We load up tomorrow. Why is our BMW 325i in pieces today?

Six days into our one-day BMW engine swap, we finally saw the fruits of our labor and were able to drive our car out of the shop. Finishing the swap was only half the battle: Now we have to prepare the car to compete in the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge Presented by Tire Rack, Powered by AutoBidMaster and Built by Carlyle Tools.

The day after our E36’s maiden voyage, Tom told me that the car was headed back to my house. My garage was quite a mess the last time I had the E36 in it, but while the car was at the shop, I had plenty of time to make my garage a usable workspace. With the car back in my garage, it was time to finish preparing the car for the Challenge.

The first order of business was to install the replacement radiator fan since the original one had arrived broken. Of course, I needed a way to control the fan, so a cheap switch panel and a sheet of ABS plastic did the job. I also found a cheap gauge to help monitor the water temp, since stock gauges don’t seem to tell you much until it’s too late.

Driver comfort was the next item on the list. My first time on track was in a stock seat, and I ended up bruising my knee trying to brace myself against the door. The seat that came in this E36 chassis had power controls–and the chassis wasn’t wired for that–so replacing it with a bucket seat was a no-brainer.

The stock steering wheel posed a bit of a problem when got in and out of the bucket seat, so swapping in the quick-release steering wheel setup from my 350Z made that process much easier–plus, I think it looks a lot cooler than the crusty old one.

Once I finished up the interior, the next step was to make sure the car would pass tech inspection. I couldn’t figure out why the headlights wouldn’t turn on, so I wired them to the switch panel and called it a day. Next up was the badly cracked windshield, so a quick Safelite appointment fixed that for us.

For a while now, I’ve known that this car won’t be very competitive, but we could at least try to make it look good, right?

The previous owner had prepped the car for paint, so I didn’t have to do a ton of work before bringing it down to my buddy Grant to paint it. Grant sent me some photos during the process and the paint was coming out much darker than we expected, so the only logical move was to order more flake and hope it brightened up.

The following weekend, I went back to Grant’s to pick up the car, and the paint looked wild. I brought the car back to the shop so that Tom and I could finish buttoning up the last couple things it needed before the Challenge, so we planned one last shop day to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Where have I heard “one day in the shop” before?

Back when we were swapping in this engine, we found that the throttle cable and bracket we had on hand were for the smaller engine, so we did a temporary fix and 3D printed a bracket to make do with what we had. FCP Euro sent us the proper throttle cable to fit our engine, and immediately the throttle response felt so much better.

A couple days later, James, our ad sales guy, came to town for the ChampCar race, so we spent another night in the shop working on the E36. Our first order of business was to figure out why the brakes didn’t work very well. We found a cracked vacuum line to the brake booster, so a quick replacement of that line fixed our brake issues.

The stock seat belt did not work with our bucket seat, so we installed a harness bar and six-point harness to keep the driver planted firmly in the seat. James and Tom helped get my seating position and belts adjusted safely, and we crossed another thing off the list.

We had a pair of coil-overs waiting to go on the front of the car, so James and I each grabbed a side and installed them. The first time we set the car on the ground, we were tucking half the tire under the fender, so James and I spent some time raising the coil-overs as high as we could. The coil-overs still seemed to be really low, but we couldn’t do much more with them at this point.

Falken Tires recently sent us a set of Azenis RT660+ tires, so we got those mounted up to some wheels I bought from one of our forum users and bolted them to the hubs. We set the car back on the ground, and it sure looked rad.

Tom took the car for a quick drive around the block, but the water temp started climbing rather quickly and the “slight misfire” continued to get worse. At this point, it was almost midnight, so I headed home and ordered more parts to try to fix it.

It’s now the week of the Challenge, and Tom and I are in the shop after work again. We pulled off the valve cover and the engine looked pretty awful, so we cleaned up the valve cover the best we could and put in a new gasket, new ignition coils and new spark plugs. It was getting late again, and the car wasn’t running any better, so we called it a night.

The next day, I headed to the shop again after work to see if new injectors would help clear up the misfire. The car now seems to be idling a bit better, but still not great. Tom said the car just needed to run more and suggested I drive it to dinner, so he hopped in the car to move it for me.

We weren’t immediately sure what had broken, but thankfully it broke in the parking lot, so pushing it back in the shop wasn’t too difficult. I grabbed a jack and lifted up the car, and upon removal of the wheel we quickly found our problem. The coil-over broke.

I’m sure it’s quite “shocking” (hehe) that buying a set of coil-overs for $80 didn’t yield great results, but a failure like this I had never seen before. Thankfully, I still had the stock suspension sitting in my garage, so we called it a night and got ready to fix it the next day after work.