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The LeMons racers of the deep South tend to be among the more innovative when it comes to unconventional modifications to their race cars. Last week, we looked at some crazy Southerners and their Cessna-wing-equipped Honda Civic. This week, we return to the South for a can't-lose engine swap concept: a BMW E30 powered by a Chrysler slant-six engine.
I posted the not-so-rhetorical question, "When are we going to get a slant-six E30?" on the 24 Hours of LeMons forums back in late 2008, and—as happens so often in the LeMons world—a team promptly set about delivering an answer. The E30 BMW 3-series is one of the most common LeMons cars, and true LeMons aficionados insist on wild themes or ill-advised engine swaps in the E30, to make it less, well, boring. Mixing the Teutonic engineering mastery of the E30 chassis with Chrysler's simple-and-indestructible pushrod six should result in racetrack dominance! So, at the 2011 'Shine Country Classic event, Team E30/6 showed up with a bright red 325i sporting a bright green 225-cube slant-six under the hood. 
The only thing better than an E30 with a slant-six, of course, is an E30 with a slant-six and an early-'60s Chrysler pushbutton gear selector!
The E30/6 looked great on the track, but transmission woes and engine oiling problems (no doubt stemming from the fact that the engine sat in a yard for a decade or three before being swapped into the Bimmer) held the team back. When the checkered flag waved, car No. 225 had finished 60th out of 68 entries.
Having spent most of the weekend spinning wrenches, the E30/6 team vowed that the car would be truly ready for the next race. 
With another, allegedly less worn-out engine painted in proper Mopar Orange under the E30/6′s hood, the team was ready for the Southern Discomfort 2012 race earlier this month.
The car was much, much quicker than before, setting lap times just a few seconds slower than the BMW M20-equipped E30s and sounding much better than any of the BMW-powered BMWs.
The Dodge Dart air cleaner sticking out of the hood must have added several ram-air horses to the mighty 225′s output. In the end, the E30/6 finished 36th out of 83 entries. Normally, this performance would have rated LeMons racing's top prize, the Index of Effluency . . . but the '12 Southern Discomfort race featured an AMC Pacer, a Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo, and a Buick Reatta with supercharged 3800 power, and the E30/6 got edged out in the IOE calculations by those far more terrible machines. In the end, the Reatta triumphed, but we expect the E30/6 to be a strong IOE contender in future races.
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com |
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