318i Reborn

Part 1

Introduction

About seven years ago, I decided to semi-retire and move, with my family, from Melbourne to sunny Brisbane. This also marked the end of about fifteen years of driving company Commodores and that meant choosing something else to drive. I'd owned cars from several European marques when I was younger, but the only BMWs I'd owned were bikes. So I thought I'd try a small BMW. That ended up being a red E30 318i and led me to the BMW Club Qld.

Stage One

I liked the car, but was a little disappointed with its lack of power compared with the average Hyundai. But the first track day (at the now sadly defunct Lakeside) showed that it was most severely lacking in the handling department. So I changed from the 14x6 inch original wheels to 16x7 inch wheels. Then I replaced the springs and shockers at all four corners with lower and stiffer units. Finally, I replaced the lower control arm bushes with polyurethane variants. That produced a sweet-handling and pleasant car.

Subsequent track days showed that the 318i was now pretty much as quick as anything else on corners, although it still got eaten alive on the long straights at Lakeside and Willowbank. On wet days or tight tracks, such as Morgan Park, it was a very competitive package.

Everyone who knows me has subsequently heard me say, many times, that the only thing wrong with the car now could easily be cured with another hundred horsepower.

Just Add Horsepower

It now has the extra hundred horsepower, with a further fifty for good measure. This is the story of the first stage of that project.

I spent years looking for a 4-cylinder E30 M3 motor in good condition without finding anything of interest. The few I located were either very tired or very expensive or very far away or a combination of the above, with one exception.

Club member Richard Gresham had a good motor that was just what I wanted, but he was reluctant to part with it. However, back in May this year, he decided to sell it and I was lucky enough to find out about it before anybody else got their hands on it. The motor has an interesting history, but I don't have space to tell that story in this article. at least it meant that I could now abandon my plan B (dropping in a Nissan SR20 motor).

Having located a motor, it just remained to get it installed and running. I thought this would be a simple enough project and the people I discussed it with agreed that it was easy and would not take long.

The Best Laid Plans

I won't describe the saga of getting the motor in and running, together with all the various little extras that turned out to be necessary along the way. Suffice it to say that everything took three times as long as promised and cost twice as much as was quoted and that there are elements of the job which are still not completed.

However, although there are still some details to be sorted out, the car has been running now for a few weeks and has had its first outing at a track when we went to Morgan Park recently.

The First Track Day

The drive to Morgan Park was fun. It was an opportunity to see just how well the car could now keep up with fast BMWs on a mountain climb and how effortlessly it could manage overtaking at highway speeds.

The first few laps of the track showed conclusively that, although the car still handled very well, it now completely overpowered the road tyres and suffered enormous wheelspin out of corners, due to the lack of a limited slip diff.

Despite these problems, none of which were at all unexpected, it was great fun. Both I and the other people who rode in or drove the car that day had a great time. And it was quick.

We also experimented with alternative tyres. Ian Solomon kindly brought along his track wheels and tyres and let me do as many laps as I wanted on them. They were better than my road tyres, but still severely lacking in grip.

Unfortunately, a collapsed left front wheel bearing started to put enormous vibration through the car. And then the seal between the water pump and the block failed. We fixed the coolant loss with a couple of bottles of Wynns radiator stop leak (a great product) and put up with the wheel bearing for the drive back to Brisbane, albeit at the price of feet that were so numb from the vibration that it was hard to drive, or even walk.

What Next?

As the first track day had made it clear that grip was the biggest problem, I have now bought a second set of wheels together with a set of track tyres. And, to solve the wheelspin, I've installed a limited slip diff, and that's another saga.

I was told by various people who should have known that I could get any baby limited slip diff and put the gears from my diff into it to get a LSD with the desired ratio.

So one of my advisors located a 3.25 diff and delivered it to me in Brisbane. Simon Harrex then dismantled it, pronounced it to be in excellent condition, and then found that you cannot take the 4.1 gears from the original diff and install them in the 3.25 diff (at least not without some significant manufacturing of spacer plates and other nonsense).

For now, the ridiculously tall 3.25 diff is in the car, so that I can see how it works at Willowbank on November 16. It's silly around town, as I have to drive in 2nd gear in 60 km/h zones. Mind you, it is fabulous for merging with freeway traffic. Second gear is on the meaty part of the power band from 80 km/h right through 130 km/h and it does that in a flash.

The brakes were quite adequate at Morgan Park. But, since they were worn out after that day (100,000 km on the rotors; 50,000 km on the pads; much of that around Lakeside and Willowbank), I've replaced the four rotors with EBC slotted rotors and all the pads with EBC Green Stuff pads. I'm expecting them to work OK at Willowbank.

As for the future, I'll need to make some decisions about the diff. And I'll need to see if the new tyres provide enough grip. And I'll have to see if the spring rates are now all wrong with the improved grip. And I'll have to see if anything else shows as necessary after Willowbank. And I'll have to persuade the exhaust people to solve the problem of the extractors hitting the steering column. And one day, I'll have to paint it.

I'm sure this story is not yet over and I plan to write some more about it for a future issue of The Bimmer

Greg Black
10 November 2002