Hello fellow bimmerphiles, this is my first post here but I've been lurking over the past few years. I finally had some free time to start a build thread for my car. I've sporadically taken pictures to catalogue what I've done over the past twelve months putting this car together. I'm part of a four person team (WinSome Racing) located in Raleigh/Chapel Hill NC that currently campaigns an M50 powered E30 in CHAMPCAR. If any of y'all see us at a race please stop by and say hi!
One of my good friends and fellow racer was looking to downsize his fleet and gave me a great deal on his track day car, a 1998 black M3. The car already had a half cage, MCS 2 way remote suspension and a few other goodies. Prior to buying the M3 I had actually driven it for a track day and felt confident it would make a good race car. The plan is to make the car competitive for WRL/AER events. Below starts my build thread.
Current Mods:
Suspension:
MCS 2-Way Remote Suspension
Vorshlag Camber Plates
Hypercoil Springs (650 front, 800 rear)
Ground Control Articulating Rear Spring Perch/Weight Jack
Turner rear adjustable camber arms
Alignment: -3.5 degrees front camber, 0 front toe, -0.1 deg rear toe in, -2.0 degrees rear camber
UUC 27mm Front swaybar
Condor UHMW Front Control Arm Bushings
Rtab pocket reinforcements
Condor UHMW Diff Bushings
Condor UHMW Subframe Bushings
Condor UHMW RTABs
Condor solid steering shaft
Wheels/tires
Racing stud conversion
17x9 ET 41 D-Force LTW5's
Falken RT615K+ 255/40/17
Powertrain:
Generic intake
BimmerWorld Traction control throttle body delete
Epic Motorsports tune (Redline 7200 RPM, SAP delete, rear O2 delete, EWS delete)
Active Autowerk Midpipe and Exhaust
BimmerWorld E-fan, runs as factory with manual override
Metal impeller water pump
Metal thermostat housing
Condor Speed Shop Delrin Motor mounts, Spare Roush aluminum motor mounts
Roush (custom) aluminum transmission mounts
AKG shifter and DSSR
Oil Pump nut safety wired
Achilles motorsport oil pan baffle
HVAC Delete
Power Steering delete
Clutch delay valve delete
Secondary air pump delete
Rogue Engineering SS clutch pivot
JB Racing Aluminum Flywheel
Sachs M5 clutch and pressure plate
Bimmerworld SS clutch line
Opened fuel filler neck
BimmerWorld fuel starve kit (dual pumps)
Brakes:
PFC V3 2 piece rotors
PFC 11 and 08 Pads
Porter field race pads
PFC 665 Brake Fluid
Turner braided SS brake lines
Interior/Safety:
Roll Cage 1.75” built by Restoration Race Works, Raleigh NC Built to WRL/AER/CHAMP specs
Racetech Seat, custom mount and transmission tunnel modification
Interior stripped
MKAH ATP floor pan
S2R Carbon Fiber sunroof delete
Steering lock Delete
Pushbutton Start / Dash Toggle Switches
SFI Window net and right side net
OMP Super Quadro steering wheel
MKAH rear bulkhead delete
Hard Motorsports pedals
Hard Motorsports Dash Block Off Plates
6 Pole Electrical Cutoff Switch
Seat Back Brace
SPA 4 nozzle 4ltr mechanical fire suppression system
battery tie down
Rogue Engineering Quick Release
Body/Aero:
Condor Polycarbonate Rear Windows w/ passenger NACA duct
Nine Lives Racing Big Wang 67” wing
Custom splitter stays and front splitter.
This is more or less how the car started
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Then the weight loss began
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More pictures to come!
So after stripping the interior, and buzzing out the door panels I realized that the throttle pedal was cracked at the plastic hinge. This was replaced with a hard motorsports pedal set and MKAH floor plate. The floor plate is a little flimsier than what I had wanted but it should do.
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up next was a OMP flat bottom 330mm wheel
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It was about at this time that I decided to install an oil pan baffle and safety wire the oil pump nut
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Mods, let me know if there's an easier way to post photos. I have all of them hosted on googleimages but I can't use an image link from there. Just don't want to hog up your servers' bandwidth with photos.
On to the next steps!
Turner underdrive pulley's came with the car so I installed these. I also deleted the power steering and a/c. Then went full hog and deleted the entire HVAC system (because racecar)
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Also installed a pretty slick Racetech seat
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Then off to the cage builder she went! For the cage I used two great local guys that I knew through mutual racecar buddies. They had mainly been working on old Z cars and this may have been their first E36. They did a stellar job!
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This was Winter of '17, all the fun things fit in the garage!
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Replaced the Dash and installed a AKG shifter with DSSR and new shift selector seal. At this time I also started planing out belt and net routing.
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The car came with an Active Autowerks head back exhaust system, but the resonator had a ton of loose material in it so I replaced with a Y pipe
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This Y pipe got rid of an awesome high pitched whine noise that honestly sounded like bad bearings. Muffler bearings perhaps? I had also installed nice rear windows from Condor.
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Good photo of the back of the cage, with a rear seat delete from HARD
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And then the real fun began. Installing condor UHMW bushings all around and RTAB pocket reinforcements.
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While this was taking place, I tried to bundle wires to clean up the interior and installed a fire suppression system.
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The car came with a well used set of PFC08 pads, and I've always liked the performance and feel I've had with their compounds. We have at times run PFC on my team's E30 and spec miata. I stuck with PFC for a brake upgrade and installed PFC11 pads along with front 2 piece rotors and new SS brake lines that came with the car.
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Well, this is about when the going got tough and really frustrating. The car had a pretty significant 5th gear lean, which was worsened by the shortened gate of the AKG shift. I was very worried about moneyshifting after putting all of this time into the car so decided to replace the detent/shift pins. While the transmission was uninstalled, the plan was to also replace the clutch and flywheel assembly.
I had plenty of extensions to access the transmission bolts, but the very top one was installed with Herculean strength and ended up stripping. Due to the limited access for a torch or other tools, I made the decision to pull the drivetrain to get that one damn bolt off.
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while everything was accessible I went ahead and replaced the oil filter housing gasket deal since it was leaking.
Old and new flywheel:
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With the JBR flywheel I'm also running an M5 clutch/PP. Detent Pins were a huge pain the rear but finally got them done (took about 24 hours, but on my spare transmission took about 20 minutes)
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Finally got the transmission back in, and it makes pretty strange noises at certain RPM but otherwise drives great. Luckily I have a spare.
- - - Updated - - -
Next step was on to Aero. I was super stoked to get in on the preorder for the Nine Lives Racing BIG WANG:
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Pretty soon will be the front splitter...
While Making the splitter, I had good chance to get the car corner balanced and aligned. Note this is with 200lbs ballast in the front seat and 5/8 tank of gas
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Then took the front bumper cover and crash bar off, had one of my team mates weld up splitter stays, and inherited a plywood splitter from my neighbor who has a few E36 race cars.
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Sick dude.
I don't know how your car is that much lighter than mine but pretty work.
99 M3 STU/ GTS3 Project
Not sure. I will be replacing the rear glass with poly, which should net a few more pound loss, I think if I went through the wiring harness there would be another few pounds there too. My neighbor's E36 is closer to 25xx I believe. For comparison, my team's E30 is closer to 2350
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