1985 BMW 318 Stage Rally Build - 1988 Porsche 924S Street Build - Sequoia Build

Well I suppose it's time to do some updating since I'm a ways behind!

About 4 weeks ago a bunch of us in DC region headed up to the inaugeral Appalachian Region rallycross, put on by our friend Corey McKenzie and his crew in Cumberland, MD - not far from where DC used to run in Frostburg. The venue in Cumberland is a big dirt-circle track that does all kinds of racing. We went up early to watch Corey run in some beater circle-track series, but it was rained out, so we went drinking instead with a large DC rallycross crew at a very quiet bar in some little town near cumberland

The next day, saw the setup. The course used about 1/2 or more of the circle track with some gates, but basically a giant drag strip, plus a grassy/gravelly tight infield section. Long story short, it was a lot of fun, but my car was totally crushed at this event, where basically I was down 2-3 seconds per run just from the first section before the curvy stuff, with everyone else there having higher-power cars for the most part. I tried to make up time in the infield, resulting in two spins. All in all, fun but frustrating day. I finished 10th in class. That's far and away the lowest I've ever finished a rallycross in the last 7 years....ugh.

That also got my mind working on engine swap ideas for the next year or so, assuming all other projects are going well. More on that at a later date when my ideas are finalized, but suffice to say there is an even chance or better that it won't be a BMW engine that I'll be swapping ;)

So here are some pics from that event, and then I'll do a Black River Stages recap, as well as last weekend's DC rallycross...

still a scenic drive

e30s at the hotel

at dabar 

so here's the venue

it's a good thing we didn't need any "exahust" work...

ok, enough about that. I hate talking about losing ;)

(continued)

So let's move on to pre-Black River Stages stuff...

With the car mostly prepped for Black River Stages (consisting of changing the oil, basically...), first thing I spend a full weekend with GRM and rallycross friends digging through my uncle's farm for good (and cheap) "diamonds in the rough", helping the family raise some money and clear out 50 years of "stuff"

Several guys (and girls) from GRM came out and nobody went home empty-handed. I recall that there was a Lincoln MIG welder found under a pile of stuff, lots of power tools, etc....

Shawn and Katie got quite a haul..

I got some great work job boxes that were buried in brambles, for my own...

Also found this, which is pretty awesome. I have plans for this, you will hear later....

So next project. For those who race/rally know, regulation decal sets get pricey. Between ARA, Rally America, and NASA Rally, each rally basically requires you to buy $30-40 worth of door panels, numbers, and windshield banners. That adds up quick if you're running multiple series. Since we run ARA and NASA Rally, and I have this other parts car sitting in the back yard......with two free front doors......

Let's have a beer and gut 'em

hmm, that color is pretty close to my rattle-can stuff already on the car

So, let's cut some vinyl stripes

Then make some duplicate door cards, mount up the "other door stuff" from the regular doors, and put them on. For power window wiring (yes, for rally it's good to keep power windows...), I made quick-connects so I can swap the doors in about 5 minutes total. So these will be my NASA doors

The other project is race/towing logistics. As you may recall, we carry a toolchest on the trailer and recently Jim and I took two Harbor Freight toolchests and frankenstein'd them into one taller one. I made some adjustments on the trailer front section to better accommodate the chest, and add front shelves for gas cans, etc.

While working on that stuff, had a few garage visitors..

and while this was going on, our new deck was built to replace the porch the tree fell on. Is it odd that I'm mostly excited that I can stash stuff UNDER the deck now? lol

Other project on the tow rig was mounting up a hitch basket to carry the toolchest and gas cans when going to service park (since you can't take your trailer). Previously we just jammed the chest and gas into the back of the truck, but I no likey 20 gallons of gas inside my vehicle, and then at STPR the toolchest fell over and nearly smashed the back window, so....better solution

So here is the basket on the trailer. I welded in a vertical hitch receiver to carry it this way when goign to events. Back of the trailer since it's pretty heavy and didn't want to add more tongue weight. Worked great on 1000 miles of towing to New York for BRS...

And here it is on the truck

All in all, it worked out awesome (also has room for 4 5-gallon race gas cans). With two big straps over it, it didn't budge and they did a good bit of driving with the 200+lb chest on there full of tools.

Incidentally, also came in very handy as a platform for grilling out in the service park :)

(continued)

Small aside....my daughter apparently stole my April GRM magazine (was wondering where it was!) and I found it. Go figure, Jim's RAGE CAGE e30 is in it (the car Jim, Stephen, Mike, and myself drive in Chumpcar). So that was pretty cool. Now both e30s I drive have been in the magazine :)

(continued)

ok, I'll update on Black River Stages later tonight or tomorrow.

In the meantime, a couple pics to tide you over, taken by Connor Dowling via the NRS website.

The AHR rallycross was a ton of fun.  You really should talk more about to, you know, encourage others to go. Gotta keep supporting Corey and Adam 

Black River Stages (make sure you hit my three posts above before you read this one too!)

Our first full stage rally was last year at Black River Stages, where (IIRC) we finished 24th but had a great time. BRS has 12 stages (actually 9, with two reversed and one done twice), which are smooth, fun, with some jumps. I personally like it because unlike STPR, where dangers is CLOSE everywhere (trees, boulers, valleys, rivers), BRS has a little bit of "space" along the stages leaving some margin for error and a bit more aggressive driving.

So we loaded up and rolled up. With most of our usual crew missing, we had some newcomers along with our crew chief Josh Sennett (bluej on GRM) and Amanda Pemberton, who has come to our previous couple. Neil Schafer and Matt Tripp from DC rallycross came up with us as well, and Ozgur Simsek asn't running, so between spectating he stopped by to help out at service and cook some good Turkish food for us :) Our crew did triple-duty this time, also helping out with Chris and Sara Nonack's XR4Ti and Adam Moore's double-zero course car. But our goal is always to keep crew work to a minimum, of course!

On the highway, 500 miles each way. Pee stop where the state trooper int he background pulled over to make sure we were ok, and to check out the car :)

Jim and I went up a day early to do tech and relax. Passed tech easily, no issues at all other than the on and off rain making it hard to apply our decals.

And yeah, that's a turbo Starion behind us with some Canucks driving it. Later in the rally we loaned them our backup Spal fan when theirs failed. Because rally family.

Then we went in search of beverages late at night, and found ourself in a nearby city, at apparently the trendy "meet market" where there was plenty of people younger than us, and not dressed in ratty hoodies and jeans like we were. We didn't stay long, lol. Jim and Neil weren't feeling it, though I kind of enjoyed the entertainment of 6 people using selfie-sticks at once...

Next day though not required, we went to the 3-hour novice seminar to refresh ourselves on rally.....we've done a few but still have things to learn. 

Then off to the evening Parc Expose at the Croghan Island mill....

More pics of all the other cars on our facebook page (Pitchblack Motorsports) if you feel like checking them out!

Next morning, another Parc Expose before rally start. This year there were 24 cars and 21 bikes...again, pics of that on our FB page. Uploading on Imgur is more of a hassle than Photobucket,....

And we were off...13th on the road (among cars). First few stages were fun but uneventful, and we pulled into the Tomlinson turnaround to wait for the bikes to run the other way and hang out for an hour, watching other peopel fix stuff they broke (luckily for 2 other cars, we carry a lot of spare parts...)

We were running pretty well, just about 10 seconds per stage behind the Beliveau Boys in their Golf, who are usually my "target" since their car is roughly similar to ours in power and setup (though FWD), and they are far more experienced than we are. If we stay close to them, we're pretty happy. 

Into first service with no issues. Crew checked some stuff, and we hung out.

Then more stages, more fun, some jumps (see post above this). We went a bit harder than last year and had some hard landings, but came away unscathed. Some others were not so lucky...

at the turnaround with DeMasi's monster Ranger

Back into service #2, trucking with the Nonacks on transit

Sergei's crew apparetly dumped a jug of coolant into hsi gas tank (that's why you put it in a BLUE jug!) so in addition to trying to fix the rear suspension, they had to drain the gas tank!

Ozgur pretended to do some work for the camera

And back to the stages, one more service to put the lights on, and then some night stages. At this point we've still had zero car issues (other than a terrible idle, which I'll discover the reason for a week later). Driving pretty good, BRS has great grip and fun roads. Every stop between stages and transits we have time to spend chatting , milling around, or trying to help Nonacks diagnose car issues lol.

night lighting. Jim and his electronics

The final two stages are actually the same stage twice. A 9+ mile stage (longest in the rally) in the pitch black (see what I did there?) I'm more tentative at night than some of the more experienced drivers who trust the notes more, so on this stage the Beliveaus kicked our butts twice and put a couple minutes on us - there's something to be said for experience!

On the last stage, it was a "power stage" where the top cars in each class were reversed, or something like that. Anyhow we had been ahead of Nonacks all day so now they were ahead of us. Good incentive to drive faster to try to catch them, with them running on reduced boost after two turbo oil-feed fires among other issues. Even more incentive, now Gary DeMasi and his 375hp Ranger were behind us. Gary is fast and throws caution to the wind. I definitely did NOT want him to catch up to us, he might just push us off the road trying to pass us (not really, Gary is a great guy!)

Oh, did I mention that halfway through the 11th stage I started hearing a nasty grinding under the car, initially thought to be a center support driveshaft bearing or diff going bad.....turned out we lost the three rear bolts to our main skidplate, which was still attached by the front bolts but dragging along the ground. Tried to jam a spare bolt up there with my impact between the night stages (in the dark, using a cellphone as a light) with minor success, but we heard it during the entire 12th stage dragging as well......

So back to Stage 12. Nonack took off. Then a minute later we left. About 2-3 miles in we started seeing his blue oil smoke hanging in the air and I tried to push harder to catch them. Apparently they were putting out a lot of smoke, because looking at the times we actually weren't catching them at all, lol.....

Meanwhile, about halfway through, at the Tinney Corners spectator turn (great 90-degree left in soft stuff, was a really fun high-speed turn), we took off down the straight and as we got to the end, I saw DeMasi's lights int he rearview coming around about 1/4 mile behind us. Damn. So with the second half of the stage tighter with no big straights, I put the light 318 into action and pressed harder (rallycross-style?). We never saw Gary's lights again for the rest of the stage :)

Gary later said he saw our taillights at the same time and said he pushed hard to catch us, doing this stage 25 seconds faster than the first time through. And he also said "I saw your taillights on that straight and put the pedal down to catch you. But somehow, I never saw your lights again" haha....So, minor victory. I'll take it. We finished the stage and cruised to the finish and loaded up. Went to the trophy ceremony to see Hooper and Claudia (who previosuly ran a fast e30) take 2nd overall in their newly built Lexus IS350 (yeah, you read that right). Pretty impressive feat in a car with brand-new everything and minimal testing time...it's gonna be scary fast very soon

So, here' the final scoring. We finished 11th overall (with two cars ahead of us crashing out), so I guess our 13th place start was pretty much perfect. In my opinion, we beat everyone we should have beaten, and didn't really beat anyone we shouldn't have (except the cars that crashed). So that's rally. There is a pecking order if everyone is running clean without crash/breakdown. BRS is a pretyt forgiving course and not hard on suspension other than the jumps, so it was great to see 19 or 20 of the 24 cars that started, finish. We finished behind two turbo AWD cars, so that was good as well.

The next morning, we were parked next to this trailer in the hotel parking lot. Kind of funny..

Damage report from the rally was minor:

1. my steering rack is even leakier now...it will be rebuilt over the winter

2. skidplate I had to built a new rear mount with new weldnuts, but it's good as new now

3. rear exhaust got pummelled by one particular rocky sectino (dry stream crossing) with volleyball-sized rocks. But just the exhaust - everything else banged it way through without issue. Will have to deal with this sooner than later...

Good times at BRS. We will definitely be back next year!

bluej said:

The AHR rallycross was a ton of fun.  You really should talk more about to, you know, encourage others to go. Gotta keep supporting Corey and Adam 

lol, IDK what else to say that I didn't. I said it was fun. But I'm not exactly gonna go into extreme detail about my sucking at driving and my uncompetitive car there haha.....not to mention I am doing a LOT of writing tonight......and still have to do the DC event from last week!

You're the one with the M52, which is perfect for that venue. Don't you have a build thread on here to give details about the AHR event? ;)

Ok, gonna jam through this and finish up with last weekend's DC rallycross event #5. Coming into this event, the Mod RWD class is ridiculously competitive, with a half-dozen drivers still with a good shot at the championship, and several more maybe out of championship running but still able to win any given event. Coming in I was 4th in the overall season points (behind Eric Eisele and Neil Cox of Dirty Industries in their 325i and Stephen Nichols in his 325i). Josh Sennet, Jeff Geier, Chris Helgesen, and a few others are always a threat as well. Repeating my 2-time class championship this year is looking unlikely.

So last weekend almost 60 total cars came out to the Rally Farm in Catlett, with 15 cars signed up for the MR class (the one Miata would drop out, leaving it an all-BMW class). Conditions were good, weather was great, and the course was, as usual, really well set-up by Andy Thomas and Mike Julian. There was a Saturday test and tune, but I'd had my fill of testing over the previous month so skipped it to do stuff around the house and try to fix my exhaust on the e30 so i could run. As it turned out, I was one of the few single-driver cars, with 6 e30s all having dual drivers.

From the start, everyone was in attack mode. First runs of the day were Mod RWD class, so we got the "water truck" and wet grass. Neil and Eric (codriving) jumped out front, with Sennett right with them in raw time, but a few cones. I hung around in 5th or 6th through the morning. A couple sections were slow-to-fast areas and my little M42 wasn't really putting out the thrust needed to make up the time at that point (curious if my crimped exhaust is constraining it at all, now that I think of it....)

In the afternoon, some people made tactical tire changes (me to full gravels, taking the mud/grass tires off the back). That would hurt initially, as the water truck did a double-pass and the first afternoon run was a slop-fest, and those of us on gravels lost precious seconds sliding around compared to the guys who stayed on the Maxsports. It dried out quickly though and evryone went full-bore shooting for the top. In the end, I managed to pull off 3rd place (behind Eric and Neil), with Sennett and a couple others right behind me. Pretty amazingly, of the top three finishers (Neil, Eric, and me) 27 total runs pressing fast times, and we had ZERO cones between us. That's the only reason I stayed in it, since a couple guys behind me (Josh S. one of them) probably ahd better raw times than I did, but cones held them down.

So, no real change in the standings. I'm still sitting in 3rd or 4th with two events to go. Next two will be do or die, so I'll press extra hard and not worry about cones as much (so I say now....)

Don't have any photos of that event at the moment (may upload tomorrow), but just look at any other of our DC events....lots of E30s :)

Coming up:

1. we talk about the next rally (most likely Wellsboro Winter Rally in February, which will hopefully actually have SNOW this year, dammit!)

2. we think about engine swap possibilities. If not M52 (or Jim's spare M20B25), both of which are not really what I'm looking for.......the letters VQ are in my head, being a former Nissan guy. We'll see. This is a long-term plan sinc I want to finish the Porsche project before I spend much money upgrading the rally car. The e30 is still fairly competitive in both stage and rallycross, so I'm fine with it as-is for the moment until I build up a good plan of action over the next 6+ months.

3. 3 weekends in the last 4 racing and/or towing. This weekend I'm not touching the e30 or tow rig or trailer, and takin a break :)

Biggest quote box ever in the history of the world removed so as not to crash the GRM servers ;-)

Also still learning the new forum software...

It sounds like it was a great time!  Thank you for the writeup!

I'm a box...

I'm a box too...

^^ biggest quote box ever lol...

No. Doubt. (!)

Thought I hit reply, lol...

Awesome! Those stages did look fun (watch Nonacks videos!)

Whats with the tape on the front strut towers?

Great updates!  Dirt track Rallyx looks fun. Gary's Ranger definitely looks and sounds pretty mean. I'm looking forward to finally getting my 5.0 Ranger back into the dirt. Keep up the good work. 

java230 said:

Awesome! Those stages did look fun (watch Nonacks videos!)

Whats with the tape on the front strut towers?

Since I have offset M3 top hats (which don't come new with the "caps" on them) and couldn't find any appropriate caps to keep dust and crap out of the strut top bearing (not that I've looked all that hard), I just tape over them to keep crap out of there. It's one of those things you do as a stopgap, and then 3 years later you're still doing it since you always forget to look for the actual piece that goes there ;)

Fixing the Nonack's car is something everyone gets to do. ​​​​​

Great write-up as usual. Reading your stuff is still one of my great motivators to rally someday. 

also, we have 2-aspect video of the whole thing, with mic on the exhaust and direct-wired to our in-car comms system. Jim likes to sync them up and format them to look (and sound) good, and he's a busy man, so we'll have video posted once he has time to do all that stuff. Otherwise you'd have to put up with poorly-formatted facebook video uploads if I did them, lol...

irish44j said:

bluej said:

The AHR rallycross was a ton of fun.  You really should talk more about to, you know, encourage others to go. Gotta keep supporting Corey and Adam 

You're the one with the M52, which is perfect for that venue. Don't you have a build thread on here to give details about the AHR event? ;)

Yeah, I shouldn't throw stones. I've been snapping pics of work/events for the most part since I first got the car, so I do have a log of sorts. At this point I'm kind of waiting on something before I start one.

So mad at myself for all those cones on Sunday. Thinking back, I was definitely overdriving the car (yeah, duh). Having Greg there to co-drive didn't give me as much time to self analyze between runs.

mazdeuce said:

Fixing the Nonack's car is something everyone gets to do. ​​​​​

We try to be inclusive!

Something something VQ something

A VQ swap would make me suddenly very interested in this car. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

Something something VQ something

A VQ swap would make me suddenly very interested in this car. 

Indeed. I didn't see that one coming.

well, we'll see how the research sends me. I'd rather spend money on entry fees than a swap that is going to end up costing relatively big bucks. So if I can do it within a reasonable budget, it may happen. In any case, it won't happen until the Porsche is more or less done....which may be next summer or so.

I had a similar idea with the hitch attachment, I like how you have it on the side right then then with the trailer not attached you have a good spot to work with the tools. this is something I need to figure out - I usually just have a huge mess everywhere but thats kind of how it is in my garage as it currently stands...

Yeah it's mostly because we cannot take the trailer to rally service parks (unless we want to pay for extra service spots, which we don't!). It's just easier than trying to jam everything in the truck, which is already full of the spare parts bins, air tank, coolers, spare tires, and other gear....

only downside is that with the toolchest on the hitch rack, we can't open the rear tailgate on the sequoia. not a big problem though since we take the rear seats out anyhow so you can access everythign from a side door, or use the roll-down tailgate window. Would be more of a hassle in a tow rig that still has rear seats in it, or if the tailgate glass doesn't open (like on most newer SUVs).

irish44j said:

Yeah it's mostly because we cannot take the trailer to rally service parks (unless we want to pay for extra service spots, which we don't!). It's just easier than trying to jam everything in the truck, which is already full of the spare parts bins, air tank, coolers, spare tires, and other gear....

only downside is that with the toolchest on the hitch rack, we can't open the rear tailgate on the sequoia. not a big problem though since we take the rear seats out anyhow so you can access everythign from a side door, or use the roll-down tailgate window. Would be more of a hassle in a tow rig that still has rear seats in it, or if the tailgate glass doesn't open (like on most newer SUVs).

Here is how you fix that. go get yourself 2 sticks of some 1/2" stock, get 4 harbor freight tires with inner race bearings, spot weld the bearing outer races of the wheel to the stock  and you have wheels/axles,

oh we take it off the rack in service anyhow, and we have a HF 4-wheel garden cart that also travels on the trailer (or the rig's roof rack) if we need to actually haul the toolchest around (for instance, at a chumpcar race where the rig cannot be at the pit).