The Euro Barge: 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E Rally Car

Hello everyone!

My name is Trevor and like many others, I've lurked on and off for a long time, but only recently started on a project I really felt was worth sharing. I've had all kinds of project before, from JDM Evos to turbocharged Dodge minivans to various oval track stock cars (my first true love) to diesel pickups, but a few years ago I fell in love with Canadian rally. I attended a bunch of events as a crew member for one of the higher end teams before deciding to pick up a 1990 Acura Integra that a fellow competitor had rolled. With some help from my dad and a friend of his, we fixed the damage and got the car straight. I rebuilt the engine (just a stock rebuild) and gearbox, had the suspension rebuilt, and fixed a huge number of things that I felt were going to be problematic. 

With my wife as my co-driver, we attended the 2017 Pacific Forest Rally, where we crashed out on the second last stage, and the 2018 Rocky Mountain Rally, where we finished second in the Production 2 Wheel Drive class. While it was a great car to learn in, it had two "problems" - it was front wheel drive (I'm much more comfortable with RWD) and it was going to cost a boat load of money to make any faster and fix to the level I wanted. The car was listed for sale shortly after RMR2018 and is still for sale to this day (some say it'll never sell!).

I started hunting for a project that would be more suitable to me, that I could build from the ground up exactly how I wanted. The original plan had been to find a clean late 90's Civic hatchback and put a J35 V6 in the back with a six speed manual transmission, as a Japanese homage to cars like the Lancia 037 and S4. However, before I could find one of those a late 80's Mercedes 190Eshowed up on Kijiji for the low low price of $500. I went to look at it with a trailer hooked up and cash in hand, and the whole situation went exactly as you'd expect. 

With the help of my friends we're building the car into an Open 2WD class car. The plan is to ditch the old M102 engine and swap in an M111 which will eventually see a turbocharger setup instead of the supercharger, a six speed manual swap (if I can ever find a T56 locally...), a Nissan R200 rear differential, and a host of other modifications to better suit the car to rallying. We're doing this as a series on YouTube, so I'll post those videos here, but will gladly add any pictures if people want more, and answer any and all questions I can.

Oh, and the name? When we alerted the chief technical inspector to the project he mistook the car for an 80's S-class and told me that he didn't think that an old 'euro barge' would be competitive. Turns out the 190E is smaller in almost every way compared to the Merkur XR4ti he is building for the same class.

Episode 1 (18 Minutes)

Episode 2 (12 Minutes)

Awesome car, good luck!

Very cool. Will watch the videos after work - looking forward to the progress.

Thanks, we're hoping to get this thing done over the next year.

Last weekend we stripped the remaining parts from the chassis, the only thing we left on was the doors and rear bumper, although those may be removed soon too. I tried to add a GIF to the post but it didn't want to work. Oh well. We also started grinding away at the seam sealer both on the inside and outside of the car. These old Benzs seem to use a literal tonne of the stuff! 

The windshield is also out, but I don't have any pictures of that process handy. We've got another day (tomorrow) of trying to remove seam sealer, then it's stitch welding, then (a week later) its the day I'm most excited for, roll cage day(s)!

I feel your frustration when you pulled the interior in the first video.  These cars are somewhat complicated to take apart.   At some point I suspect you will dive into the suspension.  A standard spring compressor is deemed too dangerous to use  and a specialty tool is recommended.  The spring  compressor is available fairly cheap on ebay or amazon.

Anyway love this project and the videos.  Where about in Canada are you located?

Hello

Excuse my ignorance(born out of no-talent and prior hackery), but why do you have to grind out the seam sealer?

The couple that grinds together,....er...ah...never mind. 

Good build! looking forward to the updates

Doc Brown: I'm a Mercedes tech and have to say the new ones are light-years ahead when it comes to taking the interior apart easily. I'd be more upset if the parts were worth saving, but despite how it appears in the videos the interior was not in the best shape. Some parts were salvagable, but many were worn, faded, split, torn, cracked, or otherwise damaged. I even offered up to the local Mercedes club to come pull the parts they want, no takers.

I pulled the suspension last weekend (will be shown in the upcoming video next weekend). Rear came out nice and easy. Front wasn't too bad other than one seized adjustment bolt. The driver's side spring, for whatever reason, pretty much fell out when I let the control arm down with the jack. The passenger side required use of one of my spring compressors (I have a few different styles, but had contemplated making my own out of a threaded rod, some nuts, and a 1/4" thick piece of metal). 

I'm still looking at my options for the suspension upgrade. A few manufacturers offer track suspension from the W201 and also happen to offer gravel rally suspension for other cars. I might be able to get them to provide springs and valving more suited to rally in the track suspension. The other option, for the front at least, would be having some adapters made that bolt to the steering knuckle and allow me to use some MacPherson style struts from something else. Although I've heard the front shock towers are not intended for the loads that would introduce, we could always reinforce and tie in to the roll cage.

Agent98: We want to stitch weld the various body seams to help increase rigidity. The previous rally car I owned was literally falling  apart at the seams because the previous owner didn't stitch weld it, and the unibody just wasn't built to be treated the way we were treating it. From the factory the car is only held together with spot welds and what amounts to 30 year old glue (seam sealer). While modern day seam sealers can be super strong and provide essentially as good of a bond as welding (all carbon supercars are bonded together, for example) the stuff they were using in the 80's isn't nearly as good.

Given we're installing a roll cage, the 'rigidity' gain we'll see from stitch welding will be minimal, but it'll help hold the car together a bit better.

I have a bit of a decision to make and am looking to the hive for some advice about our upcoming roll cage installation. 

The problem is created by my strong desire to retain the original rear firewall as much as possible, convert the car to a true coil-over suspension in both the front and rear, and potentially retain the factory fuel tank.

The car comes with a nice, almost fully sealed rear firewall because the original mounting location for the fuel tank is upright behind the rear seat. Fuel cells are not required, the rulebook only states "A fuel-resistant and fire-retardant plate or shield is required between the passenger compartment and the compartment or area in which the fuel tank is located.". I think keeping the stock tank would be nice as it would keep cost down, the original tank is in a location that would only really be damaged in the event of an extremely massive crash, and it's well packaged. It also uses an in-line fuel pump so replacing it would be easy in the event of a failure. One of the downsides is the fuel tank would technically be outside the main roll cage, so it actually could be damaged in a big crash. It's the thing I'm least happy about regarding keeping the OG tank, but I've had plenty of race cars that use the factory tank and have never had an issue. Of course, it only takes once...

Converting the car to coil-over suspension involves widening the rear shock towers and reinforcing them to handle the extra load. This doesn't really affect the fuel tank portion, but it would be much easier to reinforce if I tie into the cage. This could be achieved by running my rear down-bars through the firewall and attaching them to the new/modified rear shock mounts, but would basically remove the possibility of re-using the factory fuel tank. It would also make it more difficult to fit a fuel cell in the trunk area, which would mean I might as well eliminate the rear firewall and have the fuel cell lower in the vehicle behind the driver's seats (in a metal box, of course, to meet the rules). This would be good because it would lower my center of gravity a bit and remove some weight, but bad because it adds a significant expense to the build. It would also move the fuel cell inside the safety cell, which would be a good thing, but I'm not sure if it would really pass a cost-benefit test.

I could potentially have the best of both worlds by having my rear down bars come in at a slight angle, narrowly missing the fuel tank. I could then have my rear X-brace for those bars terminate at the firewall, but I think that might run me foul of FIA regulations that the cage needs to be built to (I don't have those handy right now and would have to look). 

My final option would be terminate my rear downbars on the interior side of the rear firewall, attaching them to the wheel well sheet metal, then building some "free standing" mini-cage in the rear of the car, bracing the rear shock towers to the floor, rear firewall, and anything else that makes reasonable sense to brace to. This seems like the best packaging option, but possibly presenting a higher chance of failure in anything I build to support the rear shock towers.

Thoughts/opinions? Pictures here:

Rear firewall. I'd likely terminate the cage against the wheel well or in the flat area just above the wheel well where it is slightly indented. These areas seem like the strongest without giving me an excessively acute angle on the rear down bar (which may or may not matter, but having them as close to 45 as possible seems stronger in my brain). 

Here the rear shock towers and original fuel tank are visible. I will be replacing the shock towers with some 5" mild steel tubing that has (I think) a 0.095 wall thickness, which should be perfect.  It shows how difficult it would be to continue the cage into the trunk area without removing the fuel tank.

This is another view of the rear strut tower area, which shows some of the places I could tie into without the main cage protruding into the trunk area. Does the hive think this would be a sufficiently strong method of reinforcing the modified strut towers? I could have one bar pulling down to the trunk floor, and one or two bars the attach the areas above the tower. I could potentially tie the two towers together with a removable bar as well. I've also got plenty of 18 gauge, 1/8th, and I think 20 gauge sheet I can use to help form and strengthen the towers.

Reinforce the rear strut area and tie the cage in as close as you can without disturbing the fuel tank.

LanEvo here on the forum is racing a 2.3 16v. Check page one of his build thread for some great cage pics: https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/build-projects-and-project-cars/87-mercedes-190e-23-16-vintage-racer-build-pic-heavy/62702/page1/

Looks like he had it built to SCCA & NASA rules, but that should get you a decent starting point to compare to.

Yeah, I had seen LanEvo's build, the cage is similar to, but not exactly what we'll be doing. Ours will have more bars to meet FIA rally specs, but generally the same idea which was actually where I've taken much of my inspiration from. Specifically, the mounting points for his main cage. The key difference is his car still uses the shock/spring setup in the rear (and he probably isn't jumping it) so the same level of reinforcement on the rear shock mounts isn't needed. 

Sounds like you've made up your mind then. If the reinforcement must connect the newly reinforced shock mounts, then you'll be hard pressed to keep the factory tank. Hack out the firewall and all that extraneous steel/weight. Land your new fuel cell behind the front seats. Used cells are out there and it doesn't have to be a huge cost.

I'm not convinced that you couldn't get a number of healthy seasons out of a carefully reinforced rear shock mount with a cage like Lan's...And is the additional life that a better attachment gets you worth the cost of the fuel cell and associated fabrication effort? So maybe 5-6 seasons instead of 3-4. Do rally cars even live that long?

No decision made yet, I think I misunderstood what you meant before though. You mean build the cage with the same type of mounting point as LanEvo's, then reinforce the rear struts as close as possible on the other side of the firewall, right?

When I first read it I thought you meant make the roll cage mount like his, then run additional tubing from the rear down bars to the rear suspension, which didn't make sense in my mind. Trying to reinforce as close as possible but not actually tying the two "cages" together is actually probably the closest I can get to the best of both worlds, now that I've re-read what you said and thought about it more. 

I did consider a used cell but finding a used FIA cell here is difficult as most racing associations don't need them, and drag racing is more popular than anything else here so most fuel cells on the market are small, like 2-4 gallon type stuff. Even the circle track guys don't need FIA approved cells, only SFI, so no luck from them either. That's not to say they don't come up for sale often, but to find an FIA approved cell (preferably with matching steel tank) that's not expired is difficult to do. The downside to living so far from real racing lol.

We have posted Episode 3 on YouTube

By the end of the video we've got the car ready for stitch welding and roll cage installation, which in real life we start work on today. I'm super excited, because now that we're done tearing the car apart, we get to actually start building things. I'm going to spend the next few days smelling like burnt metal and welder. It's going to be awesome, and I'll update the thread with some progress pics this evening!

Well,  we didn't get as much done yesterday as planned.  The shop we use is at the acreage I inherited.  While I plan to move here, I currently only come out a few times a week to check on stuff and work on the car. I found a big issue when I was in the house.

The gas heater in the garage had gone out and a pipe in the attached garage had burst. The drywall mess is from me attacking the roof to find the burst pipe.

The water had run along the roof and down the back wall of the garage (where it joins the house) and shorted out the garage door opener button,  which opened one door. The ice was crazy,  3" thick or more in many places.  Those are some Ford 2.3L engines buried in ice. 

So yeah, I spent my day yesterday feeling with this instead of building a roll cage.  Hopefully we can get something actually accomplished today...

Ugh. The frozen pipes look brutal. Get it all patched and cleaned back up?

The dry ice trick looks to have served pretty well on the sound deadening. Nice to see it coming along.

Yeah, we aren't living there currently but plan to be and plan to do tons of renos anyway, so it's more of an inconvenience than a true disaster. The lines run to the kitchen sink from the utility room, so I just cut them off in the utility room and capped them for now. When we re-do the kitchen we want to relocate the sink from the wall counter it's on to a center island sink anyway. The garage drywall was in bad shape anyway as this same pipe had burst years ago when my dad lived there, so he had just patched the pipe and done the minimum to get the drywall "livable" in the garage. We'd have to pull the roof down anyway to install sprayfoam and stuff to meet modern CO/ventilation code. I was out yesterday, the ice is still present but it is melting, so there is that. Can't tell what on the floor has been damaged or not, the engines seem ok, some stuff in boxes will need to be revisited later this week.

We did accomplish some things on the car weekend though.  I let Andrew and Brandon work on stitch welding the floor. Their welds aren't great but it was their first time welding and sheet metal (let alone sheet metal with seam sealant still nearby) is tough. I'll go over the welds quickly to make sure they are good but I don't consider them critical for safety so I won't spend too much time on it.

We also got the main hoop bent. Messed up twice, once by completely forgetting to add a measurement resulting in a bar that's 20" too short on one side, and once by forgetting to factor in the width of the tubing and misreading the centerline radius of my die, so it worked out to 4.5" too wide. I take the blame for both of those mistakes.  Luckily tubing is never really wasted, we can cut it up and use it for other bars in the cage.

We did get the bar sorted though. Needs a very slight tweak to open the mounting points up. It's hard to take a picture showing how well it fit though, perspective makes it look off on one side no matter what,  but it's actually quite close to the B pillar. 

The Cobra seat isn't staying, it was just in there to determine seating position. It's far too wide in the halo area. I'll be going with either an OMP or Sparco seat designed for narrow cars that has a halo with an outer dimension that's as much as 16 cm narrower than the Cobra, because thankfully people design seats for smaller cars. 

It's a long weekend here this weekend, so I'm hoping to get some more done on the car and cage. 

Well, small update here prior to the weekend. I met with the head technical inspector for our series and we inspected the car and had a chat about things I can/want do, changes we need to make, all that good stuff. While I had originally been leaning towards keeping the factory fuel tank, he talked me into using a fuel cell instead. We'll be looking at finding a way to mount the spare tires in the back seat area as the fuel cell would fit quite nicely if we cut out the factory spare tire area. I wouldn't say I'm happy with the idea but it does make sense and he pointed out that I would likely need more fuel than the factory tank holds for most legs of most rallies, especially if we're running a hopped up 2.3L Kompressor engine.

The rest of the team is ditching me this weekend which isn't too surprising. I'm going to spend at least one full day working on the rest of the cage though, see how much I can get done on my own. Pretty much guarentees we will fall off the schedule for the next episode of the build though, but I've got some tool reviews I did that I can use as filler.

following with great interest! keep up the great work!

Small update, would be a bit bigger but I forgot to take more pictures. Over the weekend we got a little more done on the cage but had a tight schedule to work in, so not as much as I had hoped. The lateral down bars are bent, and we started on the plinth boxes for the main roll bar. We'll also be doing these for the lateral bars. Andrew also finished up the stitch welding on the body. 

They still need to be perimiter welded which will mean adding some small pieces to fill the gaps, but otherwise they are coming along well. I'm going to have to grind and re-do some welds because they turned out a bit poorly in some spots.

In other news, I picked up an electric power assist steering column from a 2008 Nissan Verse from the local junkyard on Saturday. This will allow us to do what may be the world's cheapest electric power steering conversion on a 190E. I paid a grand total of $14.60 CAD for the steering column and related control unit. These columns are great because they provide moderate assist in "emergency mode", and to put it into emergency mode you only need to provide the main power and ground (to power the motor) and ignition power to turn on the control unit. No CAN networking required, although it does mean you don't get speed sensitive power steering. However, it will be easy enough to add the "ignition on power" as an output from our ECU, and turn the assist off above 'X' wheel speed. Edit to add: The column is also collapsible, which is awesome from a safety perspective. A similar collapsible racing steering column can be as much as $600 USD and does not include power assist, although it's probably lighter.

I'm hoping we can wrap up enough this weekend to do the Part 1 video of our roll cage install.  I uploaded a video assembly and review of the JD2 Model 3 tubing bender we are using to build the cage. Some people here might find that helpful if they are planning on purchasing a tubing bender for their home fabrication needs.

That's all for now, more updates on the weekend!