In reply to irish44j :
Yeah, my current airbox isn't terribly well guarded from water intrusion. In the case of the Jetta, it had the factory airbox, but the engine bay itself wasn't sealed up at all so there was plenty of water splashing around in there when I came to a water crossing. I'll definitely be doing something similar to yours where I seal up the skid plate to the bottom of the frame rails in the hopes of keeping some dirt/water out.
In reply to engiekev :
I ran them both in 2018, then spent 2019 building up the BMW. That Cherokee is awesome! I've had a few Cherokees now and have always thought they'd be a great 2wd rally application.
January was a pretty busy month, so progress on the car was limited, but prior to our season opener rallycross yesterday I did manage to fabricate a new skid plate support.
The rear of the skid plate is already attached to the front subframe, but the front needed something a bit more secure. It used to be attached at the core support just in front of the radiator, but now I have this:
A little tough to see in the picture, but I have some 2"x 1" (11ga) square tubing running the width of the skid plate just in front of the oil pan, then a couple pieces of 1.75" x 0.095" round tubing going up to 3/16" plates at the frame rails. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but it seems plenty strong is it is now.
Now for some rallycross action!
February 8th was our Detroit region season opener. Dealt with a good amount of snowfall on my 2 hour tow up there, so my blood pressure got a nice bump early in the morning. When we arrived, the surface was a couple inches of snow on top of frozen grass, so I went out on snow tires, but that snow and grass was thrown from the course pretty quick and I was left facing mud on top of frozen mud. As I finish my first timed run, I get red flagged because the car in front of me has stopped just past the finish line. A friend of mine brought his stage-rally e30 and his coolant hose popped off, so I had him jump in my car for the rest of the morning. I was pleased to see that the car had no issues at all being hot-lapped by multiple drivers. I was struggling to keep a tight line in the morning and picked up 5 cone penalties in 2 runs 
. Checked the scores at lunch and I was 7th in class (largely due to 10 seconds in cone penalties), so I had to buckle down and focus in the afternoon. Managed to keep it fairly clean, only hit one cone in the afternoon, and my raw times were real close to the guy that was leading MR, so I felt pretty good. After all that, I managed to get up to 4th, but have to kick myself because I was less than 4 seconds (2 cones) out of 2nd place in class. Oh well, it was still an absolute blast and the car performed as well as I could have asked!
Now for some action shots!
Forgot to mention that I cleaned up the front end a bit. I was getting tired of the bumpers being black when the rest of the car was white/blue, so I painted the front end to blend with the rest of the car a bit better. Still need to do the rear.
In recent years, the Detroit region has stopped scheduling rallycross events during March/April due to everything being a bit too "melty" and we are all tired of dealing with super muddy events. On the bright side, this provides me with a nice opportunity to get a cage built!
So plans for the next couple of months are:
-Install the 2nd Halo seat and redo the seat mounts for both sides.
-Drag the car to Pennsylvania for cage work
-Clean up the interior wiring a bit more and wire up my auxiliary lights
-Paint the rear bumper area white and generally update the "livery" a bit.
I need to put stock suspension on my daily driver NB so I can finally just go do a rallycross. It's not like I'm going to break anything I couldn't fix fairly easily. Looks like SOOOO much fun.
(Currently it's on TEIN coilovers form the PO, and they are way too low.)
Where in PA are you taking it for a cage?
In reply to AWSX1686 :
Do it! I rallycrossed a Miata on stock NB suspension for a while and it was awesome!
I'll be taking it to Scranton, PA. There's a guy by the name of Ozgur who has a stage-rally-prepped e30 and builds cages. I could be wrong, but I believe he built Josh's (irish44j) cage for his e30 as well.
artur1808 said:
In reply to AWSX1686 :
Do it! I rallycrossed a Miata on stock NB suspension for a while and it was awesome!
I'll be taking it to Scranton, PA. There's a guy by the name of Ozgur who has a stage-rally-prepped e30 and builds cages. I could be wrong, but I believe he built Josh's (irish44j) cage for his e30 as well.
Yep, he bent my cage and did some install work, though I welded a good bit of it myself (which was a clone of the cage he built for his own e30 - the shell that I gave to him). It's a good design - its a shame my welding isn't as pretty as some :) I didn't realize it was your car he was talking about doing when I spoke to him a few weeks ago. He also built Alp Seyhan's cage (that car now owned by Erik Pat), which was a bit of a "prototype." His newer design integrates several improvements I suggested.
Oz actually lives in Brooklyn NY, he just goes down to Scranton where he keeps his car stuff.
In reply to irish44j :
Yeah, the stars seemed to align for getting a cage built in the next couple of months. Ozgurs arm sounds like it's (mostly?) healed from the crash, Detroit region doesn't have any rallycross events for a bit, and its tax return season haha.
I'm not looking forward to doing that 16 hour round trip drive twice, but I picked him partly for those improvements you mention. I don't know the details of what you guys have worked to improve, but I figure if he's built multiple e30 cages, he's bound to have some first-hand experience on how to design it well by now.
Saw you out there Saturday, good driving and the car looked solid! The BMWs were out in force for sure, too bad to see Shanti's car having issues.
I was working grid so didnt have much time to mingle or check the car out, will definitely have to make a point to stop by next event.
In reply to engiekev :
Yeah, luckily it was just a coolant hose popping off. Better to have that happen at a rallycross than in the middle of a stage rally!
Absolutely, I'm always happy to chat so don't hesitate. What car were you in?
Orange Fiesta ST, I was wearing the orange jacket and tan coveralls. I guess I like orange, hah. I'm really not planning to run the fiesta much longer, long term project is a 1G DSM, sorry to threadjack!
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/build-projects-and-project-cars/dsm-rally-beater-90-talon-build-for-scca-rallycross/163441/page1/
Hopefully we get another event in before summer.
artur1808 said:
In reply to irish44j :
Yeah, the stars seemed to align for getting a cage built in the next couple of months. Ozgurs arm sounds like it's (mostly?) healed from the crash, Detroit region doesn't have any rallycross events for a bit, and its tax return season haha.
I'm not looking forward to doing that 16 hour round trip drive twice, but I picked him partly for those improvements you mention. I don't know the details of what you guys have worked to improve, but I figure if he's built multiple e30 cages, he's bound to have some first-hand experience on how to design it well by now.
There are still a few minor details I would change in retrospect, but overall I've really liked how the cage fit. Most of my regrets revolve around not getting a friend who is a prettier welder to do most of the welding instead of me haha. I have made one addition to the cage since it was built, at the suggestion of a tech inspector. Just the two short support bars from the rear strut tower crossbar, going down to the frame.
At some point I may also add some sections to the forward part of the cage in the footwells to provide more leg protection. I keep saying I'm going to do that and then keep not doing it lol.
In reply to irish44j :
Got any pictures of these additional bars? I saw Shanti (local e30 stage rally guy, not sure if he's made it to any of the east coast events?) has a bar that comes down to the floor just above where I imagine the diff mount is, which I've always thought would be nice to tie into the cage somehow.
In reply to engiekev :
Ah okay! I think we've actually met before at an event at Oakshade in Ohio. I was probably in a volvo 240 at the time. I'm not great at connecting names/faces/GRM usernames, but I believe that was you haha. I remember meeting a Kevin (Kevan?) in an orange Fiesta ST.
This is a great reminder that I need to get dates set for NEOhio...
Awesome pics of you out on course.
artur1808 said:
In reply to irish44j :
Got any pictures of these additional bars? I saw Shanti (local e30 stage rally guy, not sure if he's made it to any of the east coast events?) has a bar that comes down to the floor just above where I imagine the diff mount is, which I've always thought would be nice to tie into the cage somehow.
In reply to engiekev :
Ah okay! I think we've actually met before at an event at Oakshade in Ohio. I was probably in a volvo 240 at the time. I'm not great at connecting names/faces/GRM usernames, but I believe that was you haha. I remember meeting a Kevin (Kevan?) in an orange Fiesta ST.
Yes that was me, I think that was the last event I ran. Trying to get out to more this year.
Enjoying your build thread! Just finished reading it over the last few days as I just bought an e30. I gotta know what spoiler that is though. It just shows up about halfway through your thread. It looks like an m3 one but looks like you can still open the trunk?
In reply to Nonamedude :
Glad you are enjoying the thread! The spoiler is straight from ebay! haha. The listing no longer exists, but I dug up an email confirmation from when I bought it:
And yes, I can still open the trunk just fine. However, the added weight of the spoiler makes it so the trunk doesn't swing up as easily when I unlatch it.
In reply to artur1808 :
Awesome! The only one I could find was a really nice fiberglass one for over $400. Which is cool but not cool enough. Not for my purposes.
In reply to Nonamedude :
Yeah, I've never been one to spend big $$$ on aesthetic things like that. But I never really liked the "naked" trunk and for $65 its a pretty big improvement (in my eyes).
No e30 updates are the moment, but today I flew down to Atlanta to buy a new tow rig/project. In true GRM fashion, first thing I did was stop for fuel and take a picture.
Now to sit on i75 for the next 12 hours...
Took a break from Van stuff and finished up seat mounts:
Unfortunately, coronavirus is going to delay me getting a cage in the car, but I won't complain about having some extra time to get things done. Now that the seats are in position, I can get to work on adding the 1.5:1 quickener to the steering column.
I suspect the quickener is going to be the motivation I need to add power steering back to the car.
In reply to artur1808 :
The extra effort is really not noticable once at speed. Maybe it's because it seems like most of the steering is actually just guiding what the car is trying to do, if that makes sense.
The rest of the time it's not that bad because you can steer with your shoulders since you don't have to take your hands off the wheel so much. Sounds backwards but OTOH there are guys rallycrossing front drivers wiith quickeners on manual steering, that has got to be like a worst case scenario.
In reply to Knurled. :
Good to know! I haven't had much issue with the lack of power steering to date, the only exception being if I got into a situation at a rallycross where I had to change directions quickly and the car didn't seem to want to "self-steer" itself back to center. I'll certainly give it a shot with the quickener, what you're saying makes sense.
Just curious why you are going with the steering quickener over a rack swap? I am interested to see how you do it as the only other option for my E28 is a very expensive M5 steering box to get a slightly quicker ratio.
Adam
