E30 Zone

It was supposed to be ready for Oulton last October, but didn't even fire up until 2300 the night before, so I ended up taking the Touring, in road trim, instead.
This time it was Thruxton, on Monday 24/6, and I had months of notice.
Guess when it was ready. Go on, guess

The last bolts went in at 2100 the night before, but getting it on the trailer and fuelling it up took another two hours.
One day I'll do a track day on enough sleep.....

Well, what else would you tow an E30 with?



The reason it needed to go on the trailer to be filled up?


That's a 100 litre LPG tank (only fills to 80l) and it's the only fuel in the car.
It costs £52 to fill up

Running the car exclusively on LPG lets me remove even more wiring and parts - I don't need a fuel pump or injector wiring. There's not much left to come out...




The foglamps are blanked off, but I need to do something with the headlight holes.

Effective brake cooling saves your pads - I'm running Pagid road pads on track and they neither fade nor wear excessively.





Dryer hose, £10 for 2.5m at B&Q.

Engine bay is pretty minimal, too.





Here you can see the fuel system - an R90E vaporiser. Rated at 190bhp, I'm told they're good for a lot more as long as you can keep them hot.


Out on track at Thruxton.



Dicing with an E36 325i.



Not the only E30 there, here's a very tidy 318is.



SELOC PBMW racer.



A day of 100mph+ corners will eventually do this to a 6-year-old remould.



Tyres now on the shopping list - along with a splitter, wing, diffuser, more CDS for the cage, turbo kit, etc...

Good stuff! Love the elephant trunk hose improvisation. I sourced a b&q outside junction box for my electrical terminals. Just the job.

Were they ok with the back seat fuel tank?

Iv picked up a lpg tank half the size of that and it was foookin heavy!!!

No scrutineering on trackdays, just a noise test. Limit was 90dB, she made 88.

In any case, and for my own peace of mind, it's very well secured. MSA standard is (I'm told) 36G, so for a 100kg tank it should take 3.5 tonnes of force to shift it. The stainless straps you can see in the picture go round a steel bar welded along the back of the seat pan, where the seatbelts attach, and another near the front.

If I ever race it I'll have to look up the regs properly and make sure its compliant, but for now it's just a toy.

As there any benefit of running the air filter pod on the throttle body (doing away with the intake tract)? I was always under the impression that the long intake tract actually benefits the airflow as it has an accelerating "ramming" effect on the air entering the intake plenum (as long as it is large enough not to actually restrict the airflow, which is not normally the case with an M20).

No, its a very bad place to put a cone filter, it will pick up lots of hot air from the radiator.
When I get the time I'll fab a proper cold air inlet, may try to get a ram effect too. This will complicate the fuelling system as I'll have to add a balance pipe (turbo style) to the vaporiser.....

I remember you talking about doing this years ago when I came for a mucky old 24v engine, nice to see you finally got going with it
Perfect excuse to raise the compression ratio

Shame you cant get the tank lower down

Originally the tank was in the boot, against the rear bulkhead, but that's just too far up and back for a track toy. The only way to get the tank (and CofG) lower would be to run two small toroids where the petrol tank was, but then I can't route the exhaust out the side and have the back free for a massive diffuser
The car didn't feel 'rolly' on track; the full tank weighs about 60-70 kg, which is more weight than I'd like up there, but it also means I can do a whole track day without refuelling. When you have to find LPG in the middle of nowhere, that's important

CR is staying where it is for the moment, I've got early pistons in there but raising it high enough to properly take advantage of LPG's 110 octane (c. 14:1) will be difficult and expensive.
Instead I plan to go turbo, easy with an LPG mixer system. Should be able to run a bar easily, I'm not too bothered about precise F/A ratios as long as it doesn't go lean....

I think I may have got a bit of a bargain there :
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/351379745591

Now I just need a suitable snail, pipework, BOV, intercooler and some careful welding on the vaporiser (to attach a balance pipe).....

I've been doing a little research into LPG and boost, and have discovered a few interesting things.

Firstly, tuning for LPG requires throwing away almost everything I thought I knew about safe operation, particularly with a turbo.
UK LPG is almost entirely Propane, with an octane rating of over 110, so it looks like a very boost-friendly fuel, but there are traps for the unwary.

The usual cures for det won't work, and may make things worse

All the turbo-capable vaporisers seem to have disappeared, so it looks like I'll have to bodge a balance fitting into my venerable R90E.

Dump valve fitting is looking interesting, too. If it goes up near the throttle, it's also a short way from the mixer. Will it vent explosive gas mixture on every gearchange? If so, do I recirculate it somewhere (where?) or dump it to atmosphere?

Ignition timing issues mean I might not be able to run stock Motronic 1.3 sparks; so I need to be able to burn a custom chip (or several).

At this point, a conversion to straight Methanol is starting to look inviting...

Here's what I have so far :





eBay special turbo manifold, £55 a year or so back.





eBay special turbo, £120 delivered. T3, turbine A/R 0.63, compressor A/R 0.5, compressor trim 0.55. Internal wastegate, adjustable actuator rod. Allegedly good for 400 bhp @ 1 bar



Oil feed and return pipes. I don't like the feed pipe termination as it looks like it will loop way up out of the top of the turbo. I can get an adapter to convert it to 12mm banjo, which would enter horizontally, much neater.



Most of the fuel system, my venerable OMVL R90E vaporiser.



I need to modify the backplate, covering the hole where it mounts and adding a balance fitting.



The rest of the fuel system, a mixer attached to the throttle body. There's a bit of work to be done smoothing out the internal transition between the two.

Mental... I love it!!

I wonder where I'll put the boost gauge?



I'm thinking front and centre, where the MINI speedo goes, so my passengers can be all OMG BOOST!!!!!

Looks like a fun toy/project. I'd feel very nervous with that tank behind my bonse though

The boost (along with far too many other things) is on hold for the moment, but the wheels are at last going round again.

At Llandow early this month for a shakedown, with some subtle body mods :





It'll be at Bedford on Tuesday (30/05) for a proper play (if nothing else breaks!)

On circuit at Bedford, a good day :





Yes, the wing drew quite a bit of comment - but seemed to work.

Brake cooling ducts are very effective - both Llandow and Bedford require lots of seriously hard braking, but I've not even managed to wear a front set of Yellowstuff halfway.

Body roll should reduce when I remember to fit both ARB drop links, not just the one

Looks like a bit more negative camber at the rear would be useful, I might invest in the rear beam mod kit...

The air dam is 0.8mm stainless, the splitter is 9mm plywood, they're held together by around 12 M 8 stainless coachbolts. This might explain why all remained together and straight despite an excursion which buried the front of the car in a gravel trap up to the bottom of the bumper.

After much faffing and procrastination, and because I'm booked on a MLR day at Castle Combe and will thus be mixing with loads of bloody Evos....

It's Turbo Time!

As posted above, I bought an eBay turbo manifold etc. a couple of years back. Didn't fit it because ... well, because it didn't fit.
Cutting the flange between runners just about let me force it onto the head, but it wasn't doing the studs any good and at least one flange section couldn't be pulled flat. So I kind of lost interest...

Until last weekend, when I decided I wasn't going to be beaten by a lump of poorly-made stainless Chinesium and resolved to sort the damn thing out properly.

The first question - why doesn't it fit?
A long time ago, in a design studio far, far away (Munich), someone at BMW decided that the correct bore spacing for a six-cylinder engine was 91mm. Why? Who knows, but damn near every six-pot they've made since the M20 has had its bore centres 91mm apart. And hence its exhaust ports are 91mm apart. As are the exhaust port studs.

Maybe the Chinese have difficulty telling a 1 from a 0, or maybe they just didn't think it would matter, but the spacings on my eBay special were accurate, consistent, and, at 90mm, wrong.

Now some people have mentioned problems fitting these manifolds, and have resorted to drilling the stud holes out to 13mm. I didn't want to do this partly because it would lead to misalignment of the head ports and flange holes (fnarr) and partly because I don't have a 13mm drill bit that can handle stainless.

So here's what I did.
I started by carefully measuring a spare head, to get the exact stud spacing. If you're interested, the vertical spacing, between the top and bottom rows, is 49mm, and the top row is 36mm rightward of the bottom. I then made up a jig, with plain studs 10mm in diameter tightly fitted into a bit of heavy box section, then welded on the reverse side. After cutting the flange between each port, I forced it onto the jig, clamped it down flush, and welded it back together. The flange section for #1 cylinder couldn't be clamped flat against the jig until its runner had been blowtorched orange for a few minutes, allowing it to stretch a bit. I then prised the manifold off the jig and welded up the slots in the flange face. After a clean up with grinder and a flap disc, it looks like this :



Now it slips on to the head as easily as the OE manifold. Or it would, if it weren't for the oil cooler pipes :



Someone suggested turning the oil filter mount round, but that seems to make things worse :





I noticed that the pipes almost fitted through the manifold with the filter in the OE position, so after a bit more blowtorch work and pipe bending, and cutting the locating tabs off the oil filter mount to let it swivel further, this happened :



I'm not delighted about the pipe routing; they're both within 10mm of the collector, which will get seriously hot in use. I'll look into some kind of thermal insulation, particularly for the rubber sections.

Now I just need to mount the turbo, run its oil lines, mount the intercooler, fit the coldside plumbing, modify the vaporiser, mount and fit the boost gauge, make up a downpipe...
Oh, and get it dyno'd at some point. Not so much for power, but because I have no idea what the AFRs are now, never mind with a few pounds of boost.