Ben E92 Cook

BMW E92 M3 Track Project. Edwards Motorsports who have the M3 have made some good progress with the tubular exhaust manifolds and rear silencers. They will now sit up under the rear seat position where the fuel tank once lived with side exiting exhaust pipes either side rather than out back in the normal position. This will leave room for a nice diffuser that can be made so that we don’t have any unwanted disturbances from the stock pipes getting in the way.

E92 M3 Track Project.It was a very cold and wet start to VLN 10 – the last race in the Nürburgring endurance race series – and there was thick fog blanketing the track when I arrived at the circuit. I’d come along to support my friend Beat who has been taking part in VLN along with his co-driver/co-owner, Andre.

Making assumptions is something you learn the hard way… like assuming dropping a load of weight out of the car and adding more downforce should make the car better, right?

After the last outing at the ’Ring I knew something had to be done about the suspension and the way the car handles. Part of the reason for this is because the huge GT2 rear wing upsets the car’s balance – the amount of downforce it creates even at the flattest angle of attack is creating understeer on the front end at high speed. The only way to tackle this was to stiffen up the rear but seeing as it is already mega stiff on the springs, this would make the rear even more of a handful on track. Luckily the amount of downforce it creates counteracts the problem in the high speed stuff and makes it very stable but, as said, it then upsets the front…

Typically as I’m about to write about a poor start to the summer there’s blazing sunshine coming through the window, but on the whole it’s been such a damp and soggy start to the summer that I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t have built an ark rather than a race car.

With my next track day fast approaching we still had a good few jobs to do on the M3 and one of the most daunting was changing the bottom end shells. Although Dave and I had done a few E46 M3s before, we had never tackled an S65 engine. The reason for this preventative maintenance was that worryingly there is quite a large list of cars on the American forums that have suffered with bearing failure and I even know of a German car that spun a shell at less than 40,000 kilometres.

LONGTERMERS E92 M3 Track Project. Looking back at the car last month, I couldn’t see what others were pointing out – people who knew the car before and had now seen it in the workshop were shocked and couldn’t believe what I had done to a perfectly good car. But perfect in who’s eyes? To me the car was flawed with the weight BMW was asking it to carry around and so it was far from perfect from my point of view! As I said, looking back at the photos of the unpainted cage with the carbon panels on, it did look in a state and the different colours weren’t helping the cause as far as the aesthetic police were concerned.