Grassroots Motorsports

First look at our E36 M3 Oct 26, 2003

We recently purchased a 1996 M3 as a Grassroots Motorsports magazine project car. The M3 has 103,000 miles and had the luxury package, which included Luxury wheels, leather interior and woodgrain dash inserts.

The kicker is that we paid just $9500 for this BMW. The combination of worn shocks, bald tires and the need of a complete detailing lowered the price of this autobahn burner.

Here's the first look at what we've got and what we'll do with it. 

On our way Feb 5, 2004

Our M3 project car is well on its way now. After baselining at our test track we turned inconsistent 40.682 second laps. The wornout suspension combined with poor alignment settings made driving the car a handful. Since then we have installed the newly introduced Eibach Pro-Street coil-over kit.

This kit provides coil-over spring shock units for the front and separate spring shock units for the back. Combined with RTRS front and rear control arm bushings and rear shock mounts, this kit transformed the handling of our M3 with very little deterioration in ride comfort. Track times improved and all of the "worn-out-old-car" feel was removed from the car.

The next step was to improve the brakes. Porterfield R4S pads front and rear on Diversified Cryongenics slotted rotors with Turner Motorsports braided steel lines brought the brakes up to track worthy status.

We have also baselined the car and got 212.2 horsepower @ 6000 with 204.9 ft-lb.@4400 rpm. From there we added a Turner Motorsports cold air intake and chip upgrade kit. We were impressed with the numbers. Our next test will involve a variety of exhaust sytems and Turner Motorsports pulley upgrade kit.  

Rims and tires Mar 3, 2004

Now that our suspension is well-tuned, we turned our attention to the rims and tires. We bolted on a set of Flik wheels (available from Edge Racing) that were wrapped in A032R S-compound tires. The new wheels were several pounds lighter than stock seventeens, while being 1" wider! Our lap times improved by 2 full seconds.  

New Paint May 13, 2004

Our BMW M3 has new paint. Tom Prescott and the gang at Advanced Technology Center in Daytona Beach have righted the wrongs, scrapes and dings and given our M3 a new coat of red paint. The ATC is a vocational school that offers body shop classes, and our M3 was one of their first test subjects. We're impressed!

Dyno testing comes next, print stories will begin in the summer of 2004. 

Back to BMW work Aug 27, 2004

Now that we've gotten a few things off of our proverbial plate, we have once again turned our attention to our Project M3. We'll be examining some brake and suspension upgrades in our upcoming November 2004 issue. After this we went to work on some other areas that needed attention.

We were not satisfied with the way the stock M3 shifted gears. While adequate, the shift throws were long and certainly not confidence inspiring. After rebuilding the stock shifter to like new condition with new bushings and proper lubrication, we began to experiment with quick shift kits.

Rather than just stick a quick shift kit on and tell you that it is great, we decided to actually objectively and subjectively evaluate three popular shift kits from B&M, UUC and Autosolutions. While we will tell you that all three companies make nice kits and all three kits are very different in feel and execution, you will have to wait for the magazine series to start to get the full details.

Later this month we plan on going to Active Autowerke of Miami, FLA to test several different exhaust systems and to ring some more horsepower out of our M3 with some fuel injection upgrades. We'll give you more details when we get back from South Florida. 

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