Mean Streets

Mean Streets?

Although my shiny, new engine was completed and ready to go, there wasn't time to install it before race number two. I was disappointed, but I wanted to attend as many races as possible, on the simple principle that repetition might provide what genes had not.

I left Friday evening for the stormy drive down to Portland. It was pouring rain. Gusts of wind nearly lifted my lightweight racecar off the road. A fully stripped car is an intensely unpleasant experience. With all the sound deadening removed, every last deafening decibel of road noise rattled my teeth. The five-point harness and fiberglass racing seat did make things more pleasant. While I hoped to own a tow vehicle someday, I wanted to avoid the added expense of truck and trailer in my first year racing.

That night, I received a call in my hotel room. Someone had just backed into my parked racecar, shattering the tail light and bending up the trunk. While SUV-lady did the honorable thing by ‘fessing up, it was still frustrating. The following morning I was able to jury-rig a repair with clear packing tape and my brilliant mechanical abilities.

My second novice race at Portland International Raceway was uneventful. PIR is a relatively fast track with a number of high-speed corners. It tends to favor high horsepower cars more than our local track of Pacific Raceways, especially when the festival chicane (short, tight turns to slow the cars down) on the end of the straight isn't in place. I puttered around the track, getting passed every so often. There were one or two cars I was able to pass, but it wasn't much more eventful then the average lapping day. I did notice, however, that my coolant temperature tended to run a little hot. To mitigate this, I drove with the heater blasting on full. My next novice race, my third, would be my chance to upgrade to an intermediate or "Area" license, allowing me to race with the senior drivers.

That week, I dropped the new engine and the racecar off with a private BMW mechanic. I had originally wanted to do the installation work myself, but an involved project like that just wasn’t possible in my carport. In the future, this is something I will do.

I picked the car up on Wednesday, about a week after I dropped it off. The intake and exhaust note were deeper, and the engine pulled more urgently, especially at high RPMs. Unfortunately, I immediately found that the engine was making a really loud chattering noise between about 3 - 4000 rpm when coasting (not on the throttle). Uh-oh! After several days of back and forth with the mechanic and engine builder, we decided that while we couldn't identify what the chattering noise was caused by, it wasn't anything critical – probably just a loose body panel rattling at a certain harmonic. The car had so many squeaks, rattles and bangs that one more wasn't a big deal, as long as it wasn’t indicative of anything about to break.

On the way home from the mechanic, I was rear-ended at a stoplight. The over-eager Lexus driver behind me was apparently blinded by my astounding good looks and had failed to notice my car. Or something, anyway. A mustachioed peace officer gave her a ticket. All he said in regards to my numbers, roll cage, seat and five-point harness was, “looks like a good car to get hit in.” Yessirverymuchsir!

I bought a dead-blow hammer on the way home and pounded the dent out about half-way, and repaired the tail light sufficiently for a track day Monday. Two tail lights in two weeks. In a racecar. On the freakin’ street! That’s irony. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

On my engine builder's recommendation, I installed an oil pressure gauge. There are essentially two kinds of oil pressure gauges – the more expensive and less accurate electrical gauge, and the less reliable and leak prone mechanical gauge. I purchased an inexpensive mechanical gauge kit from Shucks. First, I unscrewed the electrical oil pressure sender (used for the “Idiot Light” low pressure warning) from the head. Then, using a metric adapter, I torqued in the brass fittings for the mechanical gauge. In standard UnSage style, I immediately broke the soft brass fitting off in the head, and despite visions of needing a new engine, was able to remove the broken fitting and find a replacement easily. The lesson learned here was that brass is really soft. While no permanent damage was done, I found small brass shavings in the oil filter for weeks afterward.

From the brass fitting, I ran a small nylon hose through the firewall and up to the actual gauge, classily glued to the dash with the UnSage attention to aesthetics. With the engine on, oil filled the tube and the gauge correctly read the pressure.

In addition to the stock water temperature gauge and previously installed oil temperature gauge, the pressure gauge gave me an interesting glimpse into the engine. For example, revving the engine would cause the oil pressure to immediately jump – as high as 70 PSI if I floored the gas. There was also an interesting inverse relationship between an oil-thinning increase in oil temperature and a decrease in oil pressure. At idle, with thicker cold oil, the gauge read about 60 PSI; this dropped as low as 25 PSI when the oil was fully heated.

I added a UUC short shift kit to help with extremely vague and sloppy feel of the stock shifter. The imprecise feel made me worried about the possibility of missing a shift and accidentally putting the car in first gear while aiming for third – just about the quickest way you can possibly destroy an engine, aka "The Big Dollar Downshift.” I chose UUC because of numerous favorable reviews, although there are many similar products available for BMWs.

The UUC guy assured me I would be able to get the shifter installed, no problem, in two hours, and that he'd once done it in seven minutes. I’ll write him off as yet another ubergearhead underestimating the outstanding incompetence of the UnSage Mechanic.

This was compounded by the directions not being even vaguely relevant to the '84 318i. As it was, the instructions barely even mentioned the E30 325i – and said nothing about the early 318i's completely different shifter design. It took close to 5 hours of head scratching, but when I was finished I was extremely happy with the feel – it had a stiffer and shorter throw. While it's doubtful it made the car any faster, it was one of the most pleasing modifications I've made to the car. All was not quite well with the shift mechanism, but the next problem would not rear its (ugly) head for a few races still.

That Monday I had a track day with the Proformance Race School. With a race coming up that weekend, it was a good chance to sort out the new engine a little and get a feel for the many changes our local track had seen over the ’01-’02 winter. About five laps into my first session: Clink! Whizzzz! Ting! CLUNK! and suddenly my car was quickly overheating. I got the car pulled over to the side of the track, and was towed off a little later. It turned out that the alternator hadn't been properly torqued into place, and one of the mounting bolts had come loose the first time it was exposed to track use. Since the belt that drives the water pump also drivers the alternator, the car had begun to overheat. Miracle of miracles – I had a bolt of the right thread and length in my tool box. I took everything apart, put it back together again, and was back on the track less than two hours later – just in time for pouring rain.

Rain brings its own challenges, including reduced visibility and lower adhesion limits. Very smooth inputs to steering, brakes and gas and a high sensitivity for loss of control are an absolute must. The rain is a fantastic learning opportunity – especially for a new or changed track. Northwest high performance drivers are, errrr… “blessed” with plenty of opportunities to drive in the wet. An ego-boosting benefit of a wet track is that high horsepower, stiffly sprung cars have less of an advantage – many fewer cars blew past me once it started to rain.

I couldn't wait to try my new engine out in the dry. My third race of the year, and my chance to upgrade to Production class, was coming up in four days.