S52 Swapped 328 Track toy

In reply to trumant (Forum Supporter) :

Yeah, I'm glad they announced it, it perfectly fits my car and it should be loose enough that we get a good number of participants. 

I'll have to check registrations in my local region and see if anyone else is running in this class.

First local event of the season Street Mod had five entries with two of them being Honda CRXs. I'm curious how the E36 would match up against them but also think that Extreme Street sounds like a great classing for my car.

Thread restorer kit showed up yesterday but my FCP Euro order of studs and lug nuts was a day late and didn't show up until this afternoon.

Small moment of panic when I counted them all out to ensure I had 20 of each. Thankfully the fulfillment quality was spot on and I had everything I needed.

After dinner, my oldest son (turning 14 in a month) and I headed out to garage and he learned how to clean the hub faces with a wire brush, use the thread restorer to clean up the hub threads that were full of old Loctite, how to apply Loctite to threads and how to use the double nut method and the torque wrench to torque everything down.

His patience only lasted for one hub but I'm so thrilled that he seems to genuinely enjoy learning this stuff and working on the car with me. We agreed to tackle the second hub tomorrow night and reinstall the caliper brackets, calipers and pads.

My son and I hit the garage again after dinner tonight and got the rest of the wheel studs installed followed by reinstalling the rear rotors, caliper mounts, calipers and pads.

I had him watch me put all the braking components back together on one wheel and then he took over with the tools and handled the second wheel. He did a damn fine job and much faster than me. I went over the fasteners and snugged them up but otherwise he had it start to finish without issue.

Felt great to be out there working with him again so we slapped the rear wheels back on, dropped the car on the ground and it took it out for quick blast around the neighborhood and bed in the new pads trip.

Took the car and the kids to a local cars and coffee this morning out in Chester Springs. Part of the fun and what keeps me coming back is that the area between my home and the meet has some fun twisty backroads.

On the way there and back my oldest son and I both noticed that the rear of the car felt a bit too bouncy/underdamped. When we got home I crawled under the rear and adjusted the Bilsteins to setting 2, one away from max compression/rebound.

Later in the day headed to the hammer store to get a waterproof 20gal storage container to hold all of my track day supplies. Latest forecast says 30% of rain or thunderstorms and I could do without my tools and whatnot getting soaked if the sky's do open up while I'm out on track. Quick little blast there and back says the rear suspension adjustment had the desired effect so win win.

After some aggressive braking to bed in the new pads on the car I've come to the conclusion that the ABS on the car is non-functional. Given the previous owners extensive modifications to the car that include removing the ASC (stability control) I guess I shouldn't be shocked.

But, I'm two days away from my first track day and given the ease at which the car can lock up the brakes (probably because I've always driven ABS cars and the E36 is apparently overboosted/lacking in pedal feel with ABS deleted and the pump no longer handling proportioning) I'm second guessing myself and wondering if I'm better off taking the E46 M3 to the track instead.

Thoughts? Anyone here have any experience with an E36 without ABs on-track?

Probably not the type of experience you're looking for, but I haven't been able to lock my M3's brakes up at the track, but as far as I know it still works. My ASC was also removed by the previous owner. I don't have issues with pedal feel though, so maybe ABS is still functional. 

If the rest of the car is solid and you're wanting to get seat time, I say go and just take it easy on hard braking so you can shake the rest down. If you're not the type that is likely to hold back and still be able to have fun, feel free to ignore me. 

Leaving for the track in a few hours and I'm taking the E36. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I can reframe my concern for at the limit braking to a more wise concern which is that it's my very first track day in a car that has never been to the track and that I need to focus on learning the track and learning the car not on late breaking into corners and going beyond 7/10ths while I'm out there.

96 degrees today at NJMP and they require long pants. Thankfully there is a breeze which makes up in a small way for the fact that all of the drivers meetings are in an open garage with no fans or AC.

Only one other E36 here and two E46 330s. Heavy contingent of American Iron: a Viper, Corvettes a plenty, Camaros and Challengers. I have a feeling I'll be doing quite a few point bys on the straights.

Survived my first track outing and had a blast. The car behaved well, taught me a lot and dealt pretty well with the high temps.

Here she is cooling off after session two. This was a memorable session because my front tires got a bit greasy toward the end of the session and I put two wheels off track briefly exiting a turn. I saw and felt it coming and stayed calm, exited that lap to cool off and then jumped back in and finished out the session.

I ended up giving a lot of point bys and appreciated having the higher horsepower cars way ahead of me so I could find my line through the corners without slowing everyone else down.

The last two sessions a few corners started to click quite a bit more but I was also dealing with a creeping temp gauge and my own mental and physical exhaustion from the heat and the intense focus.

Last session ended a bit abruptly when the guy in front of me blew a corner and ended up in the grass. No injuries and no visible damage to the car but

Definitely underscored the need to watch my personal limits and keep an eye on everything going on around me on track.

Despite my creeping temp gauge I didn't see any coolant loss or overflow tank issues or the like. I'm thinking about it further though I'd like to have better data about what's actually going on.

I have an OBD2 reader with wifi integration to my phone and I think I should be able to capture temp logs the next time I'm on track.

I'm also starting to reconsider the relay wiring I did when I installed my puller fan. It should auto kick on at around 205-210 and it's on an ignition switched circuit. I think I'd prefer to both be able to manually control it and also be able to run it via manual override when the ignition is off.

Since I suck at wiring and reading electrical diagrams might be a fun way to enhance my education and experience.

Only other temp control thoughts I've had are installing an undertray as the stock one is long gone and possibly installing some hood vents to encourage better airflow.

Between all of those strategies what is likely to have the biggest impact?

Enjoyed my time on the Thunderbolt course so much at NJMP that I'm now registered for my first SCCA Time Trials Track Sprint event. The South Jersey chapter runs them and it's a nice relatively low cost way to get some track time and really focus in on a single segment of the course.

As a side effect I'll be getting a Novice Time Trials license from SCCA.

Congrats on the first event, sounds like it was really successful with the car. Was the ABS or lack of it a problem?

Braking performance exceeded my expectations quite a bit. No issues with fade (probably because I was under braking) and only a single very quick lockup of the rears that doesn't seem to have resulted in any particular flat spotting.

I'd like more pedal feel but this was also my first time with the Hawk HP+ pads so maybe I'll build more feel with seat time.

In reply to trumant (Forum Supporter) :

Good to hear! Glad everything went smoothly.

How high did the coolant temps creep?

In reply to neverendingprojectgarage :

Previously with some spirited driving on country roads I've seen the temp gauge at maybe a 92 degree angle vs the normal dead center 90 degree angle. At the track I was seeing the needle at more of a 100 degree angle.

After I came off track, drove slowly to my paddock location, parked, shut the car off and popped the hood the temp gauge would return to 90 degree angle within 5-10 minutes.

No classic signs of overheating like steam, overflow tank level changes, etc.

I've previously done some live logging on hot days using an OBD2 device that transmits data to an app on my phone. In stop and go traffic I would see temps peak around 210F, the electric puller fan would kick on temps would drop down to high 190 to low 200F fairly quickly.

When I go to my next event I'm going to bring the OBD2 reader along so I can either log real-time temp data or at least get current temp values immediately following each track run.

Found this very cool track guide for the Thunderbolt course at NJMP published by Condor Speed Shop. Saving that bad boy for reference when I return to the course.

Not the most dynamic photo but glad to have it

Rogue Engineering brace ordered. Hopefully it shows up by Saturday so I can install it this weekend, but I'll be happy for an excuse to get out to garage next Monday night if it's a bit later.

Previous owner had installed a pretty generic, lower quality brace (possibly an ECS Tuning made or similar knockoff) and one of the bolt holes in the strut tower mount actually cracked all the way through to the outer edge.

Hopefully this the last one the car ever needs.

In reply to trumant (Forum Supporter) :

Nice! I've almost pulled the trigger on one of these a few times, but I've heard conflicting stories about how effective they actually are.  Let me know how you like it. 

Given how weak the front strut towers are known to be, commonly deforming and suffering cracks I'm hopeful that the addition of 6lbs of steel at a minimum gives me some more longevity on the towers by taking remaining chassis flex out of the equation.

Keeping my fingers crossed that fitment is good and the mounts play well with the camber plates.

Looks like the strut tower brace won't be here until Tuesday. I was feeling the itch to get out to the garage though so I figured I'd do a quick visual inspection on my belts and pulleys and tensioner thinking that perhaps my cooling difficulties on track might be due to slipping belt causing minimal output from the water pump.

What I found is that getting access to the tensioner and pulleys is not easy and also that my car has underdrive pulleys installed. The water pump pulley had a bolt backing off so I tightened that up while I was in there. Belts feel pretty loose but the garage is way too hot in the middle of the afternoon for me to want to start tearing apart the front end to get access to pull the tensioner and replace it, do a real belt check (or replacement) and ensure that all of my pulleys are firmly connected.

And of course I forgot to check if I have the mechanical or hydraulic tensioner...

Went to install my Rogue Engineering front strut tower brace earlier today and it doesn't fit. Mount is off by about 3/4" most likely due to one or both of my shock towers being out of spec.

I'm disappointed both because clearly the towers need reinforcement and I'm too late to save them. Also if I return the piece I end up paying a 20% restock fee plus shipping. Guess I'll try to sell it on Marketplace and at least save some of that.

But, save some money (maybe) and set fire to another bit because when I tightened the camber plate bolts down after removing them of course I broke one of the bolts. #fml Turns out I should have read the torque spec on Vorshlag's site because they are only meant to be tightened to 16ft lbs. Thankfully Vorshlag sells just this piece because I'm not the only shiny happy person whose done this before. Bye bye $38 for a replacement pair.

On the positive side I took the opportunity to get the new front wheel studs installed and unlike the rear was able to get all of the old ones out without breaking any so at least something worked in my favor.

In reply to trumant (Forum Supporter) :

Damn! That's frustrating. There's no way of slotting the mounting holes to make it work?

I'm a little worried to think how bad mine are, especially since the passenger's side strut tower is mushroomed a bit. PO only ran a reinforcement plate on the driver's side for some reason.