Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

After removing our stock battery—not such a hard job since it wasn’t tied down—here’s what we had: a slightly rusty battery tray and old wiring.

Some POR-15 cured our rusty battery tray.

Isn’t it cute? The Braille battery fits in the stock location. We also installed brand-new Honda battery cables.

Our CRX has been sitting a little dormant in a very un-Honda-like manner. Turns out that the car wouldn’t start one day. While checking all of the connections, we remembered something the seller told us: One of the battery cables may have a bad terminal.

Turns out he was right.

The easy thing to do was just replace the clamps, which we did as a temporary fix. However, to install the clamps we had to shorten the cables just a touch. As a result, the wire that goes between the positive terminal and the fuse box barely reached. Since the car came without a battery tie-down, any quick motion would pull that wire loose, leaving the car without power.

The stock setup puts the battery right behind the passenger headlight, meaning it’s high in the chassis and way far forward. We’d call that highly less than ideal for a car with a front weight bias.

Traditionally, people would put the battery in the back of the car to solve that weight-distribution problem, but that raises a few more issues. For one, there’s all of that cable, which puts a strain on the electrical system and adds more pounds to the car. A trunk-mounted battery also takes up some interior space.

The new trend is to run a small, lightweight battery in the stock location. One of the lightest options is the Braille carbon-fiber race battery. According to our local postal scale, it weighs a svelte 7.5 pounds. It also only measures 5.5x3.4x4.2 inches. Its lightweight aluminum mount adds another 11.5 ounces to that total and is simply screwed to the stock battery tray. (Options for attachment include self-drilling screws or hex head bolts and nuts; we went with the latter and added some thread-locking compound.)

The whole installation went as planned, and the car started on the first try.

Hi from Germany. I’m over here as the guest of BMW, checking out the really cool 135i. Imagine a 335i in a smaller, lighter package and you get the idea. It’s a little pit bull of a car, and is going to make a lot of track day addicts very happy. Not only the 305hp twin sequential turbo six-cylinder, but the trick Brembo six-piston front calipers. This thing was born to do track days. Look for a full report in the print version soon.

We also got the chance to check out the new BMW Welt, which is essentially a huge BMW theme park in Munich. The Welt is a shrine to all things BMW, and sits adjacent to the Munich factory, and the BMW Museum, which is currently undergoing renovation for a 2008 reopening. In the meantime, the Welt is where prospective BMW owners and fans can go to check out a bunch of cool interactive displays and the entire BMW lineup. New owners can also take delivery at the Welt in a specialized delivery area that turn the delivery of each new car into a production. By the way, taking Euripean delivery of your new BMW is free for American customers. You have to get yourself here, but the day-long experience, and the shipping of your car to the states when you’re done blasting around the Autobahn, adds nothing to the bottom line. Pretty cool.

Finally, we took the BMW factory tour, which is entirely too cool for words. Over 600 robots and 9000 flesh-bots roll a new BMW a minute off the assembly line. The robots are among the coolest I’ve ever seen in any factory,and could only be cooler if they were fighting each other, or perhaps fighting giant mutants. Apart from that, they rule. One fears the day they become sentient and turn on their human masters and spot weld them to the quarter panel of a 3-Series wagon. Here’s some video of the ‘bots doing their thing. Seriously, it’s worth the trip just to watch these things.

And as if that weren’t cool enough, Germany has full nudity on regular tv.

Tomorrow I’m heading west to the Nurburgring. I think there’s a ü in there somewhere, but I’m not sure where. I hope to take a few laps in my borrowed 325i before I have to come back to nudity-only-on-cable America. Full report on that coming up in print on that, too. More to come as get good internet. Later.

jg

We’re just about ready for the roll cage installation. We removed the passenger seat, seat belts and ground off the paint where our pads are going to be welded in. We’ll be leaving for Kirk Racing when we get back from the SEMA show.

Yup, GRM is heading to the Middle East, and not just to scavenge big Mercedes and Bentley V8s from abandoned oil sheik cars for future project cars. While that does sound like fun, we’ve got something else in mind.

With a little help from Operation Troop Support, we’ve got a big stack of Grassroots Motorsports magazines on our way to our troops out in the desert, and the wounded recuperating in hospitals.

Thanks to the ongoing efforts of Operation Troop Support, to date more than 1,000 boxes weighing over four tons have been sent to troops in five major military hospitals and more than ten different units in the desert.

We hope they appreciate the magazines as much as we appreciate what they do.

A friend of mine has been complaining lately that her office is getting a little too intense for human consumption, and she needs someone “normal” to talk to. (The fact that she’s chosen me to be this person should be a ready indicator that her work situation is really weird.)

Apparently this friend works with a guy who has become so incredibly filthy that the entire office refers to him as “dirt man.” He also keeps a very, um, untidy office that is littered with filthy clothes and food leavings—so much so that his coworkers have taken to maintaining a bug-spray perimeter around it in an attempt to corral the multi-legged beasties that are starting to exit it in search of greener pastures. And, as if all this weren’t enough, this poor soul has also started, in the past couple of days, to behave even more erratically, with uncontrolled outbursts mingled with murmured threats of violence. The police are coming to take him away today, she says. I hope they take him someplace where he gets the help he needs, but most of all I’m relieved for my friend.

Although this is an extreme example, I have always found that sharing a workplace is a unique relationship. Although it’s a tired, not entirely accurate cliché, we are like family here. Matter of fact, I know more about my coworkers’ daily habits and enthusiasms than I know of my own siblings’. I know who’s a morning person and who just can’t function late at night, I can pretty confidently order for most of them at any of the restaurants we regularly visit for lunch, and I know who’s going to come down with the first cold or allergy symptoms when the weather changes. I even know who drives each person most crazy in their own families. This makes the inevitable dust-ups more excruciating, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. As I type this, I’m being watched over by one of the Turkish good-luck evil eyes that Nancy brought back for all of us from her Mediterranean cruise, and most of the horizontal surfaces in my office are covered in little cars and tchotchkes that my coworkers have picked up from all over the globe and brought back as gifts. It’s a nice feeling, even if it is hard for the cleaning people to dust around it all.

Speaking of cleaning people, they come tonight, and I guess I’d better move some crap out of the way so they can do their job. Otherwise, there may come a day when I hear spraying sounds outside my office, and realize that my mates have decided to take action.

Our impromptu brass T-fitting allowed us to get a fuel pressure reading.

The fuel pressure gauge indicates an insanely high amount of fuel pressure at idle.

We replaced the fuel pressure reuglator, but it did not do anything to fix the problem.

We ran hot laps at Ocala in an effort to get the brakes to seize up; it took a while, but finally the butt end of the car was dragging as it has been in competition.

The rear calipers are far from pretty, but they’re not mechanically hindered, so the problem was elsewhere.

Redline BMW’s Rennie Bryant was very helpful in tracking down our BMW’s demons.

With a number of weird symptoms popping up regularly, it was time to spend a day playing doctor with our Spec E30. The rear brakes are seizing up symmetrically, the car runs rich nearly all the time, and we’re still down on power. Plus the fuel pump started making weird noises at the end of the NASA Championship race and power delivery went all wonky late in that same race.

We loaded the Spec E30 on the trailer and headed off to the Ocala Gran Prix track where we do much of our car testing. While we could have done most of the diagnostics in the garage, our rear brake issues only seem to materialize when the brake system is hot, so the track was necessary. Rennie Bryant of Redline BMW Performance came along with his years of BMW experience to help out.

Before we hit the track we wanted to try to figure out why the car is running so rich. We suspected the fuel pressure regulator, so we made a T-fitting out of some brass hardware in order to hook up a fuel pressure gauge and see what kind of pressure the fuel system was getting.

After we fired the car, the needle immediately jumped up to 90 psi. That’s more than double what it should have been reading at idle. Okay, so obviously we’ve got way too much fuel pressure. We swapped out the fuel pressure regulator, but that did nothing to fix the problem.

Rennie remembered a former customer who had a clogged return line in their E30, and he suspected that might be the case here. We unhooked the fuel return line and ran it into a large glass bottle so we could get a reading without the backed-up fuel return line sending the pressure to the clouds. We saw about 40 psi on the gauge with an unhindered fuel return route. After a few seconds, we also had the start of a nice Molotov Cocktail, so we killed the engine. The fuel return line carries a LOT of fuel in a short period of time, so make sure you’ve got a big enough container whenever you unplug it for testing purposes.

After unscrewing the gas cap, we used an air compressor to force air through the return line to see if we could blow the clog out. We were rewarded with air and some gas bubbling out of the tank, but the pressure still stuck at 90 psi after we hooked everything back up. The problem seemed to be somewhere in the lines of the tank itself, so we’ll have to remove and either clean or replace the entire fuel tank–Oh, joy. At least we’ve got a likely culprit, and a clogged return line would explain why the fuel pump is straining and the car is running rich as a pig. Fixing it might even free up some of our missing horsepower.

With the car put back together and running, we tried to get our brakes to seize up as they have been doing so Rennie could experience it and help figure out the problem. Naturally, the car drove just fine, with no indication of lockup; why would it want to provide tangible evidence of its malfunction with a certified mechanic around to help fix it? That would be too easy.

We tore into the rear calipers anyway to see if the culprit was mechanical. Although there was lots of nasty goo behind the caliper piston, they did seem to be moving as the factory intended. We bled the system and headed back out. A number of abusive ABS-engaging laps later we came back in, still lacking evidence of the problem. We chatted with Rennie about Murphy’s Law, sitting with the car at idle, and when we’d given up hope and lifted the clutch to take the car back to the trailer, the tail end sunk down as if the parking brake were on. Hooray! We ran for the tools and went right for the ABS unit, which Rennie suspected was to blame.

Sure enough, as soon as the hard line going from the ABS unit to the rear brake was disconnected, the pressure was relieved and the BMW rolled freely.

Hopefully, replacing the ABS unit and the gas tank will leave us with a much happier BMW.

Woof, woof

I know, I know, it’s not quite October 31, but we did a costume test fitting the other night. Guess they fit.

We also already bought candy. I went for the old-school assortment: Swedish Fish, Mike and Ikes, Bit-O-Honey and, for the kids who don’t behave, Halloween-sized granola bars.

I’m a pretty big jazz fan, especially the sounds of the ’50s and ’60s. My main goal tonight is to veg on the couch, and we have the cable jazz station playing. A John Coltrane song came on, so I Googled his name.

Interesting factoid: He passed away where I was born, Long Island’s Huntington Hospital. A little more Googling took me here: Coltrane home

Neat to see that his old homestead is being preserved as a local landmark. Next time we’re up that way, I’ll have to see if I can stop by.

Per finished up the fabrication of the skidplate this weekend, so it’s all done and this will be the last post on that subject.

The frame has tabs welded on to mount the aluminum, it was painted and now Per is fitting it into position.

The aluminum is now mounted up and ready to go.

Per took his dad down our test loop of crappy dirt/sand back roads near the Volusia/Flagler county line and we already used the skid plate. One of the whoop-de-doos was a little more ‘whoops’ than we expected. All we heard was a solid “thump” from the skidplate on touchdown. No damage and we think the piece is now ready for rallycross and rally action.

There’s not much that’s cooler than the first time you wax a new car or truck. Call it a part of why new cars sometimes make more sense than the used. I’ll pay for that extra niceness on occasion and not feel an ounce of guilt.

I waxed my new Xterra this weekend using P21S’s Concours-look Paste Wax. It’s the best wax I’ve found for cars with new or great paint to begin with.

I took this picture and a few hours later, we were blasting through a dirt trail with soft sugar sand that required the rear locker to be switched on. So far, we love our Xterra, as it’s comfortable, capable and well-built. We’ve only put about 800 miles on it so far, getting about 16mpg in mixed driving. Sure that’s not great, but it’s not that much worse than our LLBean H6 Outback that we had a few years ago, and we got that thing stuck a few times!

For our 4th anniversary, Kim and I bought ourselves a Magellan CrossoverGPS unit that can be used in the car and outside for hiking/biking/boating as it’s got topographical maps loaded as well. It should come in handy.