e430 Endurance Racecar build by WOT-Tech

4 minute(s) of a 17 minute read

The car did not finish the 14hrs. A few hours into the race the injector harness shorted at the firewall. Got that remedied and the car ran good except the fact that when turning off the main battery cut off, the car would "limp" the first 30mins until the ECU reset.

10hrs in the differential overheated the fluid, spit it all out the vent and eventually got so hot it melted the rubber mounts - eventually failing and the car no longer moves under it's own power. Will get pics later when the car comes back to the shop.

Few things to note:

We made a surge tank, cured the horrible fuel starvation in the corners once the tank was at 5/8's. The automatic HAS to go. Too difficult to drive fast, even when manually shifting it. The ECU speed limited the car to 130mph, it was capable of going much faster.

On a side note: The owner for Renntech was there racing another car. He said he has a limited slip that bolts in, so we will be changing that. He also said he could remove the speed limiter and raise the rev limiter (they want a lot of $$ to do it), but we have yet to decide if we are going to do an engine swap to make a manual conversion easier, or try to use a ZF BMW gearbox and make-shift clutch setup.

We couldn't find race pads for the single piston calipers, so we swapped in e55 calipers, rotors and used Hawk DTC 70 racing pads. They barely wore in the 10 or so hours, but the front is now too heavily biased - planning on a proportioning valve.

You can see professional pics here from AWOL Photo:

http://www.awolphoto.smugmug.com/key...9019&k=JMS3s8N

As you can see, there's new dents in the car. We had a test day at Sebring with NASA and one of the drivers ended up tangling with an e46m3. Bent the lower control arm, inner fender, fender and both left side doors. It definitely looks like a crap-can now!

They classified the car as EC (exceptional class) as the e430 is not on the list of approved cars (but the e320 is??).

We converted the A/C condenser into a transmission cooler. The owner of Renntech said it's too big and the transmission would be running too cool, but we don't plan on keeping it auto for long. The next race is in September at Sebring and we didn't plan on bringing the Benz, but we picked up a few more drivers on our team, so we will most likely bring the BMW e30 and the W210 ("Daz Benz").

6-26-2015

We believe a bearing in the diff went, cooking the fluid and once the fluid was gone it overheated and broke.

Sorry to say, but we may be looking at a drive-line donor. We will be keeping the rear end, but installing a limited slip.

The donor is looking like it will be a 4th generation Camaro with it's Ls1 and t56 6 speed. This is going to be the least expensive option since the ECU flash and manual conversion is going to end up costing more than the whole Camaro. This way we will get the pedal box, clutch hydraulics etc, we can purchase parts at any auto parts store for it, and since we are in EC class, it doesn't matter what we do to the car anymore as it's an unlimited class. This swap will only require engine/trans mounts and a custom drive shaft, all which we have the ability to fabricate in house (just have to have the drive shaft balanced). We already have HP Tuners, so we will have full control over the engine. No more speed limiter.

Really curious to see how this thing will do with 350hp and a real gearbox