Mid-Ohio Shakedown

What a weekend. Decided to make the last minute trek to MidOhio with BMWCCA for a club race to shake the car down. Spent a good amount of time a few days prior making sure the car was ready. Fresh interior paint, but didnt have time to do the exterior scheme but all in all the car looked great!

Ran the first practice session and immediately noticed an alternator failure. This is what shakedowns are for right? I ended up borrowing a battery charger from a fellow racer, Julie Wolf, THANKS! That was enough to charge the battery and hopefully maintain the charge for a 30 minute race. For those who do not know the BMWCCA rules, my car was automatically lumped into C-Modified thanks to some modifications that were on the car when I bought it. Namely, the carbon fiber roof and trunk. The car was really a H-Prepared car meaning the other guys had LOADS more horsepower and WAY less weight. I managed to finish w/ a respectable midpack order.

The most fun I had came in the "fun race" when I got to chase aforementioned Julie Wolf in an I-Prepared E36 M3. Unfortunately just as I was about to be able to do battle, my battery konked out. The lights started flickering and my dash reported 11.7Volts.

For the Enduro, I had Mike Skeen co-drive. He was about 1.5 seconds faster than I was and it was his first time in the car. Mike coaches a lot of people and I highly recommend his services (mikeskeen.com). We were on pace to have a 4th overall finish when more shakedown blues occured. The fuel pump and/or fuel pump relay died. This ended my race and I parked it for what seemed to be an eternity on the side of the track.

Goal for the weekend was to shake it down and look for minor issues before the car's real debut at NASA Hyperfest @ Summit Point. Fixing these problems and hoping for a troublefree NASA weekend!

Video from Mike Skeen driving

It's white!

Some updates...

Interior Paint!

Dropped off car about a week ago w/ Givens Collision. Looking forward to getting it back! You can follow progress of the job using their nifty Check Vehicle program. I am car #12223.

Car returns!

I got an email from James Clay @ Bimmerworld earlier in the week teasing me and telling me the car is near completion. He didnt say much more and I suspect it was an attempt to keep the suspense high for me. Super Dave Taylor arrived Sat night and delivered the racecar. Fantastic!

It was dark so I could not see much but I could not goto sleep. I wanted it to be daytime so I could pull it out of the dark trailer and have some sunlight! Sunday comes and it is a perfect and sunny 80 degree day. Below are some pictures of Bimmerworld's completed project. The welds are nice, and there were a few finishing touches that I did not ask for (nice pieces like the dead pedal, etc). The passenger side foot protection extends further inboard to give me added strength from a supported frame structure, there is a nice downtube from the doorbars that give me a jack point (unwelded), and there is a nice horizontal bar below the driver X for more strength and safety. They unverted the stock hood latch so now all I need to do is push it and viola! They also ditched the VAC floor mounts and custom made a seat mount tied into the cage structure. Im very impressed and highly suggested the skilled artisans at Bimmerworld who do cage work!

Next: The car goes back to Givens Collision mentioned earlier in my blog to paint the interior!

Mystic Monster cage update

Cagework progressing on my self-dubbed "Mystic Monster". Not much else to add so far, other than Bimmerworld is working hard. Looking forward to updating with more pictures soon.

Pista Pista

In my old E36 M3 racecar, I used an AIM Pista for datalogging and as a display. Nothing changes for the E46 M3 build. Im familiar with the AIM and the software is easy to use. It is very powerful. The one major change is the E46 M3 uses a CAN-BUS to communicate between all the various sensors and the DME. You can literally hookup the Pista to two wires and get a wealth of inputs!

I wanted to play around, but the E46 M3 racecar is currently at Bimmerworld. Good thing I have a twin street car! I hooked up the Pista to a used cigarette lighter adapter and said CAN BUS wires. Viola! Only weird thing is that it is reading 6V (odd because Pista requires 9-15VDC) so Im not sure if this cig. lighter plug Im using is funky or maybe the ground not being direct is messing with things. Some of the other CAN BUS inputs arent logging anything (values of 0), like brake pressure. I'll have to talk to some other E46 M3 owners who are running a Pista to see if this is even an available input.

AIM E46 M3 CAN-BUS info

A small update

Small update. While the car is getting cage work, it's time for some Epic Tuning. Randy Mueller of Epic-motorsports will do some tweaking to get me some newfound horses to compete with some of the more powerful Porsche GT3s in GTS4. Or maybe Ill find a way to yank power out and run GTS3? Hrmmmmm Clouded in a shroud of mystery.

If your E46 M3 is looking for some more power, look into the Epic Motorsports Software (offered at Bimmerworld). Dyno proven to make more power than typical off the shelf software:

http://store.bimmerworld.com/epic-motorsports-software---e46-m3-and-mz34-s54-engine-p1521.aspx