Eurotrash Motorsports

The weekend has come and gone and Shawn and I now have the Performance Control School and our first event under our belts.

The race on Sunday was a BLAST but man did it ever take a tole on both of us mentally.

My first lap was the first time I had ever really driven the car, and Shawn’s first lap was the first time he had driven the car in a year and it showed in our times.

I lost it coming out of the first slalom, started to spin, hit a cone (twice), and ended up doing a nice smoking donut before I kept going.  Shawn’s first lap wasn’t without excitement either as he came into the second to last corner a little too hot and ended up drifting the entire corner. 

We definitely picked up style points on our first laps ;)

Here’s a slideshow video of a spectator who was clearly impressed:

Both of our first laps were in the mid to high 80′s and our goal for the day was to break 80 seconds. We both got better as the day went on though. The rest of our times are listed below.

 With individual fastest laps of 78.817 and 79.395, Shawn and I finished 9th and 10th respectively in our class of 21 racers. Not bad for our first time out :D !

Check out the gallery for pictures from the first event.

The car’s ready!

The only issue we still had left to tackle was transporting the car from Shawn’s to the race.

Well I’m happy to say we solved that issue too.

We ride high, no lie, we ballin’  ;) lol

(A few days late)

Day 2 of the project consisted of Shawn and I, with the help of our friend Mike, attempting to swap the brakes on all four corners.

Some immediate issues that came up were our jackstands sinking into the dirt/sand in Shawn’s backyard and the freaking musquitos. Some particle board and bug spray solved those two problems. Unfortunately, once those issues were taken care of, the bigger problems came up.

For those of you that don’t know, BMWs do not have studs on their hubs. In other words, you don’t simply remove some lugnuts and take the wheels off . When you remove the wheels on a BMW, you remove a full bolt and what you’re left with is something like this…

Now some of you are probably wondering how the holes on the hub and on the rotor stay lined up. The answer is that there is a small screw in the rotor called the alignment screw that screws into the hub and keeps all the holes lined up.  The one problem with that screw is that if it gets seized, you’re in trouble.

So naturally, guess what happened….

Yup that nice and seized in there.  We tried removing the screw with one of those special reverse-threaded bits but the bit snapped off  inside the screw.  At this point we were really starting to run out of options. The metal the bit was made of was harder than the screw itself and we couldn’t drill through it – Plan B “The BFH” (big frickin’ hammer)

A few wacks with a sledge, a short drive to CT to pick up some grinding discs, and we were off to the races.

We didn’t even bother trying to remove the screw on the passenger side. We just drilled out the screw, removed the rotor with the sledge, and ground off the remains of the screw head.

The end result ? New hotness…

We’re making sure to take tons of pictures all throughout our build.

Any pictures that we take will be uploaded here, so make sure to check back for new pictures.

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With the auto-x season set to start next weekend with the driving school Saturday and the first race on Sunday, I figured it was time to get a helmet.

I took a drive over to Ottawa Goodtime Centre on Saturday to check out a few different brands/styles to see what fit my head and what felt comfortable. After trying on 3 or 4 different brands and finding out that I was a different size in every one, I ended up picking up this bad boy…

A Scorpion EXO-700 in matte black.

Man I have and expensive head!!

The project has officially begun!!

Shawn, Emil, and I got together today to work on the two cars.

The plan for the BMW was to strip as much out as possible except for the two front seats. We’ll be replacing those later, but for now the stock ones will do the trick.

We started off in the trunk by taking out the spare tire and the floor. We then stripped out all the trunk lining, the stock amp, the speakers, and all the other plastic bits. All that’s left in the trunk now is the wiring coming out of the taillights..that isn’t even plugged in anymore lol.

From the trunk, we moved to the interior. Shawn had already taken out the bench/bottom cushion in the back seat by the time I got there so we set to work getting the upper cushion out. It’s safe to say that things kind of snowballed out of control after that. EVERYTHING has been taken out of the car (interior carpet, headliner, glove box, stereo, climate control, door panels, etc.) We had all the pieces piled up beside the car – by the end of the day, the pile was taking up more room than the car was.

I should probably mention that we definitely had a puddle 1 in. deep under the front PS carpet due to a drain tube for the sunroof getting disconnected. The entire floor is surprisingly solid though :)

I think the biggest weight-savings came from removing the interior carpet. That thing must weigh around 30 pounds on it’s own and was probably closer to 40 with all the water that had soaked into it. Also, the wiring harness for the stereo must weigh about 5 pounds total. That thing was ridiculous.

The best news of the day is that the car started….eventually (lol). In our haste to get rid of as much wiring as possible, we had undone 2 ground in the back seat. Turns out that one of them was the ground for the fuel pump (oops). Needless to say that got grounded again.

All in all, it was an awesome day. We still have a bunch of things left to do this week (brakes, battery, oil change, throttle cable adjustment, etc.) but this is a huge item crossed off our list.

We’ll post some pictures once Shawn downloads them off his camera.

Check back later for picture updates:)