If you haven’t been following /The Drive’s E30 BMW 325is project car, here’s a brief summary of what’s going on. The guys at /The Drive bought a beat up E30 325is for around $2,000 and planned to use it both as a rally car and an endurance race car. To do so, the plan was to fix it and set it up for rally car duty, race a rally race, then set it up for endurance car duty and then race an endurance race. All within a matter of weeks. It’s since finished its rally racing and now must be converted over to ChumpCar duty, which is where we catch it in this video.
For those of you who don’t know what ChumpCar is, it’s a sort of grassroots endurance racing series for cheap cars on a budget to enter. It’s basically so amateur racers and car enthusiasts alike can enter endurance racing without having to use a multi-million dollar racing car.
Previously, the humble E30 raced in RallyCross, another grassroots series, but now it’s time for ChumpCar and the car needs to be changed 100 percent to enter. So all of its rally gear, like its slightly lifted suspension, wheels, brakes and tires, need to be swapped out. So they had to put in some new, lowered suspension, new brakes, fix the broken oil pan which cracked during its rally and a myriad of other things all basically in one night so they could make it to Alabama in time to start the race.
It was a crazy amount of work and there were a lot of setbacks and headaches along the way but, miraculously, they were able to get it done in time and get it on the trailer headed for Alabama. You have to applaud the commitment of Ryan and these guys who work days on end without sleep or even a shower to get this car done and ready to go.
The next video will show how well they did during the ChumpCar race and we’re interested to see how well the old, beaten down E30 holds up. Stay tuned.
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