Hello everyone! I have been checking in here for a few years now. And it seems that there are an increasing stream of new builds on the Bmw E36 chassi. So I thought that I would share my little build that I have been tinkering with. I live in Sweden and as most of the people that live in countries that has snow I found my love for drifting in the snow. Actually my "career" started in a volvo 240. But this is the only pic I could find of my car in the snow.... through the years I have had some nice cars. My last wich I tore apart completely and I really liked how it turned out. (Photo courtesy of new owner) The story of the BMW started in the spring of 2010 when me and my friends was fed up with repairs of our Japanese performance cars that took very long due to long delivery times for parts and massive costs. We started to think that the Japanese drifters was using the s13 and cars like that because they are cheap in their native country and there is a heap of cheap parts every where. So we took that reasoning and thought: "what are the swedish answer to the S13 silvia?" The obvious answer are volvo 740. That´s actually a car that could be pretty fast. But due to the fact that the chassi and suspension are basically from the stone age we decided on the BMW 3 series. BMW E36 325 coupe to be precise. Me and 2 of my best friends bought one each in various conditions from bad to crap. One pretty fun episode was when we where in Stockholm to purchase Emelies car. when we had made the 200km trip to view the car and asked about the dents on the roof the seller told us: "Sorry I forgot to mention that there was a tree that fell on the car..." In the late summer we had all bought one and we fitted some coilovers, welded the diff and put in some racing seats. This is the look of the car for the remainders of that summer. It actually worked pretty good. It was a great street drifter and was decent on the track aswell. Then winter came and the actuall build began. I´m going to let the pics tell the tale. Then in the spring of 2011 it was time for a mapping session at Pure performance factory. The idea was to get a set up that would have a good powerband and around 400WHP. So I was satisfied with the dyno results. 437WHP at 1bar and 539wnm (on 85% ethanol) The basic set up was the following: Turbobandit TB60 twin entry turbo with 60 mm wastegate custom made low mount manifold for twin entry Turbobandit fuel pump in tank arp studs and cometic gasket VEMS engine management 1200cc injectors The car was all put together and I could start to feel how awesome this car could be. First event i drove it was on gatebil in Norway. Had some issues at first but after a few laps I got a feel for it. It was one of the best weekends ever. Some pics from events that year. Write up on 2012 to be continued.
In the en of the season of 2011 I was quite happy with the car. After around 3 drift events the gearbox threw in the towel after a so called "Finnish step off" (You step off the clutch at the rev limiter in 2nd gear) Had done it several times before though. Used the standard gearbox just to see how long it would survive. It outrun all expectations. I wouldn´t recommend anyone to use it no matter what power you are running. It will die. Swapped it for a ZF from a 5 series. Have worked since. It´s amazing how durable these gearboxes are as they are speced at 390NM according to ZF. However there was 4 issues that I wanted to adress. 1, Factory steering angle on these cars is crap 2, Overheating problems when pushed hard at high RPM for longer periods. 3, Bottom end power. It was really not a big problem. But I wanted this car to feel just right. 4, With more power the standard brakes was pretty useless. We got a lot of feedback from people that liked what we had done and wanted some of the solutions that we had come up with. So we registered a company and started to develop our own parts. The idea for 2012 was to test all these parts to the limits and make adjustments so everything performed at the level we demanded. Taking it apart again for the second time 1, First it was the steering that needed to get sorted. We designed our own lower arms to be able to get the front wheel in the right position and clear all possible obstacles that might be a problem with more lock. The spindles was modified for quicker steering and less ackerman and the rest of the system changed to work with the new setup. We spent a long time to get it right and even then we made some changes during the following season. The result was over 55 degrees of lock with reduced ackerman but still modest enough for street use. 2, The problem with the overheating was a far easier fix. Bought a huge Griffin Radiator for a 7l Ford V8 and a lower temperature thermostat. I always go my own way and the decision to run without an oil cooler against what everybody else told me to do is one example. In doing this I realized that you should never install one without a thermostat. If I was really pushing it I managed to get the oil temperature up to around 108 centigrades 3, Time to put together a new engine. I wanted to raise the stroke on the engine to allow more air through thereby raise the speed through the engine resulting in higher torque. This was atleast the reasoning around this. I bought an M50 vanos block and a 2,8L crank from an M52 and joined everything up with H-profile conrods with our own specified measurements. Cooperring head gasket for better serviceability and higher recistance for high compression Standard head with intake cam on both intake and exhaust side to allow higher air speeds Ready to go back in again. Stay tuned for more.
Thanks for the nice comments. S50 is a monster engine. However I would choose the m50 any day of the week for the same reason i opted for the E36 chassi. Availability and cost. I currently have 3 spare engines. But I havn´t cracked even one so far. 4, The brakes needed an upgrade. Was thinking about D2 or something first. But I wanted something more standard looking and a setup that I could repair easily with parts from the nearest parts store. So the decision came down to standard brakes from a 330 E46. It actually have the same sized discs as the M3. There is only a slight difference in thickness. The improvement was massive. Especially the rears was a great difference and the hydro was a lot lighter to use. I did a lot of small things aswell. But this was the main mods. How it looked ready for 2012. A lot less finnish than last year. But hey it got the job done. So again it was time for PPF to work their magic on the ECU. Sadly the fuel pump proved to be a bit weak. It could have gotten a bit more power. But as I was only running wastegate boost control we decided not to upp the boost. On the bright side I can show you guys what difference the 2,8l crank does. This is the same dyno, boost, turbo and roughly the same ambient temperature. So it´s fairly accurate 478whp and 637wnm at 1bar of boost. Martin mapped his on the same dyno the day before with difference in power of just 2whp. With the new exhaust cam the power did not fall so much near redline. But most amazing was that low end torque was raised by almost 40%! I was amazed how well my ideas turned out and was ready for my first competition. Sadly I snapped the front bolt for the diff during the shakedown and had to forfit.
sweet ride man, loving red cars again atm. are you on zatzy? i recognise your tag name from somewhere.
Good call on the cams. People have such a backwards idea of cams on turbo engines in the UK its crazy, so I love seeing Scandinavian stuff as you guys actually understand tuning.
Shorter duration going by what happened. Wouldn't be surprised if it was re-timed to remove all overlap too (though less duration might have done that anyhow).
Common sense is all it takes. ;-) It´s 2mm thick with loose rings that cut in to the head when you torque it down. around its just a normal head gasket. So it is not as prone to leak as a mls. Link to the gasket. Cooperring head gasket M50/M52 84-84.50mm bore - Pure Performance Factory AB
Yes it looks that way. However the intake cam has 12 degrees more duration and 0,9mm higher lift. Unfortunetly I don´t have the figures on lobe separation on the standard cams. But most of the people running this setup recommend 1mm lift at TDC on the opposing piston. Lately people tend to take it down to 0,5mm. (Reducing overlapp) During 2011 Martin ran double intake cams and his engine felt a lot more agressive and responded better than mine. (But had similar power) When he took it apart again he realised that he had got the setting wrong as the TDC lift was 1,3mm (More overlapp). We guessed that this was the reason for the nice character. So against all recomendations I used the same setting for 2012. I can only guess what happend as I never whent on a dyno with the new engine runnig standard cams. But my theory is that the intake port is a bit restrictive and bottom end to midrange benefits from a bit of blowby that overlap creates and the fact that it does not die at the high rpms should be thanks to the higher duration on the exhaust port and a well performing turbo setup (Top rpm lies near the sweetspot on the compressor map and a low restriction exhaust to cope with the blowby). If this is accurate it should have more power with more lobe separation. Don´t take my word for it as I have no proof to back it up. If anyone has another idea I would be glad to hear it.
the start of 2012 was great everything really worked well and the car felt like it had no restrictions. During the third event it was raining heavily and it was at our home course Mantorp park wich is a really fast track. I thought it was a great opportunity to do some twin as it was a wide course and the rain restricted the speeds. Got some nice sequences and it was good fun. at the end of the day I had Martin in front of me and I was trying to catch up with him. He entered one of the longer bends and I was determind to get close. Unfortunetly it was hard to estimate his speed in the rain and I was comming in too fast and did not realise that he was standing still untill it was too late. I smashed my car in to his side as I was imitating his angle catching up to him. The engine mounts broke tossing the engine around in the bay. all left side suspension was destroyed. I actually bent the rear thick control arm that holds the rear spindle. It sat around for a while as I had not time or the inspiration to fix it. The season whent on without me. Martin managed to take a 2nd position in Emelies car the first event and Emelie also managed a 2nd place at a later event. There was some pretty angry guys that got beat by a little blond girl:-D Finally I got the car together thanks to some big help from Martin and Emelie. After some suspension adjustments the car ran great and I had lots of fun again. I only entered one more competition and was really feeling the car. Everything was perfect. But I did some stupid misstakes in the shakedown and got eliminated. Fall came and we got invited to drive in a commercial video for Mantorp park. I was playing around pretty carelessly with the car. as you can see in the beginning of the video posted below we drift on a narrow road leading up to the track. the first and second take was great and I had good fun. The third time I did not succeed with the transition. At this moment my balls grew a lot larger than my skill and I thought I could drive the left wheel in the ditch at the beginning of the following bend and it would catch and throw the car sideways. That was NOT what happened. going in to the ditch the undercarriage crashed to the ground and the car flew through the bend in to the forrest on the other side. :-D Amazingly the car was unharmed apart from a broken spoiler. So the day continued. During the last scene we where supposed to drift out of the track through a tight service road. I nailed it completely the first attempt and again I could feel my balls grow. Second attempt I was going a lot faster, missed the entry and let of to just go straight through. but I touched the surronding grass and the it was night night. You can see it in the end of the video. Crashed the front suspension again and this is how it sits now. I bought a house and have not had time to put on the car. More on that later. The commercial. I apologise for the bad edit and poor soundtrack but at least you get to see a little action.