BRZ Rally Car

Just reading this and thinking to myself how nice it was to swap all my thread-in studs on the new e30 hubs this week ;)

And I also keep a spare set with studs already in it, since getting loctite red heated in a pit area isn't much fun!

Got the oil cooler!  Removed bumper:

Perrin wants you to put it down here on the plastic thing:

They give you these foot things to mount it on:

There are thread inserts in the bottom of the oil cooler for these, but there are also matching ones on the top.  I can work with that!

Grabbed some thick (7ga?) steel that used to be part of the shipping fixture for the lift and got to work:

Zap zap:

While the welds cooled I trimmed off the parts of the wheel well liner that keep trying to get friendly with the tires- before:

After:

Once the welds cooled I painted the tabs and bolted the oil cooler on, with some blue loctite for good measure since it hopefully doesn't have to move any time soon:

This puts it at a much less precarious height:

The other end of the lines go to this adapter thing, which is annoyingly crowding the airbox but otherwise seems like a decent solution:

Added an extra quart of oil and went for a drive- no leaks, seems happy:

It's almost too nice to jump through the woods

After the wheel studs and oil cooler I wanted to do something fun to it.  So:

On the left, weighing in at 20something lbs, the stock muffler.  On the right, lighter than an equally long steel tube, a Yoshimura muffler off of a crashed R1.  Zap zap:

This loses some weight, gains some ground clearance, and surprisingly doesn't make the car particularly loud:

I also removed the rear sway bar while I was under there, hopefully that will make it a little easier to put down power on gravel.

The Yoshi should be a factory option. Looks damn good under there peaking out.

I've been messing with the ABS stuff a little.  There are two ABS fuses, and a connector at the ABS module, so a few options- unplugging fuse #2 or the connector causes a code and a number of other annoying things.  Fuse #1 works well for what I want, though:

Which gets you a dashboard that looks like this:

No ABS, traction or stability control, but also no codes and the speedometer still works.  The brake bias is too far forward, but that will be solved when I replumb the lines and add a proportioning valve.  I'll have to keep the ABS computer but should be able to take it off of the valve body and just mount it somewhere.

I went for a drive and confirmed that the thing isn't in limp mode and will happily let you slide around on gravel- the car is very well balanced but it's hard to say much more since these tires are so terrible.

Plugging the fuse back in sets everything back to normal immediately, so I should be able to drive it to and from rallycross normally until I mess with the brakes and delete ABS entirely.

These little fender thingies- it really looks like they should be vents, but they aren't:

If we look in the engine bay, there's even clearance on the other side, like some unfortunate engineer got 90% of the way to ventilation going through there before the project was cut:

With the badge panel plastic removed, this is what I'm looking at:

I'm probably going to cut out a big chunk of this otherwise perfectly good fender, and then decide whether I can live with the appearance or if I need to cover it with something.

I would expect nothing less from you. You live to cut into sheet metal for cooling purposes :)

I love the exhaust! 

Your cutting the car up in just the right way

That needs to be opened up and trimmed with a little gutter guard screen in a folded aluminum edge.

So that little edge that pokes through is a pinch weld on the unibody- above it is the engine bay, below is the wheel well.  I figure it's best to only cut above it:

Cleaned it up, masked, and painted it black since no matter what goes over it that should help it disappear:

And from inside the engine bay you can see how much space has been opened up, it's a pretty straight shot:

Hopefully this is enough ventilation for now, and I can hold off on cutting holes in the hood for a while.

Overall, pretty strange feature like the designers just got to a point and were like "ah, berkeley it, just put a fake vent over that because IDK what to do..." lol

Any concern that water / rain will get in there and rust stuff out?

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Not too concerned about stuff going in there- if air seems to be going the wrong way and I need to create more of a pressure difference, I could potentially buy some cheap knockoffs of the goofy TRD fender fin things and make the vent come out of the bottom of them:

I think it'll be fine though, maybe just needs some mesh at some point if I want it to look better.

The vents seem to work- I taped a piece of nylon rope in and it blew out instead of in:

Also made an attempt at getting clean air to the intake and higher parts of the radiator.  I swear I measured these hole centers but the middle ones look low- oh well, they'll still do their job:

Looks great. I am enjoying watching you hack up a perfectly good/expensive car. All in!

Tires have been ordered and I'm signed up for the first DC RallyX in July.

Two of the four tires just showed up, hopefully the others aren't lost.  They look like the right size:

I decided to go with MRFs since they were the cheapest real rally tire (heavy sidewall, not a retread) that I could buy when shipping was factored in.  185/65R15, although this car may be low power enough to go with a 175 at some point, and I'm hoping the medium compound will last me at least a full season of rallycross.

Eventually, when it's stage rally time, I'll run whatever has a good contingency program.

I rallycrossed my FRS a bunch of times. I really enjoyed it. Very fun car to drive in the dirt. I hope to get back into one as an actual rally car in the future. The cost of them is coming down and there are a couple of them in stages already. Glad to see another one getting the dirt treatment. 
 

MrLittle said:

I rallycrossed my FRS a bunch of times. I really enjoyed it. Very fun car to drive in the dirt. I hope to get back into one as an actual rally car in the future. The cost of them is coming down and there are a couple of them in stages already. Glad to see another one getting the dirt treatment. 

I feel like Chris is about to unlock the "floodgates" of miscreants beating on old German metal to come abuse the frisbees instead.

Honestly, I'm really hoping to get the bugs worked out and the car logbooked and rallying right around the same time these hit rock bottom pricewise- then run it for years with cheap parts and easy to find shells.  That's the plan, anyway.

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

My theory for just sticking in stock rallycross was the majority of kids that have them throw cheap (or other) coil overs on there so if I beat up the stock suspension bits the forums were full of low mileage, cheap, stock parts. 

In reply to MrLittle :

Absolutely, and is still the case- facebook marketplace is full of stock suspensions for like $100.  If I just wanted to rallycross it I'd leave it alone, but I don't think that stuff will survive too many yumps 

I want that muffler for 538 wankel snowmobile, if you see another - give me a heads up! I don't follow bike parts/bike stuff. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

Two of the four tires just showed up, hopefully the others aren't lost.  They look like the right size:

 

I decided to go with MRFs since they were the cheapest real rally tire (heavy sidewall, not a retread) that I could buy when shipping was factored in.  185/65R15, although this car may be low power enough to go with a 175 at some point, and I'm hoping the medium compound will last me at least a full season of rallycross.

Eventually, when it's stage rally time, I'll run whatever has a good contingency program.

They were cheaper than the Federals? That's pretty damn good because the Feds were already cheap @ 600 shipped for a set. 

MrLittle said:

I rallycrossed my FRS a bunch of times. I really enjoyed it. Very fun car to drive in the dirt. I hope to get back into one as an actual rally car in the future. The cost of them is coming down and there are a couple of them in stages already. Glad to see another one getting the dirt treatment. 
 

There's been one running with DC for the past two seasons and it seems to do fine. Unfortunately he's stuck in our massively competitive MR class with 15 other cars so doesn't have much of a chance (not sure if it's car, or driver). I'm going to be interested to see what Chris does in his, since I *know* he's fast at rallycross when he doesn't break E36 M3 :)

We were just talking the other day that a decade from now, all of us running BMWs are basically going to move to BRZ/FRS chassis probably, since the 80s/90s BMWs will be getting pretty thin by then. So, happy you guys are doing the development work on them so we have an easy road in a decade :)