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Just to set expectations up front, this one won’t have a great comedic narrative stringing all the events together. Its purpose is twofold, one a general status on the various projects we have going on, and secondly to stand in abject amazement that DTOMRacing (as a blog) turns 2 years old. That’s right we’ve kept this nonsense up for 2 years. Trust me I’m as amazed as you. What is even more surprising most of these posts hold up pretty well. Anyway happy birthday to us! If you don’t like this post go back and read some of the better ones, or just take solace in the fact that you generally get what you pay for – a DTOM principle since day one.
What is the status?
As usual no short answers with us, my assumption is that most people reading this are also BimmerWorld fans, so you are probably aware that during the VIR race James was taken out in one of the fastest parts of the track resulting in a wreck that made the #80 car look like a pop can someone stepped on. This led to the BW guys working a deal with the ‘other’ BMW E90 team RRT so that they could make the race since RRT wasn’t planning to attend this event – win/win. Now since Craig and I are the generous sort and 2011 is still some time away we offered the chassis to Clay if they needed to do a complete rebuild, however Steve Bassen autobody man extraordinaire said “I can fix that” and he did.
See the crash video here:
Clay Gets Wrecked
Like Brand New at Lime Rock Park.
So that meant our car was ‘safe’ and at last check it was still at the media blasters being stripped of paint, seam sealer, and other stuff that gets in the way of welding.
In conversations with RRT James found out a key piece of information that set in train this next set of events. This will require some explanation. Fuel injected cars require a computer to operate. The computer balances the mixture of fuel and ignition to match the amount of air that the car is receiving to achieve precise combustion in the cylinder. This technology has been constantly improving since it first appeared in the 80’s but as with anything the manufactures’ computer usually has to balance reliability, fuel economy, and performance. It also plays a huge role in emissions. Grand Am rules dictate that you can use two types of computers to run your car – the stock electronics (ECU) or a Bosch Motorsport unit. If you hear of a car being “chipped” that increases its performance it is usually altering or re-programming the existing manf. ECU to shift that compromise more towards the ‘performance’ end of the specturm.
Our plan was to sacrifice the horsepower that you can gain with a true race ECU, and use the one that came with the car since it is an order of magnitude cheaper (ie included in the price of the car). We had ‘heard’ that RRT was able to run with the stock setup so we figured that we could to, it might just mean more time figuring it out. What James uncovered during his talks with the RRT guys was that “Yes” you could technically run the stock electronics, however you’d also need to carry along the completely stock cooling (radiator, fan, etc) system in the passenger seat not doing anything but hooked up to the wiring harness so that the computer could see all the sensors it needed to work. This was a little too half ass even for DTOM, so that led us to our next adventure.
The Search for the Bosch ECU.
No this isn’t a Hardy Boy’s mystery, but as you can imagine this wasn’t good news for us since it would mean finding almost as much dough as we had sunk into the original car just for some fancy computer bits and pieces. We looked on the bright side that at least we had this information with enough time to try and make adjustments, take part time jobs, whatever it took. Then something very rare in the DTOM universe happened. We caught a break.
Our buddy Ted fell into a race crew job for a Porsche Cayman support series that was running at “The Mitty” up at Road Atlanta at the start of May. Brendan and I decided we’d go up for a visit and see some of the historical racecars that the event is based on.
[Interesting aside, The Mitty is an annual race of historic race cars held at Road Atlanta. We saw an Audi R8 factory race car parked outside a nice semi-truck and trailer, under a nice awning, on a nice portable plastic floor setup being maintained out of….. a sh!tty craftsman tool box with less stuff in it then mine. BD and I thought about this a minute and then I said “Well I guess it makes sense – WTF are they going to fix on this thing.” If you have a factory designed super race car you’re not getting the parts at Pep Boys, its either not going to break since these cars were designed for the 24 hours at LeMans or something (and probably someone) is being flown in from Germany to do the heavy lifting for you..]
We stopped by to visit Ted and while making the introductions Ryan Eversley another Grand Am superstar said “You’re building a BMW, hey I know a guy that is selling a wrecked BMW ST car.” And sure enough this dude was selling a wrecked Grand Am ST car, only the slightly older model than what we are building, BUT it did have the coveted Bosch Motorsport ECU. I got his info and huddled up with Craig and the DTOM advisement committee (ie Clay).
We got a list of everything included with the sale and it looked like a pretty good deal, however since this stuff is older and these cars only have another year left in Grand Am it was still risky. We discussed it some more and decided that faint heart never won fair maiden. A deal was made on Tuesday, and since I was going to be busy at work that gave about a day to figure out what to do with an entire non-rolling race car and a truckload of spare parts.
You may have read this in some other write-ups – storing dead race cars ain’t DTOM’s business. That is we are not in the business of storing dead race cars (to paraphrase Pulp Fiction). Thankfully my Spec E30 was scheduled to go up to Jason’s shop which freed up a garage spot in Craig’s museum of non-running 80’s cars. Learning our lesson with the shoddy dolly of death, I entrusted the transportation of the car to the pros that know, and called a flat bed tow truck. Best money we’ve spent so far. So we’re now in the process of dismantling yet another car, my garage has 19 wheels and tires, and another 10 tires, and three bumpers, and the list goes on… But at least it gives us something to do while we wait on the E90 car to come back, and we got the Bosch ECU.
