stripdown and individual parts blasted and treated:
Finally you say - a photo of some new parts!
And here is the front subframe all built up with the cleaned E36 rack, new control arms, engine mounts, drop links, Powerflex ARB bushes and some very trick Treehouse Racing solid control arm mount bushes. This however is not quite ready to be mounted, I made the decision to change the anti roll bars to the (considerably stiffer) 325i Sport front and rear bars. The combination of these parts and of course the limited slip differential should make for a nice handling E30.
Cleaned up and painted front 51mm strut:
The car is going to be running a standard airbox with an ITG foam panel filter as opposed to an aftermarket induction kit. With sufficient cold air this will not lose any midrange torque (like the majority of induction kits that lose the factory airbox design) and should help the engine breathe a bit better. A common way of increasing the airflow on an E30 is to remove the inner lamp assembly. I decided against this as the car is to remainproperly roadworthy.
So what to do? Well aesthetics are not ranked massively highly on this project, functionality comes first.
