M2 madness

[M3M3]

yes...and it was on two of my cars..the 73 and the 75.

[ClayW]

Dudley also ran it for a week or two.

[M3M3]

Quick note from track...

NEED MORE POWER!

I was not able to pass all the m3s..

[ray_]

Needs...

well, you know!

;-)

Keep safe!

Cheers,

Ray

[M3M3]

Anytime spent at the track is good……

Met up with Grice in his 2002 in alexadria before dawn Saturday and headed for summit point. Uneventful trip, arrived and set up for the SCCA drivers school. Had a blast all day instructing Grice. His car is totally stripped out and has a 2.3l stroker. Very light and it felt it! He did great. My car had issues…went out for instructor warm up session and it got louder with every lap. Hmmm… got car up on ramps in paddock and found the infamous exhaust gasket between wy-pipe and center section was destroyed. Running open header!

Here is what is left of the donut when we got it out.

Luckily I have a racing friend who lives out there and he spent the day auto store hopping finding a new part. Found a better one that was all metal, got it installed at end of day, so my driving day was a bust. Also had issue with Massive Gaz pedal . the shape with the extra tab on the top left put the gas pedal too close to the brake (at least for my big foot). Hitting the brakes meant also pushing on the gas. Not good. 5 minutes with a hack saw fixed it. Now the pedal is straight up and down on both sides and works great.

Here is the part that worked for the exhaust

Moved the car from one track at summit to another one in the pouring rain sat night.

Wx was great today.

Got 4 good sessions in. my instructor was entertaining in that he was a student years ago when I was teaching his competition school. So we had fun yucking it up as we went around the track. Unfortunately, the cheap flipvideo cam I used apparently needed new batterys as I only ended up with about 8min of video from the whole day. Argh! I will post the link when I get it prossessed and posted somewhere tomorrow.

I ran with the “A” group. The experienced students in fast cars. All M3’s, M5’s, race cars, and a 335 or two. Pretty sure I only had to give one point by all day (to the E46 race car…). the rest of the time was spent weeding through all the high HP newer hardware. Great fun and cause many students and instructors to stop by the paddock spot to try to figure out what the ancient red thing that kept going by was…LOL!

Suspension surprised me. Actually worked really well for not having dialed it in yet. May try snugging down the sway bars a bit next time.

I need more power……the E36 M3’s could just pull me on the straights. I had to make up all the ground in the twisties. To quote ray..

I need a 4.10 ( the 5 spd gear box sucks, as we all know. Way to big a jump between second and third.)

I need cams and /or a 2.5l

I need CF hood and trunk

I may have to ditch the big ass bumpers for track days. Although the totally stock stealth look was very effective!

Think I will do compression and leakdown tests on engine this week. It just did not feel like it had the power it should.

[ray_]

Sounds like good fun!

Hope the 2.5 doesn't need to come more quickly than previously planned!

Cheers,

Ray

[M3M3]

engine was not smoking or doing anything odd, just felt like there should have been more. water temps stayed about 2/3rd up the gauge, oil temp was solid 210, oil pressure 70psi all the time.

logged the AN system for one session, but have not analysed the data yet.

[GoFaSSter]

I have never met you, but I think you are my new idol. I quite enjoy seeing the foolow ups in this thread. I actually was quite excited when you mentioned you were getting the car ready to take out. Thanks for the updates.

[M3M3]

happy to provide entertainment for you! :-)

here is some track evidence. a couple of laps from sunday.

right seat gets excited easily!

it just doesn't get any better than point by's from E46, E36 and E30 M3's....in a 37yo 2002. (E30 happened a few minutes after the camera battery died)

i will confess...i had planned to bring my canon video cam and extra batteries for the flip thing, but forgot and left it ono the charger at home..

[GoFaSSter]

What is the guage on your dash? Great video.

[M3M3]

Oil pressure left, wide band O2 right.

[mickvr6]

sir, you and this car are a great inspiration! keep it up!

-Ryan

[M3M3]

2002 party at my shop today!

Started off by starting to “UN-trackify” my car. swap to street brake pads and tires, nut and bolt check, clean the tire gators and skidpad mud off, etc. JimG and DanS showed up to help with the fun. Work went much quicker with extra hands!

For a start, here is pic of the latest version of my Gaz pedal. Had to hack off the extra tab on the top left at the track due to the interference with the brake pedal.

As part of the drill I wanted to run compression and leakdown tests to see what engine status was after it had been run a bit in my car.

Here are the plugs. Gaps were good on three of them and a tad small on one. reset all to .028.

Compression looked ok, as did the leakdown. Head is tight…all the leakdown is in the rings. The bottom end of this mill is all original unknown mileage S14. Here is the data.

One unfortunate find….looks like the crank pulley suffered from corrosion over a long time where the factory drilled holes for balancing.

After track car had been returned to street car, we did a compression check on Dan’s ride. As we were rapping up that evolution, Dennis showed up for some diagnostics on some front end looseness. In short order we got several loose critical nuts tightened and cotter pins added were there were none and he was back on the road.

Busy day for four 02’ers! Wish I had snapped a pic of all the cars in my back yard and shop!

[ClayW]

Damn. Email me for the next get-together. I promise that BP no longer has the maintenance contract on my engine!

[williamggruff]

It appears that I've taken over the BP contract. I spent the past week looking into some of the issues that I experienced during last weekend's session at the track. I was dismayed to find a few drops of oil on the floor of my new garage. I traced the oil to the distributor housing. I gave the bolts a quick torque test and found them to be within spec. I'll try removing the housing and sealing it with RTV to see if it's better than the paper seal. I'll be sure to use RTV on the flow-through bolt as well.

Gotta have the car in leak-free status before visiting local driveways!

Grice