E36 sedan rallycross build

Hiya, got my hands on a 96 328i 5 speed, and am going to be dailying it, as well as building it up to be a fairly mild mod rear rallycross car. 

Shown here is the disapproving gaze of SWMBO, not much of a bimmer fan I’m afraid. 

The car has 288k (!!!!!) but pulls strong, our BMW guru owned it for 65k and services it for most of its post 100k mile life. It’s had the cooling system gone through, bilsteins on the front, new front brakes with hoses, And various other maintenance items addressed. 

Someone went around and used different lock cylinders in each door so I have an annoying amount of keys for it, but most of the issues with this car are minor annoyances like that. 

First step is to make it pass inspection so I can stop riding dirty with my Volvo plates on it. 

I went ahead and threw some NGKs in it as they had possibly never been done. 

Other issues so far are yellowed headlamps, rack boots and outer tie rod ends, oil leak, slight coolant leak, a dead aux water pump, and an AC belt. 

Digging into it further Sunday, plan on tackling the aforementioned issues, plus scraping the horrible tint off, and anything else I see while I’m digging around. 

Plans after its fully streetable and ready to go include making skid plates, shedding some weight, replacement radio, and some spare wheels with snow tires for Rx. 

After this M52 pops I will hopefully have a spare ready to go in that’s been worked over and (hopefully) set up for boost, but that’s MK2 and MK1 isn’t even legal yet. 

Will update Sunday with more!

Man, so that's three new people from RVA coming next year now... I hope you are planning to run in modified....we will have 20-plus cars in that class next year it looks like :)

In reply to irish44j :

Haha yup, there will probably be more of us as well. All teammates for the Alfa build are also building rallycross cars now, and I think all but one Will be rear mod. 

As a teaser, there is going to also be a ridiculous w123 turbo diesel coupe with a hood stack that’s receiving a big boy turbo. An e30, this e36, and I think a Volvo s40 as well. 

corytate said:

In reply to irish44j :

Haha yup, there will probably be more of us as well. All teammates for the Alfa build are also building rallycross cars now, and I think all but one Will be rear mod. 

As a teaser, there is going to also be a ridiculous w123 turbo diesel coupe with a hood stack that’s receiving a big boy turbo. An e30, this e36, and I think a Volvo s40 as well. 

Ah, I assume the e30 is the other one with the build thread here (Mike Moore's), and the Benz is the camo one? Also, have him check rules. I think exhaust has to exit behind the driver, so hood stack won't be legal. Don't quote me on it, but I'm pretty sure that's the rules. 

Man, I may just move to Stock FWD and run my DD GTI lol....

Maybe I missed the thread, but what is "the Alfa build?"

In reply to irish44j :

Ah the Alfa build is still in planning stages because it’s going to be a long one, but we’re currently planning a ka24 swap with 240 and hardbody parts, plus eventual turbo. It’s a series 3 spider that’s been a race car for years and has been completely stripped out already, so we’re starting fresh and going a little weird with it to make it not-just-another-spider. Ka24 will eventually receive boost. 

And yup Mike’s e30, Tyler’s w123 (I’ll get him to triple check about the exhaust before he fully commits, he has to redo his turbo manifold anyways)

probably all told there will be 4 of us, but that’s if we all finish projects and make it to the events, and if nothing else changes as far as car selection. 

In the past few days I’ve tinkered here and there.

tried to replace just the outer tie rods and they were fully stuck to the inners (I’m sure it hadn’t had an alignment in 100k+), so I replaced the inners and the torn rack boots while I was in there. 

I bought the Crystal View headlight resto kit (personal favorite, it seems to always work well and the clear actually stays, $10) and that turned out pretty well. 

(Photo cred Mike Moore)

I have a new replacement LF LCA, a black center console lid, and a new glove box cover to be put in eventually. 

Shortly after that the clutch pedal started occasionally not returning, then it started not allowing me to shift into it out of gear without a little rev and a little force, so I tried to get to the slave cylinder before it failed completely, but failed  

Finally got to replace the clutch slave last night, and after many different strategies for bleeding it were attempted, one of them apparently worked and I popped the new clutch slave in and had a good pedal after a few pumps. It shifts smooth now. There’s a lot of tightening up that needs to be done in the entire car’s bushing department, and the rear shocks look to be pretty done, as it sits about an inch and a half to two inches lower back there. 

This weekend I’ll be pulling all the windows and scraping the tint off, maybe new rear shocks, replacing the AC belt, power steering hoses, and investigating a coolant leak, oil leaks and vacuum leaks. 

More updates soon!

Got lazy (again) with snow coming and simply spent today diagnosing issues and building up my fcp euro shopping list.

The rear glass is extreeeemely loose in there, and is getting a new seal set and a whole lot of windoweld.

I went to smoke test it and couldn't too many easily accesible candidates, so I took a rubber vacuum cap, poked a small hole in it, and pushed it onto the cone of the smoke tester so it would fit snugly in the ccv tube (head to ccv): surprise surprise, the ccv tube has a huge rip in it. after stopping that up as best I could so at least some smoke would get to the rest of the system I couldn't tell for certain if it was all clear but it certainly appeared to be. 

Pulled coil connectors one at a time to chase a slight miss and cylinder 3 had the least impact, so that will be my next target after the ccv if there's still an issue. Had misfire codes from all of my testing, Fuel Trim codes, and an H02S code.

I have a spare left front LCA but I'm beginning to suspect some slight play on the right side, which had been done apparently less than 100k ago 

So the doors all have different keys, and I had two different keys that would operate the ignition. The original master key of course was broken and held together with tape, so I drove it with a valet key (until that disappeared into some sort of interdimensional vortex Friday when I was walking into work). To work around this I applied a liberal amount of Loctite Super Glue and pieced the master key back together, and let it cure for the rest of the day at work Friday.

The windows still need to be removed to scrape tint, and half of the door handles dont operate as they should, so phase two of diag is full of issues like that.

It still needs an AC belt and the reverse light switch put in/connector repaired.

Also need a valve cover gasket set, probably rear springs (hellacious sag), and I possibly have a trashed guibo (thunk every time I push in the clutch)

Thats all for now, will update more after the first snowpocalypse of 2019.

I resealed the rear glass yesterday and salvaged as much of the lockstrips as was possible, and it seemed to go well. several hours later when I drove it home there was no more catastrophic rattle from the rear glass almost flying out over every bump, there was no rattle at all from the glass actually. I live on cobblestone so this is especially important to me.

Today when I went to drive across the river to a friend's house, the car wouldn't start, so I guess I'll be figuring that out tomorrow.

Try checking the ews

irish44j said:

Man, so that's three new people from RVA coming next year now... I hope you are planning to run in modified....we will have 20-plus cars in that class next year it looks like :)

I've been recruiting hard.  Wish I could find a venue local to have one more place to run. 

so I'm dumb and didn't know the EWS cut power to the starter. Turns out the trim ring around the ignition switch in this car falls off all the time and the fix is just to clip it back in place, ews cuts power to starter, leads me to assume a starter issue.. Got AAA to tow it to the shop where I fixed it in about 30 seconds, hasn't acted up since.

Rear window glass rattle is 100% fixed now, A pillar trims are randomly falling off though. Car still has a whole lot of issues but it is slowly getting there on what budget I've got.

Hoping to have repaired the cobbled together radio wiring soon for one of the two JVC single DINs I was blessed with.  

A Boston green E36? Don't see many of those.

In reply to Tjones_W123 :

I think it might be the only one in the whole of RVA, definitely the only one parked at the shop lmao.

Now I just need to get a boston green wagon to accompany it so I can take this turd off the road and give it the gofastparts and hodge podge fixes it deserves (and re-reglue the rear glass, because the noise is back with a vengeance)

In the process of taking this beast off the road due to failed inspection and a lack of desire to replace the airbag module on an $800 car, I was sent a link to someone in RI looking for a non rusty e36 non m with a 5 speed. 

I contacted him and he’s buying this thing for $2k and driving it all the way back (insanity, but I’m sure it’ll make the trip) 

so I have replaced it with a 2000 Blazer for now, and I have my eyes on a few different MR contenders for DC area rallycross.

one that I reeeeally want is an early Impreza 2.2/5speed that’s been converted to rwd with the stub shafts. I would immensely and perversely enjoy running a Subaru in a rwd rallycross class

blazer will be a camping and overland vehicle, it was my dads for years and has been parked so once I get to the fun parts of the build I’ll start a thread 

corytate said:

one that I reeeeally want is an early Impreza 2.2/5speed that’s been converted to rwd with the stub shafts. I would immensely and perversely enjoy running a Subaru in a rwd rallycross class

 

A couple guys I know have done RWD conversion on subies for rallycross. Both went back to AWD almost immediately - like after one event, if that. A RWD Impreza is basically just excessive understeer + excessive oversteer together (worst of both worlds) and according to a top-level rallycrosser I know who did it, it sucked badly and wasn't fun at all. YMMV though. 

but yeah, do it if you want to be ironic or something. An e36 (or most other original RWD sporty cars) you can realistically be very competitive in MR. a RWD 2.2 Impreza,isn't a "contender" at all though, in a competitive sense (only as a discussion piece). Most of our MR class would beat a 2.2 AWD Impreza at rallycross, for that matter. 

PROVE ME WRONG ;) 

Convert a subie to fwd.  That should really get the crowd going

fiesta54 said:

Convert a subie to fwd.  That should really get the crowd going

I mean, nobody would really raise an eyebrow, in truth. GC Imprezas were available from the factory as FWD. If you're going to convert an Impreza to 2WD, FWD will actually be competitive since the car's balance is good for it. 

Erika Detota actually rallies a FWD Impreza

Kevin Turner and Matt Rhoades did for years too, and won a ton of events

In reply to irish44j :

rwd subie would be a Pipe dream at best anyway, probably not worth it. Guy bailed on buying the e36 so I’m going to start fixing things on it. If no one buys it in the interim it’ll be on a course out your way soon enough.  

I just wish I could put vintage plates on it and not have to deal with state inspection things