Mallory Park – Year 3 Done


How else should we spent a cold November morning?

The sprint season might be over, but 2016 had two more hidden gems in store – a lovely circuit, and a very talented new driver!

November 19th found us tiptoeing through mist along frosty lanes to Mallory Park in Leicestershire, my home circuit just eleven miles down the road, but one that I’d never driven. Friend and colleague Naim had a supercar driving experience booked here for early in the new year, but had never been on a circuit before, so it seemed only right that we take a look and learn our way around.

We found a really enjoyable little circuit. “Little” is the operative word, particularly in width, and it’s no surprise that it’s more favoured as a bike circuit, but the feeling is almost like a flowing B-road than a racetrack. It’s very satisfying to get into a groove and string the laps together, as there are some good commitment corners – Gerard’s needs real balance, and tipping into the Devil’s Elbow flat-out for the first time with the pit wall looming on the outside is an eye-opener!

Not such an eye-opener, though, as Naim’s ability behind the wheel. He was the eighth person I’ve sat beside in this car, and all have acquitted themselves well, but this was an absolute pleasure. When you’re giving tuition on track, you want your driver to listen & apply, give feedback, and be able to record what they’re doing to learn from mistakes. Most people are a little overwhelmed by the mental and physical work rate needed to drive quickly on a busy circuit, but here I had a fast, methodical and consistent driver who never made the same mistake twice. My highlight of the day was instinctively catching snap oversteer on some dropped coolant at about 85mph, then getting straight back on the power. Brilliant. Footage to follow!

As ever, the car was bulletproof reliable and we got 150 miles racked up – which is well over 100 laps. We also broke into double figures for bums in the hot-seat, with Nicol driving for a beautifully sympathetic session to become the tenth driver this car had seen on a circuit.

Now 2016 was safely wrapped up, it was time to consider what 2017 should hold. It was no secret that my real aim was to go racing, and in fact – don’t tell her – the E36 was only bought at all because plans to share a race car fell through and I couldn’t raise the budget on my own. Now it seemed I had three choices:

1.  Turn this into a proper racing car, and run it in the Kumho BMW Championship or 750MC Roadsports

2. Sell up, and buy a ready-to-race BMW E30 320i for the Production BMW Championship

3. Accept that I can’t really afford to go racing and commit to just making a specialised track day car

It seems easier when we all know which decision I came to! But at the time, it took a month to come to the answer, with mountains of research, budgeting, calculation and consulting racers, track-dayers and friends and family alike. But by the end of the year, I had ordered a Safety Devices rollcage from the supremely knowledgeable Neil McDonald at Automac, and had my ARDS test booked to get my racing licence. Watch this space..!

Sam

Before & After.. & Thruxton


Oh, how far we’ve come already…

The 2016 sprint season closed with a return to Blyton Park’s Outer circuit. This was a great opportunity to see how the car and its driver had really developed over the three seasons since that first tentative, wobbly outing… Apart from the sprint virgin behind the wheel now being on his fifteenth outing with this car, what else had changed?

Totally shot original suspension vs HSD Dualtech adjustable coilovers
Hopeless no-name brake pads vs Performance Friction Z-rated pads
2.93 open diff vs 3.15 LSD
1340kg kerbweight vs 1260kg
Heavily worn Kumho KU31 tyres vs very heavily worn and flatspotted Kumho KU31 tyres

The result? A 3.83-second improvement, getting the 1:20.21 that was the best time of 2014 down to 1:16.38. I was really pleased with that, and while I know that my own experience with the car and circuit will have contributed, it goes to show how much time can be found with a few choice modifications. It might finally be time to retire those tyres, though!

Buoyed by this success, it was time to try a new circuit – Thruxton. What a place. I’d only ever spectated here before, and that was very long ago, so I hadn’t appreciated just how fast it is. Commitment levels are off the charts – four corners around the lap were taken at over 100mph even in this old girl, two of them flat-out! It has a lovely flow to it and it’s really satisfying to get the long, long sweepers right, but the overriding impression is that it’s just so damn fast. It’s addictive in the extreme.

The car stood up very well – I was actually a little worried, since she’d never spent as much time wide open as was required here, but she performed perfectly throughout and another 180 miles were racked up. Here’s how a session in the afternoon looked from onboard, this time with a pedal camera to add to the involvement!


Fast with a capital F… A wonderful experience

Another circuit I resolved to come back to. As this made the sixth one I’d driven this car on, I made a rather polarising addition to the bootlid – one that’s grown significantly since this photo was taken! It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I still quite like it.

It wouldn’t be long until another sticker was needed, as we ventured to Mallory Park a couple of months later. After that, it would be time for some deep thought on the next steps for this car…

Sam

Lightweighted and LSDed

A little over two years in, we start to get more serious about developing this car. Since the start there have been two key problems – it’s too heavy, and it keeps spinning up a rear wheel. Time to solve both of those!

I had never weighed this car, but it did come with a handy photo showing it on a weighbridge at 1360kg. It had an extra spare wheel and half a tank of fuel on board then, which means it should be 1318kg on its own. This seems about right as kerbweight for a standard E36 328i SE, and it’s not too bad against the 190bhp and 280Nm offered by the 2.8-litre straight-six.

Weight, though, is the enemy of performance and reducing it delivers you a compound benefit – a lighter car not only accelerates faster and corners better, it’s easier on its tyres and brakes. Better yet, a lighter car doesn’t need so big a cooling system, can get away with smaller brakes, needs less structural stiffness, can have smaller anti-roll bars and suspension springs… So it gets lighter still and the advantage grows and grows. Best of all, when you’re starting with a standard road car, a significant degree of lightness is free or even profitable to attain!

A full list of what’s been removed and what it all weighed will be added soon, for those of a similarly anal attention to detail. But between this “before and after” on the rear bench alone, we’ve lost 10.3kg of rear seat base, 4.9kg of rear seat squab, 6.0kg of insulation beneath it, 4.6kg of parcel shelf trim and insulation, and 2.5kg from each rear door card. The rear floor mats – just the rear ones! – weigh 1.3kg. So in this area alone, that’s 30kg gone.

Once I’d carved through the rest of the car, we had 70.0kg removed, all in an entirely reversible way. Even the stubborn bits like the headlining! I didn’t get too serious at this point – the carpet stayed, as did the audio system, the front door cards and all of the dashboard trim except the glovebox. This first pass at lightweighting the car only took me four hours or so – if you weren’t weighing everything that came out, three hours, and if you didn’t care at the condition of what you removed, probably 90 minutes flat to save the weight of an entire passenger! I can’t overstate how worthwhile that is for a car that’s used exclusively on track.

Here, then, is the solution to the other problem:

This is the LSD from an early 3.0 E36 M3. The only changed needed to fit this to a 328i is the output flanges, as the bolt pattern is different – but happily, this diff had been briefly run in a 328i rally car, so not only has that been done already, but we also know it works properly. I handed over £400 for it, which in mid-2016 was fairly cheap for an increasingly rare item, but they can still be found for this money on occasion.

Fitting this took the final drive ratio from 2.93 to 3.15 (7.5% shorter) and gives 25% drive locking. The effect is, as you’d expect, profound. On a dry road it became almost impossible to unstick the car on its NS-2Rs, it just powers on out and awaits your next question! It was very impressive, and the gearing change was welcome – where before third and even sometimes second could feel laboriously long, they’re now dealt with much more quickly and it feels “right”.

It also means you can leave number elevens, rather than just number ones…

All this sounds wonderful written down, but what does it translate to on a circuit? Curborough and the stopwatch had the answer. The car felt fantastic, noticeably quicker in a straight line and so much happier being hustled through the twisties. The ability to put the power down on corner exit was in a different league, and when you’d finished trying to be quick and tidy, it made lairy slides much more accessible too – hence the photo at the top, complete with Emily in the passenger seat! That day was the first time I’d hit the lockstops trying to hang onto a slide, and a whole new dimension to the car had been found.


But how much laptime did we gain?

Last time we visiting Curborough, I managed a 1:10.52, which felt pretty good at the time. This time? 1:08.18. A massive 2.34 seconds faster around a pretty short lap, thanks to these two relatively simple changes, and a car that felt so much better for it as well. Next up would a return to the very first circuit we ever drove, to find out what three seasons of practice, tweaks and development are worth…

Sam

Keep pushing..

After that successful day at Oulton Park, I’d formed a shopping list for myself again. It seemed only sensible to change the other front wheel bearing, as it couldn’t be far behind failing in a similar way to the first, and new brakes were needed. I’d had good performance from the Mintex M1155, but always want to keep moving the car forward, so after consulting plenty of owners I settled on Performance Friction. A US-based company who have been making professional race pads for decades, PFC also do a more accessible compound called Z-rated. These cost me £80 for the front and £60 for the rear from the excellent part-box.com.

With new Brembo high-carbon rear brake discs to replace the old scored ones, the total came to a pretty reasonable £250. The front pads didn’t go on straight away as there was still some mileage left in the Mintex, but there was no argument against changing the rears at this point!

This new brake combination was run in at Bedford, and after 140 hard miles on the track the new PFC pads had barely worn past their edge chamfers – a far cry from the EBC Redstuff that were wiped out in a similar timeframe last year!

Then we were on to Blyton Park for another crack at the Eastern circuit. I always enjoy the atmosphere of any paddock, especially when we’re competing, but doubly so when my car is completely shown up by a gorgeous period race car!

Yes, this E30 M3 – a factory-built race car – was competing alongside us and was simply wonderful to watch and listen to. Thankfully I didn’t disgrace myself, and my first run was a strong one  at 1:20.87 – as compared to the class record I set previously at 1:20.63. With a few scrappy runs in between, I then managed to set not one but two 1:20.21s in a row, both feeling like they’d left time on the table in different parts of the circuit.. this was a decent chunk off my previous best, but so close to getting under the 1:20 barrier that I couldn’t let it lie. Happily, at 5:02pm, I was let out for a “last chance plus one” run that looked like this:


Finally under the 1:20 barrier with a 1:19.86!

This was very satisfying, stringing together what felt like a fast and tidy lap on my third visit to the circuit. It just goes to show how much practice it takes to even start to get the most out of any given car/track combination, even a relatively short one such as this.

Oh, and if the car sounds a bit louder in that video, it was! I took advantage of a spare day to start some lightweighting, removing unnecessary interior, trim and many other parts. More on how 73kg were lost, and the effects, soon…

Sam

Into 2016 – New year, new circuits!

After a short winter laid up, it was time for the car to meet its new stablemate – gone is the red E46 328i, and in its place a much bigger and much more V8-powered 645Ci. Apparently shocked by this development, the E36 wouldn’t start, but it was purely a battery issue and a quick jump from the big Six was plenty to get it running.

I dropped the oil out, for no real reason other than I felt it deserved it after 18 months and just over a thousand track miles.. Came out still golden and feeling as smooth as new, which impressed me and justified the choice of Mobil 1 0W/40 quite nicely. Then it was time to sample a new circuit, and a new car at the same time:

Oulton Park, with Adam’s RX-8. I like this photo, because we have two ubiqitous bargain track-day cars next to each other, with very 90s German styling next to very 00s manga. We also have 228,000 miles in the shot – four-fifths of them on my car!

Oulton is a glorious circuit, and if you’ve never been I really recommend it. The elevation and camber changes, the bumps and dips in inopportune places, and the views out of the side window all add so much to the experience. It demands respect and I’ve seen many a well-driven race car end up in the wall here, but it’s fabulous.

We split the day, driving the Mazda in the morning and the E36 in the afternoon. For a standard road car, I was very impressed with the RX-8. It felt nicely balanced, the pedal layout and weighting was decent, the gearshift good and the engine constantly begging to be revved out. It needed more serious brake pads in it and the chassis felt a touch too soft when you started pushing really hard, but a very pleasant thing to drive on track and certainly a good starting point. It did feel a little gutless, mind – despite an alleged 40bhp advantage and very similar weight and gearing, the E36 outpaced it down the straights. It was only later I found out that even a very strong “231bhp” engine in one of these is lucky to produce 200.

Getting back into the E36 felt strange, by comparison it’s actually a bit of a nightmare ergonomically, but it all made sense again once I started to drive it properly. The car felt great and ran without fault for 45 laps in the afternoon. This was the first chance I’d had to do sustained sessions in the dry with my Mintex 1155 front and 1144 rear pads, and I was impressed to find no fade whatsoever. The rears were shot by the end, but the total of 740 track miles they managed is pretty good for £58!

The last run of the day brought me one of the best driving experiences I’d had so far.  I went out behind acquaintances in a K-series Elise, a Toyota-engined Elise and an N/A VX220 and chased them down – the car felt brilliant, and being able to drive it right to the limits of performance on a beautiful circuit was a real pleasure.


I’d happily relive this run every day!

My fastest lap around Oulton’s Island layout was a 1’49.3. For reference, the best we could get out of the RX-8 was a 2’01.6, but with a passenger and a couple of seconds lost behind an Elise at the end of the lap. A clean solo run might have seen a 1’57 or so. That’s a far bigger performance gap than it feels from the driver’s seat, and speaks volumes about the E36’s potential.

A fantastic start to the year. Next up would be yet more brakes, Bedford again, and another sprint…

Year 2 done

Now we draw 2015 to a close – with another sprint at Blyton, some time on the tools to solve a new issue found there, and a return to Bedford just for fun.

We returned to Blyton Park’s Eastern layout, with an opportunity to test the road-going Kumho tyres back-to-back with the track-biased Nankang NS-2Rs again. It revealed something I didn’t expect – on the semi-slicks, I felt like I was having to overwork the car. The balance wasn’t satisfying, the brakes were getting too hot and it generally felt like it wasn’t enjoying itself. Putting the Kumhos back on, it immediately felt more approachable and better balanced. I’d put most of this down to the lesser grip making it much easier to adjust the rear end with the throttle, but when you’re driving at ten tenths these tyres seem to have a much wider and more progressive slip range than the Nankangs, which either grip or don’t.

The body roll shown in the photo underlines part of the cause, that the car likely isn’t stiff enough (or properly set up) to make the best of stickier tyres. Options to improve this were geometry changes to add more front camber; spring perch adjustments to lower the front end, currently 20mm higher than the rear; or stiffer anti-roll bars such as Eibach adjustables.

Most of my timed runs were a bit scrappy, and while I did manage to improve my personal best by a few tenths, I also managed to throw the car at the gravel for the first and so far only time!


There is a limit to this “last of the late brakers” tactic…

Alongside the need for setup changes, a front wheel bearing finally tipped over the edge from “slightly irritating on the motorway” to “clearly not controlling the wheel properly any more”, with heavy vibration when loaded up. This isn’t actually a hard one to tackle yourself, since the front bearings come integrated into a whole new hub, but all the same I’ll include it in the list of mechanical DIYs I plan to add here in the future.

Off with the old…

And on with the new. This job gave good opportunity to spanner check everything on the front upright, which is a worthwhile routine after every event anyway – a fact underlined by discovering a loose coilover locking ring.

To round out the year, it was back to Bedford, with a friend along as (count ’em) the seventh person to drive the car on a circuit during my still-short tenure. 191 miles later, the tyres had rubbered in rather nicely.

As a final little giggle towards the end of the day, since Tom had never been on track in a RWD car, I fitted a pair of wonderfully named Accelera Alphas to the rear axle only. These Chinese ditchfinders are so hard that they could be plastic rather than rubber, so to say the car is rear-limited with those on the back and NS-2Rs on the front is an understatement. Then it rained… A video tells a thousand words about how slippy that combination is!


How to hone one’s reflexes in one easy lesson…

Having survived that without mishap, another season came to an end. 2016 would promise more circuits, more competition, and one big decision…

Sam

 

Bedford III – did it all help?


Watching this three years later still brings back very clear memories!

With brakes, tyres and setup improved, it was time to go back to the benchmark circuit. We all know that another track day means another new driver, and this time it was future brother-in-law Calum who got a chance to catch the track day bug – an early conversion at the grand old age of 18!

The video really does take me straight back to how the car felt that day. This was the first time it started to feel like it might be making sense on a circuit. My notes from the time:

‘The car felt superb. I was extremely impressed with the NS-2Rs, there is a huge amount of grip, much more than I was expecting – turns out they respond far better to a longer run on a “proper” circuit, as opposed to my brief tests at Curborough, and of course the surface is probably grippier at Bedford. Whatever the reason, it was mega, and I would recommend these tyres for anyone’s track car. I was glad I had the harder 180 treadwear compound, as some TT drivers using the softer type reported the fronts overheating a bit.. but then that’s a TT, might be fine on a properly balanced car wink. What can’t be denied is their durability – they’ve rubbered up nicely, but the tread has worn not a jot. Excellent.

‘I had three drivers [me, Emily and Calum] for the first time, and that was probably too much, she never had more than 15-20 minutes’ rest between sessions and I’d rather do longer runs with more breaks. We got a little over three hours out on track, 185 miles chalked up, and inter-family rivalries were continued as Emily beat the time my mum had set on her visit to Bedford!

‘As for the car, no complaints all day which is always nice. We just managed the day on a tank of fuel, having filled up 20 miles before arriving and crawling out on fumes, always nice to avoid paying Palmer’s prices or leaving the venue halfway through. Tyres as mentioned, no real wear at all, and the brakes felt good too – no fade at any point and the Redstuff front pads still aren’t quite done yet. Mintex 1144 in the rear seemed good and much more durable at the high temperatures seen on the rear axle.


‘I was suffering a bit of a loss of power due to heat soak (you can measure half a second lost down the first part of the back straight alone, despite a much faster exit from the hairpin) – I’ll need to rethink my intake design, I think I’ve got away with it up to now because of cooler ambient temperatures and longer breaks between sessions.

It all rings true today. If the car looks a little neater in the photos, that would be down to the cheapest modification yet – the removal of the one remaining foglight (450 grams out of the front end, thank you very much) and fitment of two cut-down Chinese takeaway lids, sprayed with a remarkably well-matched Audi Blau Perleffekt left over from my old A4!

Amazingly enough, the double-sided tape holding these in survived the track day. I count that as a win. Soon it would be time to see how the new tyres handled Blyton…

Sam

So are they any faster?


Before and after, McKee style…

So just how much time do you gain, going from knackered old road tyres to new semi-slicks? Quite a bit, actually! Despite a messy lap, I was over half a second faster in a back-to-back test, and absolute potential felt more like a full second over the 70-second lap.

Given that these Nankang NS-2Rs were very cheap, a hard-wearing compound and a bit narrower than the Kumho KU31s that came off, I was impressed with that. I can’t think of many other £240 changes you could make that would gain you a second per minute, not unless you were correcting really fundamental issues with the car. It’s not all about the outright pace, either – a track-oriented semi-slick will generate less heat because the tread blocks move around less, allowing you to do longer sessions and giving a far longer lifespan. In almost all cases, the investment pays you back in durability as well as performance.

In untimed practice in the morning the car felt far better, with sharper turn-in and considerably more overall grip. These tyres do need a little heat, and I had some understeer and a bit of a slippy feeling until they warmed up. What was most telling was bolting the Kumhos back on having been running the NS-2Rs all morning – I immediately found myself sliding around on exit and slightly outbraking myself. The Kumhos have been a very good tyre, but the NS-2Rs showed them up good and proper, and they only seemed to get better the more I drove them.

In reality, I probably didn’t have them properly scrubbed in, nor did I have the correct pressures or the right setup to take advantage of them. All part of the learning experience.

There’s always a bit of time to play silly buggers, too. Though one thing that felt sorely lacking by the end of this event was a limited-slip diff.. It had been evident in low-speed corners before, but Curborough is made exclusively of low-speed corners and the increased lateral load transfer on the NS-2Rs made the problem much more noticeable. It was well captured from trackside!

This kind of “one tyre fire” is deeply undesirable, so I set about searching for a solution. There are many ways to go about this, as the E36 was fitted with LSDs from the factory in various forms. My car, and most 328is, was built with a 2.93 ratio open differential in the 188mm “medium” case. An early 328i Sport (one without traction control, or ASC) has a 2.93 LSD in the same casing, and this is a direct swap. They’re also quite rare, and original Sports are getting very sought after now, so it’s not that common to find these diffs for sale. The next best option is a diff from a 3.0 M3 (not an Evo), which is a 3.15 LSD in a medium case. The driveshaft output flanges are different, but you can swap these for the ones on your original diff easily enough. The 8% shorter ratio is a useful performance boost for a track car, too. You can fit the 3.23 large-case diff from a 3.2 M3 if you really want to, but you’ll need the entire subframe, propshaft and halfshafts to suit, and unless you’re producing an awful lot of power it’s not really necessary.

As ever, there were a few more events to get through before any money would be spent…

Sam

Bedford II – More brakes needed..


One clean, clear lap of Bedford GT – April 2015

I know I said I wanted to get some semi-slick tyres fitted before taking the car out again, but it felt so nice driving it on the road after a winter of absence that I found myself back at Bedford Autodrome on the Kumhos again.

Keeping in the spirit of family involvement, this time it was my mum who came along with me, and drove really rather tidily as well! It seems a lifetime of watching motorsport teaches you to find the right line instinctively, it was a pleasure sitting in the passenger seat. Naturally I wanted to find out a benchmark lap time as well, so I went out for a solo run towards the end of the day and managed the 3:04 lap in the video. There’s plenty of time left to find out there!

Once again, the car covered just over 150 miles on the circuit, which is apparently the lifespan of a set of EBC Redstuff rear pads once you start using them hard. I wasn’t sure at the time whether it was the pads, or the grooves on the Brembo MAX discs being too aggressive and chewing the pads up, but experience has since told me those discs are just fine with proper materials clamping them. No more Redstuff for me, and wiping out an entire set of pads in one track day was irritating enough that I haven’t bought EBC since.

Admittedly, the rear brakes do get very hot on an E36. There’s quite good airflow through the fronts, but the rears have a double problem – no cooling ducts leading to the wheel well, and the handbrake shoes and mechanism are housed inside the disc, so you can’t route air to the centre as you usually would. The result, measured on a laser pyrometer after a cooldown lap, was front discs coming in around 170°C but the rears a whopping 280°C. It’s difficult to extrapolate operating temperatures from this, but suffice to say it’s pretty bloody hot. So, onto the next step up the friction material ladder:

These are Mintex, the M1155 compound for the front, and M1144 for the rear as that’s the only one they make in that size. These are aimed at fast road/track day use, but I’d read good reviews and considered them well worth trying for £120.

And, at long last…

Some semi-slicks. In the typical budget style, spending £600 on a set of Toyo R888s or Yokohama AD08Rs wasn’t on the cards, and I went for Nankang’s now-ubiquitous NS-2R in the more durable (if less grippy) 180 compound. Even before they’re mounted, it was obvious that they were much stiffer and softer than any typical road tyre I’d seen. They also come with only 5.5mm tread, which means they won’t heat up and wear too quickly if used on track from new. £60 a corner in 205/55R16.

It’d only be a month until a sprint to try them out…

Sam

 

 

Into 2015


Welcome back…

Happy New Year.. 2015!

After four months laid up over the winter, it was with some trepidation that I came back to the car to start it up again ahead of the new season. I’ve had all sorts of problems with cars left standing in the past, but I needn’t have worried… After making sure the battery was topped up, simply get in and fire. Colour me impressed.

It’s always lovely coming back to this car, especially in contrast to the daily E46 lurking in the corner of the shot. It feels so nimble and responsive in comparison, and sounds fantastic. It also felt like it had an extremely long brake pedal, which I’d been living with for too long now, so I went back to the rusted-up rear bleed nipples with renewed determination.

Not much danger of undoing that with a spanner, or even molegrips as it turned out. Short of replacing the entire caliper, which was unappealing with them in otherwise good condition, the only alternative I could come up with was to weld a nut onto the end and undo them with that.

Cue the enlistment of Mr Tyrrell’s welder and kind assistance.

We weren’t aiming for style points! This was plenty to get them undone and replaced with new ones. This let us flush and bleed the brakes properly, using ATE Super Blue fluid – especially handy because the bright colour makes it easy to see when all the old fluid is out and you’re feeding new through.

The novelty of having so little droop travel in the new suspension still hadn’t worn off!

The pedal felt much better after this, but still softer than I’d like. It wasn’t clear whether this came down to the old rubber flexi hoses or the brake pad compound, but there were still a few other things left on the to-do list first – suspension bushes.

A vagueness in steering feel about the straightahead gave me a clue to what might be causing the judder I had in high-speed braking and hard left cornering, as it felt very similar to my E46 when it had worn out its front control arm bushes. Happily, I already had a set of Meyle ones for it, kindly thrown in when James sold me the car! I figured while I was working on the front end, I may as well put some polybushes in the front anti-roll bar mounts, since that had been on the to-do list and they shouldn’t take all that long to fit.

These Powerflex Black bushes were so stiff they were actually difficult to fit over the anti-roll bar, which at least boded well for performance. They gave a more direct feel to initial turn-in, as there’s now much less compliance before the bar can generate anti-roll moment.

(Six-cylinder E36s were available with two different anti-roll bar setups. The standard car came with a 24mm front bar and a 15mm rear, but cars with the M-Tech suspension option got 25.5mm front and 18mm rear. Surprisingly, my comfy-spec SE saloon actually had that option ticked, so a common OEM upgrade was already done!)

Another use for a gear puller – persuading the rear lower control arm bushes off an E36. They didn’t come off looking too happy, as you might expect for 20 years, 178,000 miles and this removal technique.

It’s easier fitting new polybushes than rubber ones, as they slide into place with far less effort, but believe it or not Fairy liquid makes a pretty good lubricant between rubber and aluminium. It helps if all the years of road grime and bits of old rubber have been polished off first though.

Judicious use of Adam’s Dremel put one high up on my shopping list – there are just endless uses for that thing.

The outcome was a much improved drive – the steering response was more precise and direct, and the vagueness in initial turn-in was gone. Ride control over sharp bumps felt better, and I couldn’t replicate the judder under braking either. A satisfying day’s work, and all finished in time for another track day…

Sam