One of the most expensive parts of the Lemons car is the seat – a good fiberglass seat will run you at least $500 dollars and even an aluminium seat will cost > $300. Now if you are preping a regular race car thats not a problem, the seat will usually last the lifetime of the car. In our case the car will most probably last only 1 race and it did not make too much sense to spend more than the cost of the car on just one seat. Enter Terry Griffin and Griffin Motorwerke, the west coast Recaro distributor, who offered to lend us a Pole Position seat and the associated mounting hardware.
One of the biggest advantages of getting the Recaro hardware was the fact that it came with a set of sliders. Since our driver lineup has some significant height variation, a single fixed seat position really wouldn’t have worked for us. By using a seat on sliders we’d be able to move the seat around as needed to fit the various drivers. I should add that it is possible to transport a seat in the Elise.
When we got around to actually mounting the seat in the car we came across some interesting problems. Mounting points for the Recaro Seat rails are 16 inches apart while the factory mounting points are 17 inches apart. Since we couldn’t reuse the factory seat points we’d have to drill some holes in the floor except that with just an inch of clearance it wouldn’t be very safe to drill a hole next to the factory point. Also the floor on the E30 is not flat which meant that we couldn’t get a good fit between the rails and the floor. In the end we had to weld some C-channel to the floor and mount the seat rails to the channel. This method did lose us about half an inch in head-room but it was the only safe way of mounting the seat.
Once the seat was in place we came across another problem – the Pole Position seat was actually a bit too small for both Jyri and me. The shoulder harness slots were a too low and the tops of the slots were under our shoulder. In the case of an accident this would lead to spinal compression which really isn’t a very good idea. We got back in touch with Terry and he gave us a Profi SPG XL seat instead. This seat is quite a bit bigger and the shoulder holes are high enough to work quite well for all of us. Best of all since it’s a Recaro seat it just slots into the same brackets as the Pole Position and required no modifications to car. Our race seat was officially in place.
I’d like to give a huge thanks to Terry Griffin and Griffin Motorwerke for sponsoring our team in the Lemons race. I’ll let you into a little know fact about Terry- apart from running his massively successful business, he also lead a double life as a professional F1 photographer. He takes some incrediblephotographs and as a long time member of the F1 circus he knows a good number of players. The next time you’re at his shop just bring up the topic of F1 and expect to spend a good half hour discussing the sport with a true insider
One of the most important pieces of safety equipment for any racecar is the roll cage. Having seen one car flip in July event, we knew that this one part we we had to take very seriously. The official rules for the race only require a 4 point roll bar and a door bar, but we decided to go all the way and get a full roll cage instead. In fact, one of the reasons we went with the E30 was availability of several bolt-in roll cages for the spec E30 market. After looking around for a bit and contacting several companies, we decided that an Autopower roll cage was the way to go. Their cages are legal for both SCCA and NASA and they are universally regarded as one of the best cage builders in the business. Additionally since they are one of the largest manufacturers of bolt-in cages, we knew that they cage would be well designed and would bolt in with a minimum of fuss.
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.
Day three of car prep was all about getting the engine running. At this point we had had the car with us for several months but we hadn’t yet heard the damn thing run.
We started up by tightening up the head bolts and putting in a new timing belt. After that we adjusted the valve spacing (space between camshaft and valve stem) and began reconnecting that various fuel hoses and wires. We decided not to put the cooling system in until the engine was in running condition to give ourselves some work room in case we needed to replace any additional parts. After everything was connected back up we added some more oil to the engine and started it for the first time.
After sorting out some initial issues with some blown fuses, the car started on just the second attempt. The cloud of smoke on the side was a combination of an untightened exhaust manifold and some oil burning off. After this major success we decided to wrap up the day and were actually able to drive the car outside to park it. It still doesn’t have a cooling system so we havent run it for any length of time but the fact that it moves under its own power and doesn’t make any weird noises is a great sign.
Last weekend Nithya and I took our GTI to the GGLC Autocross at the Marina airport. The performance far exceeded my expectations and at 61.7 seconds I was actually the 3rd fastest driver in very wet morning session (the fastest Elise did a 64.x). Much of this was due to the fact that it had proper wet weather tires on, but the handling was pretty amazing – very predictable with some understeer at the limit. It did of course feel quite a bit heavier than the Elise but the direction changes were quick and chassis was very forgiving. As the track dried out I lost my performance advantage over the elises but as you can see in the photo I did manage to get a wheel off the ground
This was also the first Autcross for Nithya as a driver. She started out very slowly with a 130 second lap but by the end of the day she was down 66 seconds – by far the greatest improvement of any driver at the event ans just 6 seconds off my best lap. She had so much fun that she’d decided to attend all future events, we’ve already signed up for the November event. The following video is of her last run – notice the tire squeal in the turns and the cones she destroys near the end
Day 2 of preparation was all about fixing up the head. As you can see below the valves were in really bad shape and all of them had to be replaced. We cleaned the head and the block before putting on a new head gasket kit.
The manifolds were bolted back onto the head and we put the head back onto the car. At this point we were feeling quite optimistic about getting the car done when we realized that we didn’t have the right tool to tighten the head bolts – seeing that it was already late we called it quits for day 2 with the head just sitting on the block.
Now that we had the car at Dietsch Werks, we had to figure out what was wrong with. Day 1 would be all about stripping the car under Robs guidance. We started out by jacking it up and draining the coolant.
The next step was to remove the cylinder head. This was needed because the 325 is an interference engine and the broken timing belt guarantees that we have belt some valves. We disconnected all the hoses + wiring and used a forklift to lift the head out of the engine bay.
Once we pulled the head off we made a surprising discovery – all the pistons had valve marks on them. This confused us for a bit until we looked at the timing belt and found that it was not only broken but was also missing several teeth. In a regular timing belt break you usually damage the valves in only one or two cylinders before the engine stops turning and prevents further damage. In this particular instance the engine had kept on running with bad timing (due to the missing belt teeth) and ALL the valves had made at least some contact with the pistons.
While all this work was being done on the engine we got to work stripping the interior of the car and by the end of the day it was looking much more like a racecar.
After this we called it quits for the day and felt quite pleased at having accomplished quite a lot on our first work day.
After a couple of weeks of frantic paper writing things have finally cooled down enough that I can go back to writing my blog. First on the list is a series of blog posts about our preparation for the 24 hours of Lemons. Sit back and enjoy the fun.
The first and most important thing we needed to run in the Lemons was a car, not just any car, but a car that we’d be able to buy AND prep for for under $500. Looking through the results of the first race we decided that an older japanese econobox would probably be the best car to run with. We were all set to rummage through the local junkyard when fate suddenly dropped a car in our lap. One of Robs friends had an old BMW with a broken timing belt that was blocking his driveway – he told us that as long as we get the car out of his way immediately we could keep the car for free. We quickly showed up at his door to take a look at the car.
We found that the car was a 4 door 1986 BMW 325 E with 245 thousand miles on the clock. The E denoted that it had the economy engine, this meant lower horsepower but higher torque which should be ideal for the tight Altamont circuit. The car itself was in better shape that I expected, the paint was peeling from 21 years of exposure and he interior was a mess but there was very little rust and the engine “looked” ok with the timing belt being the only obvious problem. Being an E30 meant that the parts were cheap and bolt-in rollcages were readily available. People who had entered the last race had warned us that non-running cars were a huge time sink, but the fact that the car was available and free meant that there was only one thing to do. We rolled the car into Robs trailer and made it our official entry into the Lemons race.
P.S.: We are not cheating by getting a “free” car, the KBB value for a 1986 325E in fair condition is $400 – a non-running car is worth almost nothing.
[tags]24 hours of lemons, e30, bmw, 325, preparation, racing[/tags]
Colin McRae was killed in a helicopter crash yesterday. I never had the pleasure of seeing him race in real life but I did follow it on TV. He truly embodied the never say die spirit and will be missed by million of fans.
Check out this clip from the 2006 X Games – he rolls his car(2:10) and still continues on to finish second.
[tags]Colin McRae, RIP, x games, roll, death, sad, rally, driver[/tags]
I just got this great decal of the years in which Team Lotus won the F1 constructors championship. It may have been well before my time but there was a period in the 60s and 70s that Lotus was by far and away the best team in Formula 1. The genius of Colin Chapman combined with the talent of drivers like Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti resulted in Lotus not only having the fastest cars but also the best drivers – makes you feel sorry for their opposition
For more info on the racing history of Lotus check out their wikipedia page. Another good source of information is Classic Team Lotus an independent company formed by Clive Chapman to preserve and promote the cars raced by Team Lotus.
On Monday we finally got our Lemons car started for the first time – still need to put the cooling system on buts its a relief to finally get it running. I promise I’ll have a series of posts about the actual prep work.
RT @cjmartin: Fun to see one of @rnair's photos (http://flic.kr/p/aPeaf) featured in this video created using CC Flickr photos: http://b ... 2010/08/18
Just got Sir Stirling Moss to sign my Lotus F1 heritage poster 2010/08/14
