Car info:

• 1986 BMW 325 E (E30)
• Class winner at Reno-Fernley 2009
• 2 Top 5s and 2 Top 10s in the last 4 races
• Excellent handling and fast lap times
• Ultra reliable – no major breakdowns in last 5 races
• Full safety gear
• Autopower bolt-in roll cage with additional weld in door bar
• Recaro Profi SPG XL seat withe Recaro mounts on Recaro dual locking sliders
• New G-force 6-point harnesses
• 20 gallon fuel cell with additional internal baffling and safety foam
• 6 TR-Motorsports wheels with Hankook tires (enough rubber for 2 races)
• Fully stripped for maximum weight reduction
• Lexan windshield
• Sunroof and rear parcel shelf replaced with sheet aluminium
• Door skins only
• lightweight sealed battery
• dashboard, excess wiring and interior completely removed
• Updated brakes (new master cylinder, stainless steel brake lines, new Hawk race pads, Super Blue racing fluid)
• Wired for in-car radio (4 radios and helmet mics included)
• 2 gallon drinks system in place (separate 1 gallon bottles)
• Cool suit mounting system (cool suit not included)
• Numerous other safety, reliability and speed modifications – contact for full list
• Never had any BS Penalties or tech issues
• “Lemons Legend” on Jalopnik
• Click here to follow the history of the car and its racing efforts

Car package includes all safety gear, radios, wheels, tires, drinks systems, fuel filler hoses, etc… – just add gas and race!

The car is located at Dietsch Werks in Santa Clara and we are happy to show it with an appointment. For pricing and more information please leave a comment below or call Rahul at 510-439-7265

In the meantime check out this video of a Lexus IS-F lapping the Fuji circuit with its virtual recreation side-by-side.

You can see the speed, heart rate (BPM), longitudinal G (acceleration + braking) and lateral G in the dashboard on the top of the video. His average heart rate was in the low nineties while on the grid and rises to to 101 just before the start of the run. As the run progresses you can see it quickly rise all the way to 145 bpm by the end of the 45 second run. Just as interesting is the way his heart rate falls as soon as the run ends and drops to the low 130s just 10 seconds after the run. So now if anyone asks you why you autocross just say its for the health benefits

Unfortunately the video quality is not as perfect and the heart rate only updates every 5 seconds but all in all it was a successful test of the system. I have already ordered a Polar RS800CX (1 sec resolution) and I plan to run this same setup for the duration of the Lemons race at Buttonwillow next month. So stay tuned for the health benefits of endurance racing

This post has been cross posted on the GGLC blog.

One of the highlights of the 2008 West Coast Lotus meet were the time trials that were held at the go-kart track of Jackson County Parks facilities. You often hear that the Lotus handles like a go-kart but this was the first time that I got to drive my Elise on an actual go-kart course. Our run format consisted of running 3 back to back laps on the outside of the track to count as one single timed run. It was an interesting day and we got to to run the first session in the dry before the rain came down creating a very wet second session.The following video combines in-car and external footage of my first wet run of the afternoon. Major thanks to Rob and Jen from Dietsch Werks for taping the run from the outside.

Lotus Elise on a Go-Kart track from rnair on Vimeo.

Since my R-compound tires were completely slick I had to swap to my AD-07 street tires for the first time in six months. The combination of skinny tires, street compound and wet surface meant that I had no grip and I almost went off while braking for turn 1 (I was later riding with someone who shall not be named when we actually went off at the same spot ). I make the turn with about six inches to spare and am pretty cautious and slow waaaay down for turn two only to find the rear end wants to fishtail on the exit. Turn 3 went much better but the lack of front-end bite at turn 4 lead to a few NSFW comments. At this point I slowed down even further and tiptoed my way around the course for the rest of the run. We later found out that the county had repaved about half the track which meant that the course had sections with both old and new asphalt which account for the wide variance in the grip levels at the turns. Turns 1 through 4 had the lowest grip and you had to tiptoe through them before getting on the throttle for the rest of the course.

The next video is incar from my final run in the dry. The lap is much better and doesnt have too many mistakes apart from a missed shift on the start of lap 3 – I believe it ended up being the second fastest Lotus time of the morning.

West Coast Lotus Meet: Time Trials from rnair on Vimeo.

Compare that with this photo I took at Canepa Design using my 5MP Nokia N95.

Not only does the GT5 shot have much better colours, the details (check out the wheels) are truly spectacular. With the recent Blue Ray win I think I might just have to buy a PS3 after all

Head over to Jalopnik for more GT5 info.

Harris is one of the best automotive reporters out there – he strikes an excellent balance between the humour of Jeremy Clarkson and the driving ability of Tiff Needell. If you liked that review I highly recommend the Chris on Camera series where he reviews a different car every week.

Driving in the dark from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see, the visibility is not the greatest which makes driving quite an interesting experience. While the lights do give you some idea of where the apex is, the real problem is in finding your track out point. Turns 1, 2 and 4 were especially difficult since the optimum racing line has a very wide track out point where you run over the outside kerbing on the exit. This is all well and good in the sunshine since you know exactly where you are going and you know that its safe. In the dark however, you simply cannot see the track out point when you turn in and you basically have to hope that the exit is clean and that no one has dumped mud or oil on the kerb. The other problem is that its really quite hard to see the track surface and/or its boundaries, especially when people drag mud onto the track. In many cases, the white line marking the track is completely obscured and you just have to guess at what your turn-in point is and hope that you wont put a wheel off on the inside. Some of this might be improved by using better lights: we used the stock E30 headlights and tried spreading the beam sideways to try and light up the apex but since it is a road car the amount of adjustment allowed was just too limited. The next time we will use more powerful, fully adjustable dune buggy lights instead. My solution to the visibility issues was to take it slow and always leave myself a margin for error, it may not have resulted in ultimate lap times but it meant that I always had enough “in hand” to be able to adapt to the any unexpected changes in the racing surface. Our goal was to just stay out of trouble and rack up the laps at a steady pace – since we were in 6th place after 10 hours I guess it did work .

The next video is an example of what happens in low visibility, the cars are just entering turn two after someone had an agricultural moment and dragged a massive amount of mud right onto the racing line. None of us can see the mud on the line and come into the corner at race speed only to lose all grip mid corner. One car spins out completely while dPunks and I have some interesting sideways moments. While I got through it ok, it did give me quite a scare and I ended up taking turn 2 quite slow for the next 3-4 laps. Endurance racers who race at 10/10ths all night must be either incredibly brave or incredibly dumb

Muddy moment from rnair on Vimeo.

The next video is of a couple of laps in traffic. As you can see it is actually easiers to drive in traffic since there are a lot more headlights lighting up the track . Also the headlights make it impossible for someone to sneak up on you which means that you always have a good idea of the cars around you and what they are going to do. This leads to much better manners on the track and less problems off the track. Compared to the October race at Altamont the traffic here was incredibly well behaved and there was hardly any contact.

Driving in the dark (in traffic) from rnair on Vimeo.

This final video is a highlights package attempting to show some of the interesting from my 4 hour stint in the dark, I apologize for the crappy editing. All the video in this post was recorded using the PDR100 Racer kit from our sponsors at ChaseCam – I highly recommend it for your own racing/track video.

Thunderhill Lemons highlights 2007 from rnair on Vimeo.

30 Dec 06: Another trip to LA down Highway 1. Tons of pics here.

17 Feb 07: Visited the Tesla factory and saw the latest roadster to be built at Hethel.

24 Feb 07: Start the track season at Thunderhill with TEAM

1 Apr 07: East Bay Etalk Brunch

24 Apr 07: Met Crudson and JnC on their cross country trip

12 May 07: Had a 95 mph spin at Reno-Fernley Raceway

15 June 07: A photo of my car (post spin) is used by the SCCA for an ad in Sportscar magazine

16-27 June 07: 2500 mile roadtrip to Vancouver

12 Aug 07: Broke down on Highway 1 with no cell service. Had to hitch a ride to town to call the tow truck.

18 Aug 07: Saw a bunch of classic Lotus at the Monterey Historics.

1 Sept 07: Elisetalk photoshoot in Alameda

22 Sept 07: Finally convince Nithya to drive in the GGLC autocross – was in the GTI rather than the Elise but she still had fun

Nithya @ the GGLC AutoX from rnair on Vimeo.

20-12 Oct 07: 24 Hours of Lemons with Team SFF1. More details here.

2 Dec 07: 2 years and 33,500 miles later my luck finally runs out and I get rear ended

The next step was actually buy the cage, Autopower does not sell to directly to clients so we had to find a distributor. When I looked up the list I was happy to see that Livermore Performance was one of their distributors. I have been buying brake pads from Monty and Stephen ever since I moved to California, and its always been a pleasure to work with them. When I spoke to them about our Lemons team they were very interested and signed on to become a sponsor. At this point the race was just a month away, and the regular 4 week lead time for a cage would have been too slow, luckily Livermore Performance and Autopower worked some magic and were able to rush us a cage in just 10 days.

The cage arrived as a set of shaped and welded steel tubes which we painted and left to dry overnight. After that we put the car on the lift at Dietch Werks and got to work fitting in the cage. The back section with the actual roll hoop went in fairly smoothly as did the front windshield bars. The door bars did however cause some interesting issues due to the placement and width of the B-pillar post. The roll cage was designed to fit an E30 coupe since that is the car most commonly used in the Spec E30 class. On a 4 door E30 like ours, the b pillar post is about 8 inches further forward than in the coupe which meant that the main cage roll hoop would not line up with the B pillar. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue (you cant use the back door but that not really a concern in a race car), but since the door bars curve outwards from the roll hoop they were hitting the B-pillar and would not fit in place. The solution was to use a sledgehammer and bend the inner sheetmetal of B-pillar about half an inch outwards. This does affect the structural integrity of the pillar, but since we are doing it to put a full roll cage, the car is going to be considerably stronger than stock.

Once the full cage was in place, we drilled holes in the sheet metal and bolted the cage to the car with the included high grade bolts and mounting plates. The final step was to tie the various pieces of the cage using the supplied sleeves which would be bolted across the joints in the cage. This required us to drill a 3/8th inch holes through the sleeve and the cage so we could pass a bolt through. Now this may sound simple but it was actually by far the slowest job. The cage steel is so hard that it takes 10-15 minutes to drill just a single hole and we needed 16 holes in all which meant that it took us a full day just to fit the sleeves. On the plus side though I will feel extremely safe sitting in a car with such a strong cage

All in all the cage install was a fairly simple process and needed only the most basic tools. It may add weight to the car but in terms of improved safety and chassis rigidity it is one mod that was well worth time, money and effort. If you ever need a roll cage, I strongly recommend buying the Autopower cage from Livermore Performance.