Rally-x 528e build (caged, head swap, and more!)

[95maxrider]

The final event of the season began with Josh taking a lead on the first run. Unfortunately for him, he was driving too aggressively and spun on his second run, putting him some 6 seconds back. We went back and forth the rest of the AM, but he couldn't claw back much time from his mistake, and I had a decent lead at lunch time. Turbojosh decided to sit this one out, so when our PM runs came around Josh decided to do some hooning and see how much he could drift, since he didn't have much of a chance at winning. I pretty much just kept doing what I always do and laid down more fast times. In fact, I didn't hit a single cone all day, marking at least the second time this season where that happened, and was again the fastest 2wd car at the event!

And with that, I won 5 consecutive events and had a decisive season victory! There were times, specifically in the 2013 season, where I was really fed up with this car, and was kicking myself for not getting the default E30. But with some work and choice mods (bigger sway bars, proper rally tires, a working O2 sensor...) the car really came together and now I'm totally in love with it! I still want to mod it more, but it's really doing quite well, all things considered. But rest assured, there is more to come!

So I finally put on the proper windshield banner...








Oh, and to make the weekend even worse for Josh, his ramps decided to slip off when he was putting his car on his fancy rich-boy trailer. Naturally, I declined to help and instead took pictures while pointing and laughing.







Here's a pic of Jeremy's STi, aka the cone killer. And bumper killer. This was the first event where he didn't rip it off at some point. I think some sort of bet was involved.



Here's a pic of the previously mentioned FC RX7 driven by Shawn and Katie. It's pretty much stock, but damn does it seem to effortlessly connect corners and drift like it's a job. It's a complete POS (it requires bump start to start and can't hold an idle without a foot on the gas), but it's totally awesome and embodies rally-x spirit.



Here's Matt's constant-FTD Impreza with a EG33 3.3 F6 from an old SVX. This thing is just stupid fast, and sounds incredible. I will never be this fast.



Results!
http://www.wdcr-scca.org/RallyCross/Res ... lt.aspx#MR

And video! I missed recording my fastest time in the PM, but it doesn't really matter....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNMvfZY ... D7LGc5McKA

Thanks to everyone for the help with the car this season! Thanks to Josh for letting me co-drive his 318 when the E28 broke (coolant hose burst, rear spring perch broke)! I'm pretty sure with my win I have used up all goodwill, and if something breaks in the future I will be on my own. Thanks to Patrick for letting me store the car at his place while I waited on Bilstein to send me new circlips, and for helping out with getting the car back together!

[95maxrider]

On a quick side note, I bought this urethane steering coupler from Ireland Engineering a while ago, but when I went to install it, it looked like it was way too big to replace the stock part. I didn't actually pull off the stock part to verify however.



http://www.iemotorsport.com/bmw/E28-E24 ... upler.html

It's been too long for me to return it, but can anyone tell me if I'm just looking at this wrong? Their site says it fits all E28s, so I'm hoping my eyes were just deceiving me. Has anyone else here installed one?

[95maxrider]

I know most people here are M30 guys, but does anyone know if this JB lightweight flywheel will work on my SETA car? It's listed for E30 ETAs with dual-mass flywheels, and I'm pretty sure the SETA E28s come with dual-mass units. I would really like to take ~18 pounds of rotating mass from my engine, but at $760, these puppies ain't cheap!

http://www.turnermotorsport.com/p-3749- ... wheel.aspx



Oh, and I'm parking this here in case I forget: IE brass clutch pivot pin, $20

http://www.iemotorsport.com/bmw/E28-E24 ... otpin.html

[95maxrider]

Well I got lucky browsing Craigslist last week and got the deal of the century. $2400 worth of Hoosier A6 245/40/17 rubber for $300, barely used. Also, a brand new (but expired....don't care) and a used 6 point harness for $50! I've got rubber for the next 4 years! Even though it's for my other car, I couldn't help but post it up in here. The harnesses WILL be used on the E28 though. I'm tired of my old crappy style harness lock.

[95maxrider]

With the 2015 season right around the corner, it's time to start furiously looking for parts to freshen this thing up and get it ready. The first thing to arrive was a used single mass M20B25 flywheel and clutch. There's no way we were going to spend $800+ on a lightweight aluminum flywheel/clutch combo, but with a 27.5 pound flywheel, something had to be done. After seeing rather high prices on the forums, I spent some time searching on car-parts.com and found one hell of a sweet deal. I found a junkyard that had pulled them out of a car and I was able to get them for only $85 (shipped)! From what I've seen, the "i" flywheel weighs about 18 pounds, which is rather substantial reduction from the stock dual mass unit.

It looks like it had been sitting around for a while, and there was some surface rust buildup on the flywheel and pressure plate. I cleaned them up a bit with a scotch brite pad, and I'm thinking they look good enough to throw in the car, but I'm no expert. Does anyone think I need to get the flywheel resurfaced, or need a new disk? Since it all came out of the same car, I figure there's no reason why I can't just slap it in mine and go. There appears to be enough material left on the disk. Let me know if you think otherwise!

Clutch disk:


Close-up of depth:


At least it's a Sachs!


Flywheel before:


And after:


Pressure plate before:


And after:


A big happy family


Obviously, I'm going to have to spend a fair amount of money on the little things:
-Throw out bearing
-"i" flywheel bolts
-Pilot bearing
-Brass pivot pin
-Clutch fork, spring
-Amsoil fluid
-Seals, Etc

I can reuse the bolts holding the pressure plate to the flywheel, right?

But even so, I'm hoping to get this installed for less than $200. I'm really hoping that shaving 10 pounds of rotating mass from the motor will really wake this thing up, but who knows.

More coming soon!

[95maxrider]

I've always been rather disappointed with the brakes on this car. Driving Josh's 318 really drove the point home, as his car seems to stop in about half the distance my car does, and without ABS. Granted, his car weighs 500+ pounds less than mine, but still, my brakes suck. But hey, the E28 was build with 14" wheels stock, so there isn't a ton of room in there for decent sized brakes. Well, the smallest wheels we have are 15s, which meant we could run the E34 brakes without a problem. I picked up a set of used calipers for $50, a pair of Brembo rotors for $50, and OEM Jurid pads for $50. So for about $150, I'm anticipating much improved braking! I went with the OEM pads because my requirements are to get maximum cold braking bite, with no regard for fade or dust. It sounds like the Hawk HPS that I think are on there now need a tad more heat in them before they bite, and we never build up any heat in the rotors during a run, so I figured OEM pads would be a good choice, but we shall see.

Oh, and I got new shoes for the e-brake to qualify for free shipping since I'm pretty sure mine are shot.

Obligatory pics:

[davintosh]

I just caught up on reading this thread (didn't click one of the notifications sometime last year and hadn't got any new ones since then), and it looks like you've been having some fun! Congrats!

I may have something for you in the way of a lightened flywheel if you're still in the market; PM incoming.
--
Dave

[95maxrider]

According to my scale, the B25 flywheel weighs 18.8 pounds....

[95maxrider]

In other news, my I30 made the front page of NICO!
http://www.nicoclub.com/

[95maxrider]

Spring 2015 update time!

In addition to the previously shown E30 325i clutch/flywheel and E34 front brakes, I got a bunch of things to go with them:



Throttle cable, e-brake cables, E34 rear strut mounts, flywheel bolts, fuel filter, etc.

Here are the new E34 mounts compared to the Moosehead Engineering mounts:


Beefy! E34 rear strut mounts are notoriously weak, and I needed some parts from them to get the E34 struts to bolt up the the E28.

The E34 rear Konis arrived like this:


But that was quickly resolved with a swift thwack from a hammer. Hooray for welded on spring perches!!



One of the bleeders on the E34 front calipers was seized, and the other broke sometime while it was on my concrete floor, so they had to be drilled out and we just used the ones that came out of the puny E28 calipers. That sucked.



Mmmmm, bigger brakes.



Here are the E34 Konis (with stock E34 rear springs) next to the E28 Bilsteins/springs. Not only are they some 1.5" taller, the body of the shock is significantly thicker. I'm hoping these things can take some abuse.



Boosh!



So I had sanded down the pressure plate, flywheel and clutch disk with some Scotchbrite pads to remove some of the surface rust that had built up from sitting around for so long. However, there were still raised sections of rust all over the place, so my mechanic buddy recommended we sand everything down properly, because he said that rust would tear the clutch material apart. Here's the end result:



I would just like to reiterate that I got this used clutch/flywheel combo for $80 shipped (thank you car-part.com!!). It's freaking unbelievable what some people on these forums want for a 25 year old flywheel.

Although it was going to add work to the project, I wanted to replace the rear main seal and input shaft seal while we had the trans out, and I'm glad I had ordered the parts. We found the rear main seal weeping a little oil onto the clutch disk. It looked like this had caused the clutch to slip and wear out prematurely, as one side was pretty much worn down all the way. I thought I had felt the clutch slip sometimes on hard shifts, but I could never be sure it wasn't something else fucking up in this old rust bucket. So although I replaced the flywheel with the sole intention of removing 10 pounds of rotating mass from the engine, it seemed like it was a necessary and needed repair. While we were in there we also got a new brass clutch pin (instead of the plastic ones that wear out), new throw out bearing, clutch fork/arm thing, springs, etc.



I had bought this red poly steering coupling bushing from IE 2 years ago, but never got around to installing it. I finally took a closer look at the steering column and realized I no longer needed the part:



It seems the previous owner of this car (6' 5" tall and built the car for Lemons racing) had spaced up the steering column inside the car with 1" square tubing so he could reach the wheel comfortably. I assume to relieve the stress from the angle, he replaced the stock rubber bushing with that u-joint. I'm going to assume that this thing flexes even less than the poly bushing, so we left it in the car. So my nice new IE steering bushing is no longer needed....shoot me a PM if you want it!

[95maxrider]

The following day I took the car to a local Solo test and tune event to make sure everything works as planned. You might remember that last spring we did the same thing, only to have the clutch line blow out after three runs. With the rally-x venue 2.5 hours away in the middle of nowhere, I learned it's important to shake things down close to home before the season gets going.

With the stiffer and taller E34 rear shocks/springs, the rear of the car sits even higher than before!



Mad tyte suspension travel.



The muffler of champions:



This year there is a new class for auto-x, Classic American Muscle. It's pretty awesome, as evidenced by some of the cars I was able to shoot:





And to think, the guys at tech were questioning whether the E28 would flip over since it's so high off the ground Thankfully they stopped caring when they saw the roll cage.

I took it very easy on the launches on account of the "new" clutch, but the car felt great! The lighter flywheel is immediately evident, and makes the engine very peppy. I'm so happy we got this in the car, it finally feels like it's got all of its whopping 180 HP The bigger brakes and OEM pads were also immediately evident, and greatly increased braking performance, long a E28 weak point. Even the E34 rear suspension made the car feel better! With the higher spring rates, the tail of the car wants to rotate a lot more, and understeer has been reduced. I'll probably set the adjustable FSB to its stiffest setting sometime soon to further reduce body roll.

When it was all said and done, the E28 had beaten many cars it had no business beating, and did it without a single hiccup. Hell, one of the auto-x veterans even commented that it was the most unique BMW he had ever seen. Between the vertical muffler and the milk crate glove box, he might not be far off. It was getting close to being ready for the first race, but I still needed to put more miles on the clutch. Well, a week later, the clutch is ready, the car is packed, and I'm ready to rock and roll tomorrow. Wish me and the car luck!

[Jelmer538i]

Nice writeup as always!
Did you end up using E34 koni's like I suggested?

[95maxrider]

Well, I ended up getting new E34 rear Konis and used E34 springs, and put them together using the beefy Moosehead Engineering upgraded rear strut mounts (thanks Paul!!). The Koni's shock body is quite a bit thicker than the E28 Bilsteins, so I hope they can withstand some rally abuse. Thankfully, they have a welded on lower spring perch.







You can see how freaking high this thing sits.


Sure enough, they raised the rear end of the car about 2", which I thought would be a good thing. Boy was I wrong. At the first rally-x of the year this Sunday, the car was miserable to drive. It just would not go straight. I was fighting with it every turn to make sure it didn't spin out. Going through the slalom was a series of me reacting to the rear end stepping out. Before, one of the best aspects of the car was how recklessly you could drive it without really thinking about what it would do, because it was just so planted. That is now gone, and I need it back. I ended up in 2nd place for the day, some 6 seconds (out of about 600 total) from my main rival Josh in his M42 E30, who I had beaten the prior 5 races in a row.

I'm thinking the culprit is the raised ride height, and not the increased spring rate. Josh said that when he lowered the rear of his E30, it was much more planted and put power down much better. I'm thinking the same applies to me. Since coilovers are out of the question ($$$), and lowering springs are too (would require buying two sets- one E34 and one E28, also didn't work well when we had them on the car before), I'm pretty sure cutting coils on the stock springs is my best option. Due to weight reduction on the front (battery moved to trunk, no AC or heat, dash, etc) the car sits higher than stock in the front. The same is true for the rear, but it's due to the E34 rear suspension. It's for those reasons that I think I can lower the car about 1" without any of the negative effects of cut springs. I think I can cut two coils from the rear and one in the front, but I may start with half that and see how it works.

One problem that I'm already aware of is that putting lower/shorter springs on the rear E34 setup would require tender springs, as you don't need a spring compressor to assemble the rear suspension, as there is no real tension on the spring when the assembly is out of the car. If I cut rear coils, the spring could become unloaded at full drop, which is a bad thing if I want to go fast and make these struts last. I'm honestly not sure how E34s run lowering springs without the same problem, because it's not a result of E34 parts in an E28. I've read about plenty of E34 and E28 guys who cut front coils, but I don't recall if the front springs are heavily compressed at rest (out of the car but assembled), so I don't know if I'll need tender springs in the front as well. Can anyone advise or point out other things I need to be aware of? I found a great site with info about properly cutting springs, which I will be following:

http://www.eatondetroitspring.com/cutting-coil-springs/

Any advice would be appreciated!

[Jelmer538i]

You may want to look into rear camber.
Rasing the rear will result in positive rear camber, like this: \ / and that is not good for grip when cornering.
Maybe a kit like these wil bring your camber back to specs:


http://www.iemotorsport.com/bmw/E28-E24 ... -lock.html

[Drew in NYC]

Pretty sure this is the most unique - and one of the cooler - E28s on MyE28.com

[95maxrider]

So my buddy on R3v posted up this in regards to spring length:

"Before you look into tender/helper springs, do a quick check of this: Put the e28 springs on, install them in the car. They'll hang loose initially. Now hook up the swaybar. See if that reduces the droop in the rear suspension sufficiently to keep the spring seated.

On the e30, my rears will practically fall out at full droop with the sway detached, but the sway limits the downward travel enough to keep them seated when attached. May be the same case on the e28."

I know E30s have vastly different suspension design than E28s, but it's an interesting idea none the less. Can anyone comment on this off the top of their head?

I just did a quick search and tender springs are EXPENSIVE! I've read about so many people cutting springs with these cars, and never anything about using tender/helper springs, but still, it worries me that the spring won't be compressed at all if the assembly is out of the car. However, if the tension from the sway bars is enough when it's in the car, then I guess I would be okay with that. What am I missing here?

[95maxrider]

Can anyone else comment on cutting springs? In my other thread, someone said: "I think if you cut the front spring you're going to have to bend the last 1/2 coil back flat again otherwise the spring will not seat right."

I can only assume the only way to bend a spring back is to heat it up, which does not sound like a great idea. Does anyone know if this applies to the rear springs as well?

Thanks!

[irish44j]

I should really just stop giving you advice. After all, I like winning But since I lurk on here on occasion, figured I'd actually register and add to what we discussed on the phone:

A couple quick things:
- looking at the e34 stock rear springs, they don't really appear to flatten out much, so cutting shouldn't be an issue in terms of them seating correctly. The real issue is whether or not they stay seated at full droop with the sways hooked up. Only one real way to check that and that's to jack the rear of the car up (both sides) and measure the distance from the lower perch to the upper perch with everything hooked up. Then that length, compare it to the length of the e34 spring, cut and uncut.
- if it falls out of the perch, best option is tender springs. They shouldn't be all that expensive. I think mine were $50/pair from Eibach (via Ireland Engineering), and they should come with a rubber piece that goes between them and the main spring, to keep it all together.

Looking at e28 fronts, I would not cut those unless you're going to be able to heat them to flatten them out. Could convceivably flip the spring and put the cut end on the bottom perch, that may help (but may not). I still think you just need to get the rear down and leave the front. You had the front at that height last year, right? That seemed to work pretty well for you.

Side note: remember, my car is not the same as it was last year - it's 50-75lbs lighter now with completely different spring rates and height - so comparing results to my car last year is probably not an accurate measure in terms of actual time. Plus I have more red, which adds like 100whp by itself.

Will let you know about Sunday, but for the moment it looks like a go.

[95maxrider]

I figured I would do a quick recap of the first event to add to my earlier post.

Ignoring the poor handling that resulted from the new/higher rear suspension, the car felt great at the first event! Well, aside from the battery terminals coming off again, and staying off for four runs until I thought to check them, since the car was stumbling a bit. I don't know how the car ran so long off just the alternator, but it's a trooper!

The M20B25 18 pound single mass flywheel is a godsend compared to the old dual mass 28 pound unit! The pedal is lighter, the non-oily clutch grabs better, and my god does the lighter flywheel help get the engine rev quicker! Waiting for the revs to climb coming out of a slow corner is gone; the motor is much more responsive, and I never feel like it's sleeping on the job. I have also yet to feel like the motor is more likely to stall coming away from a stop, so considering the $200 in costs, the flywheel conversion was a huge success!

The E34 brakes were also very nice to have. Initial bite is better than before, and the car seems to stop quicker as well. I have a feeling I was braking too early in one section, so I need to remember to try to brake a little later.

Here it is in action. Thanks for the awesome pic Ed!


We haven't gotten around to painting the roof yet....ugh.

Anyway, back at the first race, I was hitting cones left and right due to the sloppy suspension. I ended up with 5 for the day, equal to Josh, who was 6 seconds ahead of me (out of ~700 seconds/13 runs). Little Eric, who is 18 and in his second year of rally-x, was 14 seconds behind me in his E30 ETA car on brand new tires. M52Josh was co-driving the E30 since his M52 swapped E30 wasn't quite ready, and was 8 seconds behind Big Eric, hitting about 20 cones in the process. Things will be very different next race when M52Josh has his car together. Hopefully our car will be sorted out and driving the way I want it to by then!

[Jelmer538i]

You can clearly see in the last that your rear wheels are like this \ /!

[bluej]

[95maxrider]

What are you doing in here? Unacceptable!

[95maxrider]

Well I had a productive weekend with the E28!

First off, I installed a Yoshi-rebuilt (shiboujin) 3.73 LSD diff that I bought from Dave (jalopi). Our old 3.73 LSD whined like a spoiled child on the highway. Hell, it made a fair amount of noise cruising at 10 mph, and just got louder from there. Here are the specs from Yoshi on the new diff:

"3 clutch 0.2mm over shimmed 3.73 lsd using bimmer world clutches. The dog ear plates are Porsche."

Dave was extremely generous and basically did the whole install for me in his garage since he has plenty of tools and experience doing diffs. Aside from the hassle of removing my stupid 3" exhaust and swapping diff covers and axle flanges (it came off his E30), everything went smoothly, and I was pleasantly surprised driving home that I no longer had to listen to that constant high-pitched whine....just my obnoxious exhaust....hooray! I haven't tested the lock up characteristics yet, but I'm confidant it will help me put down power a little bit better in the dirt.

The new diff


Getting ready to swap parts


The next day, I went over to Josh's house and he helped me cut my rear E34 springs! I don't have anything to cut with, and he knows suspension stuff, plus he has a garage, so another win. We started with cutting one rear coil, and after reassembling it, that's where we left it. I forgot to measure the ride height before, but it looks like it dropped the rear down about an inch. Using his camber gauge, it looks like we added about -1* of camber to the rear, from about 0* before. So between the increased spring rate from cutting, the lower center of gravity, and the better camber, I'm expecting good things from this.

When we cut the rear springs, we cut from the top, as the upper coils didn't get as close to the coils below as the bottom ones get to the ones above them.

Top:


Bottom:


To answer the question that I kept asking earlier, it looks like the rear springs are not considered "square" as they won't stand up by themselves:


So in my opinion, while not perfectly tangential, they are closer to that than to square, and are safe to cut (to an extent). With only one coil cut, they were under compression with the top mount installed, so no need for tender springs or limit straps. I'm curious to see if I could get away with cutting another coil, but that would require me getting another set of E34 rear springs in case it's too much and they won't stay seated/under compression.



Josh smoothing out the edges:






Sorry, but I don't have any after pics yet, but I will soon.

In related news, I bumped up the stiffness of the FSB from the middle position to the full stiff position, and the front end seems a bit tighter, but I haven't really pushed it hard yet. Still, I'm hopeful this will balance out any additional oversteer I created with the stiffer rear end.

We then decided it would be interesting to do Josh's ghetto car weighing using four bathroom scales placed under each wheel with the other side on wood blocks to even out the ride height. It's not super accurate, but it's good enough for a rough idea. Josh's 318 with an M42 weighed about 2200 pounds when he weighted it, and mine came out to just over 2900, which is where I thought it would be, so that's good enough confirmation for me. Still though, it's not great to know that my car weighs a full 30% more than his car, when I know it doesn't make 30% more power.

Anyway, I'll post up my impressions of all the new stuff when I drive the car a bit more, but I'm feeling pretty good about where the car is right now! Big thanks to Dave and Josh for all of their help. I don't think I could have done all this without them!

[95maxrider]

The E28 got to race twice last weekend due to me tearing an axle seal on my I30 late Friday afternoon, and somehow couldn't find one locally, so it wasn't going to be able to race on Saturday with the local BMW club. Their first event was in Waldorf, which has a good, but not great parking lot. The course had a few very tight turns that didn't really suit the E28, but overall the car felt pretty damn good!

I could really feel an improvement from the cut rear springs, and I think between that and the stiffer setting on the FSB, the car handles better than it possibly ever has. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, I'm an idiot, and I had not properly secured the battery like I should have after both terminals popped off at the last rally-x. Naturally, they started popping off again, but I caught it earlier, and solved the problem of the battery shifting forward and back so much by stuffing the 3" in front of it with some cheap carpet stuff we use to cover the reflective sound deadening. The battery hasn't moved since!

I did however feel the effects of low power steering fluid after my runs when I got some weird shaking feedback through the steering wheel when I turned it. This went away in the 5 minutes or so between runs, but I felt it after every run. I went home and topped off the reservoir and hoped that would solve the issue. Since I couldn't find a shop capable of giving my I30 a proper alignment on Saturday, I had to use the E28 again Sunday for the first Solo event of the year.



With no power steering overheating, a relatively secure battery, and the faster/bigger course at FedEx field, the car felt great! I ever beat some cars....just not very many. The car running in front of me is a 5.0 swapped E36, and its other driver put down the fastest time in my unlimited class over all the Cobras, which is hugely impressive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7j70Dm ... e=youtu.be

And here is an awesome short little clip from someone recording from the side. My car goes by at 13:30. Granted, I'm not going that fast, but the car doesn't look like it's leaning very much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZqIkt- ... page#t=810

I would REALLY like to get the car 'painted' before the next event, but we'll see about that....

[95maxrider]

Last weekend Bobby finally came over and we did a couple small things that I've been meaning to do for quite some time. First up was replacing the throttle cable. Even with it fully tightened/adjusted, there was still a fair amount of slack in the cable, so I wanted something new. I figured it got stretched or something when the motor mounts failed a year ago. I picked up a new one for like $25 and got to work. Turns out it wasn't necessarily stretched, but rather a little oval metal piece was missing, and it was installed on the wrong bracket for the TB. We moved it to the upper mount location, and viola! A nice tight throttle cable.



We spent the rest of the day doing dumb stuff, like blacking out most of the chrome trim on the car and painting the rear bumper black. It looks good enough from 10', which is all I care about. In fact, I think it all looks fantastic now!









Ahh yes, that's the stuff.

[95maxrider]

With all the recent work done to the car, I was eager to get it back to its natural habitat and see what it could do in the dirt. Thankfully, my impressions of the car from the last auto-x didn't lie; the car was excellent!

To recap, I "secured" the battery, added more power steering fluid, increased the stiffness of the FSB from medium to full stiff, cut a coil from the rear springs, and swapped in a rebuilt 3.73 LSD diff. Upon loading up the car, I noticed how the rear rally tires are almost bald, but I have some spares that are slightly less bald.

Either way, the car felt PERFECT straight out the gate. Everything is doing exactly what I want it to do, and it's just glorious. Sure, the car could use more power (what car couldn't?), but really, the car is just about perfect. I bet lowering the front an inch or so would make it even better, but I really had zero complaints about the car's behavior.

I started out the AM runs by hitting a cone, but by the third run I had pulled ahead of Josh and I stayed there the rest of the day. The course was pretty wide open with no super tight sections, which certainly is to my advantage. By the end of the AM session I had a 3 second lead and the fastest individual run by about 0.3 second in the MR run group. As the PM session wore on, I slowly put more time between Josh and myself. I hit one more cone, for a total of two, but Josh hit five for the day. Again, I put down the fastest clean time in the MR group in the PM session by about 0.3 second, and ended up about 9 seconds ahead of Josh. I even beat the stock AWD champ by about 4 seconds! Here's a shot of the results for my class:



And a video with my best AM/PM runs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOJtRgAbP4A

And I just had to copy the following description that Josh used in his review of the event:

[QUOTE=irish44j]In any case, I’ve taken to thinking of that line in Top Gun where Goose is like “Mav, that’s Iceman. They call him iceman because that’s how he flies: ice-cold, no mistakes. He wears you down, you do something stupid, he’s got you.”

So Nick is pretty much Iceman (except he doesn’t get as many girls). Because he drives no –mistakes (or at least, very occasional) and if his competitors make a mistake it’s pretty much over because Nick may not always put up the FTD runs, but he always puts down consistently near-fastest runs and never has any major screw-ups to let you back in once you make a mistake. He actually got 2 cones (in 14 runs) which is unusually high for him, but with the lead he just kept on laying down good run and none of them deviated by about more than 1 second from each other, so that’s pretty consistent on a course with constantly-changing conditions. He also laid down the fastest clean run of the MR class at 46.3 seconds on his last run.[/QUOTE]

Thanks buddy

[tsototh]

Glad to see your persistence has paid off! I enjoy following your thread, keep up the good work!

[tsototh]

Glad to see your persistence has paid off! I enjoy following your thread, keep up the good work!

[95maxrider]

I was feeling pretty good about the third event coming into it. The car felt great, and I was eager for a second win against Josh. M52Josh didn't have his swap ready yet, and sat the event out to work on the car. I was excited to pick up a set of new/used rally tires from a guy racing with us for the great price of $180! I haven't been rotating the rally tires front to rear at all, so the rears are pretty much worn down, while the fronts still have a pretty good amount of tread left.

Unfortunately, when I went to start the car for the drive through, it wouldn't start! I naturally checked the battery connectors, as the battery had a tendency to move around quite a bit due to a lack of tie down in the battery box, and the terminals would pop off. It even happened on the drive to the event! Somehow the positive wire worked its way loose, and when I turned on the headlights as we were going up a super steep hill, the car bucked and tried to stall, so I turned them back off real quick and pulled into our normal rest stop location.

Back to the race. We checked a bunch of things but couldn't find the problem. After letting it sit for a while, it started up, hooray! But as I pulled up to the line, the car cut off. It restarted easily, but I knew something was wrong. On my second run, I got about 80% of the way through the course when the car died on course. Apparently it took me about 40 seconds to get moving again, by which point I had basically lost the race for the day, cause there ain't no coming back 40 seconds. Fuck. Thankfully Josh is a good sport and let me co-drive his car AGAIN! I hopped in his car having not driven it since he put on coilovers and disconnected the RSB, and immediately beat his fastest time by half a second, and ended up with the fastest clean time in the morning.

After much poking around in the area where the dash should be, Mike (2.5 RS, crazy FC RX7) found a wire that appeared to be the culprit. By jiggling the wire, he could make the car cut off. I proceeded to wrap the plastic box the wire went into with about half a roll of electrical tape to ensure the bog didn't jiggle around and the wire couldn't move out of place. Half way through the afternoon session I got it running and did the last few races in it. If I hadn't hit a cone on the first run I would have had the fastest time, but Josh's cleanest run was a tenth faster than mine. Josh of course won the event handily, some 34 seconds ahead of me, back in 5th place. That gives Josh two wins to my one. I had some work to do.....

Here's my last run of the day:
http://youtu.be/ZUQnhMb8j8I

[95maxrider]

The car was hurting after the third event, and needed a thorough freshening before traveling up to the STPR rally-x divisional race the following weekend. M52Josh was going to co-drive my car since his wasn't going to be ready, so he came over and helped out with some wiring problems to get the car legal and ready.

First up was the cutting off issue. Turns out the little black plastic box the wire went into was part of the factory alarm system, and the loose wire triggered the immobilizer. We had trouble replicating the problem, but eventually were pretty sure that forum lore was correct after checking the wiring diagram for the system. The solution was as simple as splicing two wires together. Thanks M52Josh!

Next up were the taillights that (partially) lit up when you didn't want and didn't when you did. Turns out it was a combination of an out of adjustment plunger on the brake pedal that triggers the brake lights, switching bulbs side to side, and removing some dielectric grease. We "solved" the plunger issue by putting a small spacer on the brake pedal. Wow, we actually have working taillights!

We turned on the car and it started right up, but we noticed it was running rough. Josh inspected some things and came across a spark plug wire that was not only filled with black sludge, but was missing the little spring that held it in place on the cap, so it never made proper connection. Thankfully, he had a spare set and would bring a replacement with him when we went up to the STPR rally.

I also picked up the new tires from Chris' house, who was nice enough to bring them back to the DC area for me, as I can't fit 8 wheel/tires in the E28! I decided to just replace the rear two tires, since the fronts had quite a bit of life left. The new tires are Kumho R700s and have a hard compound. The tread blocks are very different than the old ones. I will be putting the old tires on the back of the car and putting the new ones on the front. Here are my current rear tires and the obviously new fronts:





And here are my old rear tires compared with new:







The car was ready for STPR!