Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

Our car is missing its lower chin spoiler.

The 325is is lowered with H&R sport springs (not race…) and pretty well-done Bilsteins

The 325is came with 15x7-inc BBS RS wheels. You can see the paint is pretty well toasted.

The interior is pretty craptacular, with the original leather sport seats well past their prime.

We picked up the basis for our Spec E30 project this weekend. It’s a 1989 325is that we purchased for a mere $1500. The good news is that it came with a set of 15x7 BBS wheels, the bad news is that the original 3.73:1 differential with a limited slip has been replaced with a 4.10:1 open diff.

For more info on this great NASA road racing series, you can visit SpecE30.com

Our MINI Cooper wrapped up the 2006 points season in Central Florida region with another win in H Stock. Kim won the class handily over 4 other racers. Per spent the day cheering on the sidelines and being a nuisance as Kim ran. Per did take a couple of fun runs at the end with one hand in a cast and Kim doing the shifting–but a downed cone kept the bragging rights clearly in Kim’s corner.

CFR Results

We’ve just placed an ad for the car in our local autotrader. If anyone is interested in a very clean and very fast Cooper, we are asking $17,500, which includes an extra set of rims and race tires. You can email per@grassrootsmotorsports.com for more info.

Noelle has left the office for the Challenge. This is her last weekend with us here at GRM and we will miss her.

We had the Katzkin seat covers installed on our Saab last week. The end result looks pretty sharp and smells great. The next step is to recover the door panels with the matching material that was provided, although we are considering just swapping the panels for all black ones from an Impreza.

We also received and installed a cheapo eBay rear strut brace, which is rumored to really help the wagon out. Our regular photographer, Rupert Berrington turned us on to this trick.

After installing the new rear brakes, the pedal felt a little soft. We re-bled all four corners today, and the pedal feels better.

It was a long day for all of us today.

By definition, puppies are usually full of excitement. Well, right now ours are 100-percent exhausted. It wasn’t easy, but we managed to fully tire them out.

First, they spent most of the day outside, barking at squirrels, exploring the back yard and puppying about. After their dinner, they got to join us for our dinner—out. We have a Volvo convertible press car, so the whole family loaded up for a trip to our local burrito place. We got an outside table, and no one seemed to find the four-legged guests.

After dinner, we visited Petsmart for nail cuttings. Our dogs have some pretty serious talons, and they’re not too trilled about getting their nails cut. We let the pros do it. While there, they got to puppy about some more.

This time of year, our evenings are perfect—almost cool and quite clear. So we all went for a late-night ride. We more or less headed south from Daytona Beach and eventually made our way to downtown New Smyrna Beach. It’s Biketoberfest right now, but the traffic wasn’t too bad.

And as predicted, upon arriving home the puppies could barely make it from the car to the house. They didn’t do too much once we got home.

We keep getting spam comments from “Jonny” each with a different fake email…interestingly, the link doesn’t even work. I hate spammers, they waste my time.

We took our Saab 92x over to our test track last week to do some suspension work. With our Team Dynamics 17x7-inch wheels and Nitto Neo-Gen tires in place of the original RE92s, we managed a lap average of 41.50 seconds (versus 42.2 in near stock form). The addition of a Hotchkis Tuning 25mm rear anti-roll bar dropped our average lap time to an even 41.0 seconds, with a much higher “fun” quotient. Next we’ll be installing an Addco 25mm front bar, which is one of the few available for the normally aspirated 92x (Impreza)

My column is going to be tough to write this month; I already had to turf Nationals coverage to Andy Hollis for this year–It’ll be the first time in 7 years that I haven’t written it!

The surgery on my right hand went OK…I’m just stuck in this stupid cast for 4 weeks….

Grrrr…..