Eurotrash Motorsports

Finally, Another beautiful weekend!  Because of Jeff’s vacation, and my motocross racing, we had missed the last two MCO events, but were we ever ready for yesterday!

After being generously donated Emil’s van to tow the car to the track (no, the truck has not yet passed its e-test), we started off with an awesome day of racing!  At first we were worried that the suspension drop would make it hard to load the car onto the trailer, but we were able to do it as easily as before! 

Because of our new mods, we were bumped up a class, and we were expecting to be at the bottom of the pack.  The track was superb – nice long slaloms, some tight, technical corners, and some sweeping full -throttle corners.  As we were anticipating, the day started off slow for both Jeff and I, since trying to get used to the car with the new setup.  Can you say grip?  It was AMAZING.  We couldn’t believe the difference!  It was a huge learning curve trying to get used to trusting the car and to go deaper into the corners before braking, to carry more speed, etc, but both of us improved steadily throughout the first three runs (well, first 4 for Jeff).  We had a huge fanbase out today, which was great!  I posted my fasted time of the day on my third run, and Jeff squeaked his out on his last run.

My fourth run was probably my fastest, but a downed cone (the very last one on the track) from the car before me had been missed and I wasn’t able to complete it.  Of course, my re-run sucked :(.  The fifth showed a bit of an improvement being within 1.4 seconds of my FTD, and my sixth… well lets just say that I wouldn’t have been disapointed if it wasn’t timed… it was definitely my WORST AutoX lap of my life.   The first half of the run went great, and the last lap, I fell apart, hitting two cones, and posting my slowest time.

Here is how we did:

These times were good enough to class me 7th in our new class, and Jeff 17th (out of 25)!  Looks like we aren’t doing too bad after all!  Jeff and I both had a blast and are extremely excited about the new setup.  We did notice that with the suspension drop, our front bumper was getting DANGEROUSLY close to the ground, but it seems to be ok.  Check back soon, as we will be posting some videos from the day!

During my tire change at Canadian Tire on Carling Ave. right before Calabogie, the service manager, Ralph, who is also an MCO member and racer noticed that our car was on stock suspension.  He had a set of Bilstein Tourings that were for his street car and that he was no longer using.  So, clearly not wanting to miss an oportunity like that, we bought them!  A few weeks later, we found a set of Eibach Sportline performance springs (1.8″ drop in the front, and 1.5″ in the rear!)for cheap on Ebay, and we bought those too!  And, since we had snapped the front swaybar at the St. LAC event in Shannonville, we picked up an OEM used swaybar with endlinks from EuroParts in Gatineau.  While we were doing all our purchasing, I discovered that there were three different suspension setups for a 1992 BMW 325i (ugh!).  So we made sure that we had everything needed for the upgrade.  When Jeff came back from his vacation, we got started!

Day 6 -

First up: Driver side front!  With a set of borrowed spring compressors, we tackled this side with…. not ease… but not too far off!  Everything went smoothly, and after around an hour (yes, we know we took our time), the spring and shock was replaced!

Next: Passenger side front!  This side ended up being much more challenging:  We got the shocks used, and along the way, without noticing, we had lost one of the pins that mounts the top plate to the strut tower.  Not a problem we though, we can just un-press a pin from the old top plates.  Not so fast!  The original top plates were a different design, and we weren’t able to disassemble them to get the pins out.  After a long evening of trying to figure out what to do, we gave up and went to bed.

Day 7 -

Knowing we had a tough job ahead of us made it a little less interesting, but after fighting with the top plate some more, we decided to screw it and drill out the old one.  We were then able to get the new pin in, and managed to struggle through reassembling the passenger side front.  Success!  Only two more to go!   The rear springs are not the MacPherson type, so we figured, easy as pie!  Not so much… after looking at the Bentley manual, we discovered we were supposed to remove the rear driveshafts when we dropped the suspension to prevent damaging the CV joints.  After checking some forums, we noticed that some people were not doing this, and everything went well, so we decided to risk it.  At 1am – another success! the rear shocks and springs were in!

Day 8 -

Time for the swaybar!  Once again, this should be easy right?  Well, it turns out in our upgrading from an older style suspension to the newer-style 1992 suspension, we had forgotten to purchase the brackets that connect the endlinks to the control arms (our original mounting point was to the strut).  At 5:15 we phoned Otto’s BMW, and sure enough, they had some in stock!  We wasted no time in going to pick them up, and we returned to complete the job successfully!

We did it!  The swap was complete!  after a gruelling three nights of work, we were finished!  Wait… what was that?  We installed all the springs upside down?!?! 

*@#$!*@@#*$*#$%*%*!*#*#$%…..

 I guess we should have read the instructions… Check out the build section for pictures!

EDIT:  turns out we did to it right the first time… *@#$!*@@#*$*#$%*%*!*#*#$%!!!

Tuesday afternoon , Jeff and I took the BMW and the truck and went to a St. Lawrence Auto Club (St. LAC for short) SoloII event at the Shannonville speedway.  After driving over 2 hours, we found out that site officials had repaved the track in certain areas to prep for the go-kart race they were hosting that weekend.  Of course, the areas we repaved were right where we were going to be racing!  So a change in track configuration left us with something looking like this (and yes, i know my paint skills need work):

The track ended up only being 34-38 seconds long, but it was still a blast.  The corners were really challengining because the weren’t smooth at all.  Both Jeff and I had a lot of trouble figuring it out, and we both ended up in the field more than once!

 After the first few runs, it was obvious that the low wait time between runs, and the short, aggressive track was taking its toll on our cooling system.  We were having cooling problems, so we’d have to coast into pit lane, and push the car back into the lineup.  All in all, we had six runs, and I came out 1 second ahead of Jeff in our fastest laps.  At the end of the evening, we discovered that our front swaybar had snapped!  Jeff and I are quickly discovering that our car runs awesome, but things like this will happen!  It was our first time running an AutoX on the new tires, and it wasn’t the greatest track to really get a feel for it, but it was obvious from the get-go that it was an extreme improvement over the ol’Falkens ZE-512!

We got some great in-car footage, but once again you’ll have to wait since Jeff is on vacation ;)