Caradise Project Car: So What Happened at Sonoma Raceway?

Our mission started earlier this year, where we scoured FB Markeplace for a project car. We found a few worthy candidates, and some safe choices. But instead, we took the harder road and decided to go to Joyride, where I find all my cheap hoopties in case of emergency.

There, we found the chariot to take us to glory, this broken, battered, non-running E30 325e coupe, that was rotting away at the impound, with a history that went blank in 2011. We had it towed home, where we discovered a broken oil pan, and that was how the story began.

But today, we meet our date with destiny, the last six weeks we fixed and restore this car to make sure it could do a great Autocross day at Sonoma Raceway

The Morning Started well and promising. The car performed flawlessly, if too loud due to the near non-existent muffler. Is just there holding on vibes. I didn’t dare remove the oxygen sensor, as the area around it was brittle and full of holes. But perfect soundtrack for the track.

We attended SpeedSF autocross, held at the paddocks at Sonoma. So, this configuration today was not gonna work. this time there were many curves, and barely a straight. If I tell you I spent my saturday driving a car at an average speed of perhaps 25-30 MPH, you would not think, ‘how exciting!’

The car was full of great noise, but there was no way to build up speed. I tried for three rounds of 30 min each, but no amount of trickery could get me better speed. This car needs to be above 3K RPM to find its power, but anything below 2,800 just feels and is very slow. Most of my runs stayed on 2nd gear, and first gear runs at 5K RPM, every gear does. But still, victory! Car performed well, had no mechanical issues and did the round trip like a champ.

The results, please? OK, well….We were THE SLOWEST car out there, by far. I cant think of anyone, including that Lexus SC400 coupe automatic that was floating all over the place, who was slower than us.

We were #blessed with TWO Suzuki Capuccinos, looking amazing and fun.

Then there were two other e30s. The one right next to me was a blue coupe, an 87 E30, also a 325e the owner told me. But every time I saw it driving the course, he was just blasting 3x faster than my pathetic 30MPH starts, and staying at the top of power the entire way. After an hour, I asked to take a ride with him as passenger. It was a complete blast. Then he casually reveals to me his secret….a Honda S2000 engine and transmission, hidden perfectly inside the E30. WTF? OMG.

So, after a couple of hours, decided to claim victory and head home. The car made the trip back perfectly fine and finally saw speeds above 70MPH. No problem at all above 3K RPM.  AC barely works but is still there.

Very happy to have accomplished our mission. Imagine that Top Gun Maverick movie, but Tom has to fly the old Russian plane he found, for the entire movie and mission. Somehow we made this happen. We did it! We took this E30 from the Impound to near glory and I think it could do something like Thunderhill, where there are enough flat, longs to help the car maintain speed. We’ll see if we do one more track day or not. There is potential for sure. But still needs lots of fixes.

There are a few more things to fix and we need to pass smog, and then decide on a sale or not. We shall see. But thank you everyone who supported the blog and the project all along. Thanks all y’all