Hi all,

My name is Preston and I am the owner of Lapping Performance in Newbury, OH. We do builds and service here and there for mostly people we know on their track and race cars.

I also work for EBC Brakes and take part in endurance racing along with time trials, and this project is definitely one for the former. We had a great debut with the car and the stock S54 M3 at Pittsburgh International Raceway, claiming 2nd place in class 5 which we were ecstatic about. The car felt underpowered though and needed service, so we took it to get bearings and looked over. You can read all about it here https://ebcbrakes.com/race-motorspor...ace-car-debut/

Shameless plug but we put about 1100 race miles on a single set of pads and lost about 1mm, these new SR pads are phenomenal.
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Apparently the engine was way down on compression and was probably making about 100hp less than stock, so that explains being pulled by almost anything out there. Long story short, after some higher compression pistons, valve train work, and rod bearings + 1 Watkins Glen trip later, we had a blown freshly built engine. Hard to tell what happened as datalogging wasn't available, but we assume an overrev or valvetrain failure.

Funnily enough we pulled out our back up car (e36 328 sedan with an LS1) and were running 4th in class 4, but the car got walled on the LAST LAP in the rain
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As the title states, we looked for a replacement S54 but kept seeing examples with 100K miles or more go for around 5K and up. This doesn't really make sense when we could invest some money and be able to order brand new engines for that price, so in goes an LS3. Don't get us wrong, we loved the S54, very fun engine and the car felt great but it has availability issues and is a relatively complex engine.

More to come shortly, but if anyone needs anything from the S54 let me know and shoot an offer. I wouldn't recommend anything that moved oil though. Clutch and trans is up for grabs, just let me know and I will get you info!

I am skipping a few steps here but you get the point, I will continue to share pics and info as we go but its essentially a Sikky kit with a wiring speciatiles harness, and a custom driveshaft. Its a fairly straight forward swap and seems to be plenty of room. We are utilizing a new close ration magnum F with this set up. Its actually the 'wide ratio' version of the transmission, but its way closer than stock.

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