I took off work a few hours early to go buy paint.
As far as I can tell, there are two places to buy automotive paint in Colorado Springs: Sherwin Williams or English Color. I went to English Color even though they spelled their name wrong.
Brian used Valspar TB550 Urethane, and I have all the magic numbers needed to recreate the appropriate colors, but no one in town sells Valspar TB550. The English Color in Denver sells it, but I’d have to drive up there. They’re not open on weekends and I’ve got work to do during the week. So I figured I’d just grab the tail cover of my car and head to the English Color in the Springs which sells PPG, and PPG Concept is a favorite single stage of the Internet.
The ladies at English Color put their magic scanner on my tail cover and mixed up a small amount of both the blue and the yellow. It’s hard to tell from wet paint, but it looked mostly right. The yellow seemed maybe a little dark and the blue seemed maybe a little light. “Do you want to take it outside and compare under the sunlight?” they asked. “Nope.”
“What kind of paint do you want?”
“Whatever single stage urethane you have.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“Concept.”
“We don’t have that.”
“Right. So what do you have?”
“Omni.”
“That’s what I want, then.”
They remarked that my Blue matched with a color called “Volvo White” on their computer. Maybe “white” means blue in Swedish. But when I got home, I was shocked to notice the name of my yellow:
Alberta Government Telephone?!? A little Googling turned up the answer:
Apparently, the yellow on my Vee is a match for the repair fleet trucks that Alberta Government Telephone used some long time ago. When Brian asked what shade of yellow I wanted, I said, “Just use whatever the color of Jared’s car is.” “That’s midlife crisis yellow.” “Perfect.” Only, the shade he used is way lighter than midlife crisis yellow. Now I know that it’s Alberta Government Telephone Yellow.
Last year some time, FedEx started sending photos of packages they’d delivered. Because FedEx is truly terrible at delivering packages to me, I’ve found it a useful feature to know that they did indeed leave my package on some random porch that’s not mine. Here’s a sample of a FedEx photo, one of the rare ones that’s actually my porch:
UPS started doing the same thing last week. It’s less useful for UPS, because they actually deliver my packages. But the thing I noticed is that the quality of the photos is truly terrible.
I started to wonder how, in 2023, UPS could be producing such terrible images. My first thought that was that they were just compressed excessively and poorly, but on further reflection I think the quality of the original photo is just really, really bad.
So I’ve got a completely uninformed theory: FedEx decided to start offering these photos and upgraded their equipment to do so. Someone at UPS thought it looked bad that FedEx offered the photos and UPS didn’t, so they decided they needed them too. Only, they decided that upgrading their little scanner clipboard gizmo to have a proper camera would be prohibitively expensive. But they realized that it did already sort of have a camera: it has a 3D barcode reader. I’m guessing that a modern 3D barcode reader is simply a cheap CCD camera with a fixed lens that’s optimized to focus on something about 12 inches away and some firmware that does the barcode scanning. So they updated the clipboard firmware to take photos of deliveries, only the crappy lens is still focused about 12 inches away.
I have no idea if it’s true or not, but I like my theory.
After Erin Kelly (who I didn’t know) died doing it last weekend, I’ve spent some time considering the risk/reward ratio for rally, and it’s unclear to me that the reward is worth the risk. I’ve spent even more time considering the effort/reward ratio, and the results are more confusing. I don’t want to tally the number of weekends I’ve spent in the garage since I bought this car, but it’s an awfully large number of them. Thanks to sneakattackrally.com, it’s pretty easy to tally the amount of time I’ve spent driving it on stage: slightly more than 2 hours.
There’s probably a reason that everyone I knew in rally before I started was in Formula Vee. It’s not particularly easy to campaign a Formula Vee around a track, but it’s super easy compared to rally. My co-driver, Jack, drives a Formula Vee much better than I do and has been co-driving for a long time. I’d never have gotten into it without him, and he conveniently failed to mention how ridiculously hard it is. I probably wouldn’t have paid any attention if he had, though. My crew chief, Dan, worked for Sterling Chase (aka the Frobell) has been crew for hire for Rally, Pike’s Peak Hill Climb, and Formula Vee for the past decade. Also a fellow Formula Vee racer was working a radio checkpoint as a volunteer, and I ran into a long time vintage racing volunteer working ATC. All of you are crazy.
Rally Colorado is centered around Rangely, CO which is a small oil and gas town that’s most of the way to Utah. It’s in the desert, and as we headed out for recce on Friday, I was struck at how it only takes a few miles from the town center until you lose mobile phone reception and you can safely say, “Yup, here I am in the middle of the nowhere.”
I’m not sure if the porta-potty on the side of a desolate road is a national symbol of rally, but it’s absolutely a beacon for Rally Colorado. It took us the entire day to day to write notes and do 2 passes on all 6 stages. I’m pretty confident about all my calls for 1,2 and 6. But any 3 might have been a 4, and any 4 might have been a 3 or a 5, and any 5 might have been a 4. Such decisions started pretty rough, got better as I got into a groove, and worse as I got tired. Jack questioned some of them, and unilaterally corrected the worst offenders. None of our notes from last year were of any use–either we did the stages the opposite direction, or they were completely new. I should probably try the tape on the steering wheel thing. We got through it with about half an hour to spare. Thankfully, Dan was able to take the car through tech for us, otherwise we’d never have finished.
I’m not sure about this whole 30mph recce speed limit. I was, at times, cruising along at 50mph only to have to pull over for folks doing recce in pickup trucks at speeds that were probably above my rally pace. I will say that doing the second pass a bit faster helps a lot to see if the notes are any good.
Taken on its face, recce is absurd. “What did you do today?” “We drove 150 miles on some godforsaken roads writing down a bad textual description of them. And then we drove another 150 miles across the same roads to validate that our textual descriptions were, in fact, bad.”
We headed off to Parc Exposé which was in the parking lot of the Rangely Automotive Museum, and which would have been a little more pleasant had there been any shade. A bunch of people said that they thought my car was awesome, or their favorite, or that they were rooting for me. Most of them were shocked to find out that the hood was concealing 1.8l of stock BMW fury.
After exposé, we were to parade up and then down (unless it was down and then up) Main Street on penalty of $100. I remembered to bring some candy for Jack to throw at the kids this time.
Day 1 started with Dragon’s Trail, 12 miles of tight turns, a ton of elevation gain and loss, and a few gnarly exposures without much in the way of big speed sections. I drove conservatively, trying to get the hang of processing the notes, the feel of the car, and remembering how this whole thing works from my whopping 2 previous stages of experience.
As we got to the section of gnarly switchbacks where a mistake meant rolling hundreds of feet down a mountain, I backed off from slow and was immediately passed by the only car who started behind me. He never should have been behind me, in a STI and with a ton of experience, but no ARA-relevant times so they put him at the back. Since there were only 24 entries, the organizers used a 2 minute gap for dust at all stages–this means that over about 8 minutes, this guy passed me after starting 2 minutes behind me.
And it was terrifying. I, of course, had no idea he was back there with the dust until he got next to me. I braked hard to let him by quickly as we both charged toward a pretty impressive void. As he passed me, he got seriously sideways and it looked like he was going to slide right off the mountain. Somehow he managed to keep the car on the road, and I came to a complete stop for 30 seconds or so because I couldn’t see anything. I have no idea how he successfully passed me, and I’m pretty annoyed at the organizers for having him start behind me, even after he’d asked to be moved up.
I was driving slowly, and the car is really slow on the big uphill sections. I was still pretty crushed to find out that I was more than a minute slower than lateness on the first stage. I felt bad for Jack, who’s co-driven for some fast drivers. I still cannot fathom what it’s like to drive that section at the 14:03 pace the leader managed. I did it that first time in 19:02. The Jetta in front of me was also just over lateness, but was still a minute faster than me!
Still, my first stage, I finished, didn’t crash, and the car didn’t break. I resolved to push harder. But, uhhh…. not on the next stage. Which was Cathedral–4 miles of terrifying exposures with a super slick silt-covered surface that might give you pause at tourist speeds.
While waiting for ATC on the next stage, we talked to the Subaru driver who passed us because, of course, his arrival time was still a minute ahead of ours. There was clearly no room to let him around between ATC and the start, so we decided that Jack would walk our timecard in ahead of him on our minute. Unfortunately, he misunderstood, and arrived early even for our minute and wound up with a penalty. I felt bad about that, but at least he started in front of us. I crawled through the next stage, and was not at all surprised that I was still slowest. By a lot. But at least I beat lateness, so I didn’t feel nearly as worthless.
The third stage, Presser, was a mile long, probably flat out for those with confidence. After the finish is a a left 3 without a lot of grip and a huge drop-off on the outside. During recce, I told Jack to be sure to get my attention, because it would be all too easy to go straight off the mountain and wind up on top of the oil well at the bottom of the mountain. I’m scared of big speed on dirt (at 80mph, I just feel like keeping the car straight is too hard), so I knew this would be another big loser for me.
While waiting for the start behind the Subaru we’d let in front of us the stage before, a volunteer suddenly demanded that we pull into the shrubbery to let Sweep onto the course in front of us. Clearly not a good sign. After half an hour, we were cleared to transit the stage and warned that medical was on scene at the finish and go slowly.
As we crossed the finish, I told Jack that I didn’t see medical or any car off, and he wondered if they’d cleared it already. And then, as we came around that tight left we saw it, a green Jetta on its side at the bottom of the mountain, leaning up against the oil rig, surrounded by lots of people.
I felt terrible. I didn’t get a good look at it, but the car looked obliterated and it had dropped a long way at what must have been pretty high speed. It was pretty clear that they hadn’t gotten anyone out of it in half an hour, and that just seemed like it meant the worst. I remembered seeing on Facebook that the co-driver was super excited about getting a ride at her first rally. I wondered what it would mean for rally if we killed someone 2 weekends in a row. As we headed back to service, we passed a firetruck screaming out of town at full speed.
It put a pretty big damper on any excitement I might have felt at getting back to service for the first time in a rally. Dan checked over the car and couldn’t find anything wrong with it, so we headed back out. We had to drive the car out of service, but were instructed to leave there and walk back with an estimated hour delay while they got medical in position for the next stage after handling the incident.
The next 3 stages were a repeat of the first 3. Dragon’s Trail went slightly faster (I at least made the lateness minute), and I was starting to feel like I was getting in a groove. I drove like a grampa through Presser, basically coming to a stop at the flying finish. The remains of the Jetta was on its feet, its occupants having been transported the hospital.
There was supposed to be a second service, followed by another run through Dragon’s Trail, but the medical delay meant that was canceled. When we got back to the service park, Sterling (who’d been volunteered for Sweep after only having signed up for tech) informed us that the driver and co-driver were alive and were expected to be transferred to Grand Junction for care. The driver suffered multiple fractured vertebrae and the co-driver broke her pelvis, but both were expected to recover.
Much beer that night, a pretty good sleep, and we headed out for day 2.
The first transit greeted me with a terrible vibration starting around 40mph. It got worse until about 55mph, and disappeared by 65mph. It only did it under acceleration, so it was clear it was something in the drivetrain. Driveshaft, differential, or axles. I wanted to go back to service and figure it out–as a track driver, you don’t set out to drive at speed in a car that has something wrong. Jack said we could do that, and he’d be fine with that call, but thought I should understand that meant we’d be done with the rally. You can’t just go back, check stuff out and continue with a penalty.
So I decided to press on.
We started out with Earl’s Bad Day, which we ran last year in the opposite direction as Earl’s Revenge. It’s a bit less scary in this direction, but only a bit. I felt more comfortable in the car, pushed a bit harder, and Jack said he felt like I was doing a lot better as a driver. The car did not explode, though the vibration got worse. The second stage, Quest for Darwin, had a bunch of technical stuff with some super fast sections. I bailed around 85mph on the super fast stuff, because it was also covered with a bunch of super slick silt that just made it unpredictable.
There was some delay getting ready for the final stage. Something about the 0 car. I’m not sure if this true about rally in general, but at least with Rally Colorado the volunteers are terrible about communicating what’s actually going on. All we knew was a delay.
While waiting, we ran into a fellow Formula Vee driver who was spectating, which was completely unexpected. Lots of folks wanted to know about rallying an E30 and were super supportive, kind and encouraging. Spectators were gathered for the start, and you could see the first few stages. I made a mental note to drive the L1 in plain view sideways, albeit slow. As long as you’re sideways, kicking up dirt, and making a ton of noise, they can’t tell how slow you’re going, right?
I think I did a pretty good job of it, making good use of my hydro brake. The stage felt good, though the vibration had turned into full on clunking–it was clear some part of the drivetrain was hitting the underbody under power.
As we cruised through it, we came upon the completely destroyed Subaru of David Peretz and Cora Masson just sitting on its side We’d met Cora the night before–she was a first time co-driver with zero experience or training but a ton of energy and excitement. They were holding the OK sign and a tow strap.
I was last. I had absolutely nothing to lose. But this seemed like a crazy plan to me. “Is this a thing?” I asked Jack as I came to a stop. “Sure!” he said, like he did this every Tuesday. David hooked up the tow strap, and I tried to create as much of a lateral angle between my car and his, even though mostly the tow strap angle seemed like it’d just drag the car on its side at best. As the tow strap got tight, I gave it the beans as the mighty M42 spun the rear wheels and we inched forward. I watched in my rearview mirror as the Subaru amazingly tumbled on to its wheels like something in a movie, kicking out a giant cloud of dust as it landed. I reversed a bit for some tow strap slack, and David got us unhooked immediately and smacked the rear window to let us know we were good. The whole thing probably took less than 15 seconds.
As we got to the end of the stage, I told Jack, “That feels like the most rally thing I’ve done all day.” “No,” Jack said, “You drove a rally car all day. That’s way more rally.”
David and Cora passed us on the next transit while I was pulling off my helmet and getting a drink of water on the side of the road. They were producing a truly extraordinary amount of foul-smelling smoke, but they were moving under their own power!
We got to service, and Dan quickly diagnosed the problem as a trashed CSB. The rubber surrounding the bearing was non-existent, so the center of the driveshaft was just flailing around and smacking into the now-deformed metal that used to hold the rubber. He tried shoving some carefully-formed beer cans in there, but I don’t think it made any difference.
Additionally, the trunk latch seems to have lost the C clip that holds it closed, because BMW. Some zip ties to the rescue…
The final 3 stages were a repeat of the previous 3. At this point, it came to pass that I was 13th overall, and 2nd in class. Despite being the absolute slowest by a truly stupid amount of time. Jack pointed out that all I had to do to podium was finish. I had lost track of the number of upside down and destroyed cars that I’d passed on stage. My feeling at this point was a not-very-rally, “You know, if they didn’t drive so fast, maybe they’d finish.”
The second run of Earl’s Bad Day went great. The notes were on, the sun was behind some clouds, and it was like only 95 degrees. I was feeling good. We headed into Quest for Darwin with a, “let’s just finish,” resolve. The stage went great. We passed a disabled car on one of the fast sections, and I cautiously motored past.
And then we crashed. It was a right 4. It looked fine, I turned in, the turn tightened, I turned more, and nothing happened. I hit the brakes, and it felt like sped up as we smashed into the side of Colorado. It seemed like too hard a hit to continue from, and sure enough, the car wouldn’t go anywhere.
Sweep dragged us closer to the finish where it’d be easier to get the car on the trailer.
Fortunately, my Formula Vee friend Jared who was working one of the radio points had enough phone service to get in touch with Joanna and Dan who came and got us. The top of the shock and the control arm were snapped. Getting it on the trailer was a ton of fun–we actually managed to balance the wheel assembly in place and brace it with ratchet straps and zip ties to winch it on.
Fixing this is going to suck. The wheel smashing into the fender well moved my dead pedal about six inches and ripped a hole in the sheet metal under the clutch. The hotbits strut is welded in to the knuckle, because BMW. I have to somehow cut the old one out, and weld a new one in. First, I have to find a new one, which you can’t just order on a website because hot bits is some random thing in Malaysia so I have to fill out a web form and figure out how to order it. Not that I know what to order, since the part number was scribbled on it in sharpie 20 years ago and isn’t legible now.
But, I guess I’ll order a welder and figure out how to fix things, because I’m not very good at doing the math on either effort/reward or risk/reward ratios.
Finally, I managed to start fixing things faster than I was breaking them this weekend.
First up, the alternator. The internet let me know that some E30s refuse to charge the alternator if the charge light wasn’t working. There’s some disagreement about what year that change was made, or if it was universal. My charge light wasn’t working, but I was pretty sure that it’s never worked. But not certain. I verified that with the ignition powered, I got 12V field/excitor voltage to the D+ terminal which is the thing that gets interrupted with a busted charge light.
With that in mind, I turned to the spare alternator from the second engine, but it subjectively looked worse than mine. It’s also filthy. But mostly I reasoned that it was very likely that the failure was the voltage regulator, and I didn’t want to condemn an entire alternator if the problem was just the voltage regulator. Here’s the Bosch regulator that was on the unknown alternator:
The one in the car was not Bosch and the lettering was impossible to make out. I swapped this one in, and the alternator worked just fine. The charge light never comes on. Not sure if it’s burned out or bypassed in some way. The aforementioned joys of a car with an unknown history.
I wanted to replace the 20 year old seats with modern containment seats. Irish44j’s photos make me think it’s maybe possible to fit an HTE-R XL in there, but it’s not certain. My codriver is quite a bit smaller than me, and he claims he fits comfortably in an HTE-R 400. In fact, he had one that he’d purchased for a Pike’s Peak car that didn’t run this year, so he gave it to me to install it. So I set about installing this seat, and it gave me fits.
First, it’s about an inch narrower than the seat I had. I’m unclear about the wisdom of mounting a seat with spacers and longer bolts (seems maybe bad), so I flipped around one of the seat brackets which took up right about the right amount of space. I still had a heck of a time getting it in there, I think the brackets are *slightly* too tight now, but I did, eventually, get it. For reasons that make no sense at all, the seat is now farther forward. This is apparently due to the new seat just sitting farther forward of the mounting points than the old one did, but looking at them doesn’t look that way.
I really need to move the seat brackets after about 2 inches, but given that I was running out of time, I think this will work fine. I needed to move the fire extinguisher forward a bit, and Jack has less leg room now, but I could fit in there and he’s shorter than me.
My harnesses went out of date in 2022, so I installed new Sabelt ones. I really like Crow harnesses because the material is soft and easily adjustable, but the SFI-only certification is a bit frustrating. And while you used to be able to send them back quite a few times for re-webbing for like $60, they will now only reweb them a single time. Which means only 4 years out of a set.
I’m loving the adjust-at-the-buckle 2″ lap belts these have. Super easy to get the lap belt much tighter than with the standard pull-up 3″ belts. The shoulder belts are pretty hard to adjust because they’re so stiff, though.
I put the old co-driver seat in place of mine, because the cover on mine is torn and it made tech upset last time. If I and the car make it through this event, I’ll figure out how to get a proper containment seat on my side, too.
I got the ugly new graphics badly installed. I worked really hard on the last decals, and I’m annoyed at having to replace them with uglier ones so I spent less time on it this time. Trimming the windshield banner carefully is hard, and the black hides mistakes way better than the white. Oh well.
I’ve driven about 60 miles and it seems good. I cranked the idle up too high (about 1,200rpm) to keep the oil pressure high enough at idle to not flip the fuel pump shutoff relay. This would be bad for a street car, but I think it’s fine here. My impression is that the car is slower than it was with the old engine, but that could just be in my head. The new clutch is way stiffer than the old one, but it’s also fine. My $30 ebay short shifter is working great and makes it easier to get it into 1-3-5 while belted in. I should probably get one of the tall ones and bend it a bit, but this is fine for now.
The rear lights (which they actually checked at tech last year) like to stop working. Removing and reinstalling the bulb fixes it for a little while. I decided to pull them all and spray them with contact cleaner hoping that they’d at least work long enough to get through tech this year. Of course, one of the tail lights disintegrated on removal. Drove to the auto parts store to acquire a replacement.
I also plugged the new inspection port on my transmission with a rubber plug.
The machine shop called to say that three valves were bent, and they were having trouble locating replacements. I quickly browsed all the German car part sites, and most of them didn’t have any intake valves in stock, but ECS tuning did. That should have been a warning sign, but I just ordered them with overnight shipping and figured it’d be fine.
They called shortly after delivery to let me know that the exhaust valve was correct, but the intake valve was the wrong size. After much searching, it turns out that the 6mm intake valves on the M42 were only used for one year, and they’re NLA from BMW. After much searching, it turns out that Rock Auto, of all places, actually has some aftermarket ones readily available. They don’t, of course, list the valve in a part search for my car, but once I managed to find the magic part number (RV1359), they appear. And unlike most sites, Rock Auto actually lists all the relevant dimenstions in a diagram, so I was able to be sure they were the right ones before ordering. Unfortunately, while RockAuto would happily ship next day, they said they wouldn’t ship for 3 days.
Luckily, they lied, and the shop got the valves on Friday, in time to return the head to me on Saturday.
Not good as new, but hopefully good enough:
A continued annoyance when reassembling this thing: BMW can’t be bothered to mark TDC (or anything else) on the M42 crank pulley. Just… why not? Yes, the stock flywheel has a hole that lines up with a hole in the case that you slot a tool through to lock the crank in TDC, but I don’t have a stock flywheel. And you still have to locate TDC to stick the tool in. This seems like the most basic thing you do to make an engine serviceable. I’m so over BMW. Problem solved for now:
I got it mostly bolted together on Saturday evening (at least everything with sealant on it) so it could cure overnight. Finished up Sunday morning. Cranked it over to prime the oil system, got 30PSI of oil pressure on the starter motor. Then flipped on the fuel pumps and hopped out to leak-check the fuel system.
I had a geyser of fuel spraying from one of the braided stainless hoses on the firewall. It had leaked there once before, and tightening the connector fixed it. It did not this time.
I pulled the fuel hose, cut an inch off the end and reattached the AN fitting. An even bigger leak. Curious how I bungled that so badly, I did it again, and it leaked again. This time when I pulled it off, I noticed the rubber hose inside was cracked several inches. I cut it off past where it was cracked, reattached the connectors and tried yet again. This time the geyser came from the middle of the hose. At this point, I’d probably been screwing around with this hose for 3 hours, I was drenched in fuel and furious.
After looking it up, apparently it’s normal for this stainless braided rubber fuel hose to disintegrate after just 5 years? This stuff is probably as old as the original build (2007), but what the hell? OEM rubber fuel lines often last 40 years with no problems! I think the fact that it spent a year drying out when the engine was disconnected is probably the biggest problem.
Anyway, AN-sized braided fuel line isn’t something that auto parts stores seem to have in stock. I ordered a bunch of replacement stuff from Amazon, this time PTFE (teflon) which supposedly lasts longer than the rubber. But it won’t get here until tomorrow. And registration for Rally Colorado ended last night.
So, I went ahead and registered even though I have no idea the car even runs, much less drives. I have 9 days. I’m sure it’ll be fine?
