Jason and I were back at the shop this last Wednesday finishing up the rear brake caliper rebuild.

Just like the fronts, he pulled the rubber boots off, slid the pistons out, soaked and cleaned everything, then put it all back together again. It went by quickly and without any major issues.

In the mean time I took the intake manifold off the head

... and grabbed the oilpan from the parts block. The other pan was somehow cracked on the bottom. :0 THe new pan needed an oil return for the Holset hx35 to drain into.
I soaked the pan in some degreaser at John's shop.

I then pulled all the Home Depot fittings from the old pan, cleaned them and re installed them on the new pan.

After a while we needed something else to keep us busy, so we grabbed some spray cans and and John donated his shirt.... super-m20-man was born! You can have your own super-m20-man, all you need are some old hi-temp spray cans and a blown headgasket.

Teardown

We were back at the shop last Wednesday tearing into our spare m20 from the parts car.

While Jay took care of the teardown, Jason was busy pulling our front brake calipers for a simple rebuild.

Once the brake calipers were out, we pulled the old rubber seals out, they were in pretty bad shape on the driver's side. fortunately the calipers and pistons looked pretty good. Bartley soaked/cleaned up the pistons and calipers, and then we put everything back together.

Once we had finished tearing down the parts motor, we moved on to the original motor that had been in the car. We knew we had blown the head gasket, but we were curious as to what else was going on.

Well,  when we pulled off the valve cover we realized where the strange noises might have been coming from…

 
At some point on race weekend, we broke one of the rocker arms.

I really wonder when this happened. My guess is that it might have been on our last drag run, but what are the chances of this happening at the same time as blowing the headgasket?

Talk about a blown head gasket! 21psi FTW!

As we inspect things a bit closer, we also found that one of our valves had kissed the piston....

Looks like either some detonation occurred, or something got sucked into the motor.

All I know is that the m20 is a strong motor, for it to have this many things going on with it. I'm certain they didn't all happen at once. Its amazing that the motor was still strong enough to give us the 2nd fastest autox time, and a 12.3 1/4 mile run.

This Wednesday, we finishing rebuilding the rear calipers and start putting things back together.

2011 work begins on the race car.

The past 3 months have flown by. We have all been super busy, Jimmy was busy preparing for his big move to Chile. I bought a house back in Aug, and with all the house remodeling going on, the car has been sitting, collecting dust since the event.  Now is the time to get the car prepared for the 2011 Ultimate Track Car Challenge. Jay and I got together this past Wednesday.
I started by putting the car on jack-stands, and pulling the drive-shaft.

The driveshaft center support bushing and guibo both look good. I just need to get some new bolts,
I'm creating a list of all the parts we will need to swap or rebuild in order for the car to be safe.

Jay pull the Holset HX35 from the Manifold while I pulled the wiring harness.

We drained all the fluids, pulled the radiator and all the intercooler piping, turbo and all wiring.

The motor ready to come out.

Since we didn't have a load leveler, we had to get under the car and pull the transmission off before pulling the motor, otherwise we wouldn't be able to angle it enough to clear the firewall and radiator support.

Between the two of us we were easily able to pull it out.

Clean engine bay!

This week we pull the motor apart to check the headgasket.

Its about that time...
Time for another update. For those of you that have not seen these videos yet. They are both Challenge videos from the Autox. The first vid is of our first 4 timed runs. The second vid is 2 fun runs, in which we were trying to beat our best time.
Enjoy.

12.3 second drag run at the GRM challenge

This is our first of many videos that I will be uploading. This was our second run of the day. I ran a 12.9 on the first run, The car ran better than expected, and it really hooked up well in first and second gears, compared to last year(thanks John for the drag setup pointers), I hot lapped it and went straight to the line for run #2. Little did I know that we were going to loose the hood on this run ;) We ended up running our best time at the event, a 12.3 sec drag run at 117 mph. The car has an HX35 running 21lbs of boost with a Stock m20 motor. Tuning was done with the stock motronic and a 535 AFM. We blew the Head-gasket on the next run(3rd and final)! Have you ever seen a bunch of people celebrating the ripping off of a hood? Get ready to... (In reality we were happy about our time,...no really we were ;)

So we're back from our 4th year at the challenge.
We had an amazing time hanging out with all of our old friends, and we were happy to have made some good new ones. Every time we go to the challenge we have the best time hanging with REAL people that love cars and are passionate about wrenching! We are happy to report that we duplicated our results from last year, 3rd overall, and 2nd in the Autox, plus we finished 3rd in the concourse this year, which was no easy feat!


Challenge Winners

Overall Winners: (All 3 going to the Ultimate Touring Car Challenge)
1) Wreck Racing / Ga. Tech Mazda Miata
2) Westside / Hooligan Mitsubishi Mirage GT
3) Condor Speed Shop BMW 325is


Drag Times:  
1) PACC Racing, MG MGB: 10.67 sec.
2) Westside / Hooligan, Mitsubishi Mirage: 10.82 sec.
3) Team MiniMe, Dodge Aries: 11.64 sec.

Autocross times:
1) Wreck Racing / Ga. Tech Mazda Miata: 32.303 sec.
2) Condor Speed Shop BMW 325is: 33.118 sec.
3) Hong Norr Honda Civic: 33.564 sec.


Concours Scores:
1) Wreck Racing Mazda Miata: 22.8 pts.
2) PACC Racing MG MGB: 22.7 pts.
3) Condor Speed Shop BMW 325is: 21.95 pts.



Jimmy and i got together to create a build video to document the 4 years it took us to get the car from a normal every day BMW to a full on turbo track monster, which runs 12.3's in the drags. Another sweet prize for this year was winning admission to the UTCC at Virginia International Raceway in July of 2011!

I haven't posted updates to my blog in a while, because we were trying to keep things secret from a certain team that will remain nameless ... I will say that their car looked a lot like ours did (hey!). In any case, we have a lot of respect for those guys, and were flattered that they used our 09 car as inspiration for their build. Hopefully they will return more competitive next year. I will post all the previous build updates, and videos in the near future.

We're off to the 2010 grm challenge!

Ok, well after an all nighter last night, we are on the road somewhere in central Florida, on our way to Gainesville. We have a good group with us this year, Jimmy, Christy, John, jay and Brian. We want to let you all know that if all works out we will be streaming the grassroots motorsports 2010 challenge live with in-car video. Video will start at approximately 9:00 and can be viewed at Justin.tv/condorspeedshop. Thank you all for the support.