The Tire-Punishing, 400HP Turbo BMW E30! - /TUNED

when building a tuner car many of us begin with a plan we search for the perfect car on forums on eBay dealers in hope of finding something ideal for the project we'd like to build how will this chassis accept the power I'm feeding it can I fit the right size tires under those fenders so which wheels does the engine send the power I need a lot of parts will I get more value out of tuning a Mustang or an Audi do I need to get parts from Japan from Europe how much will that cost we consider every angle and then we buy and tuned accordingly conversely when you're young you don't necessarily have these options young people work with what they have and even though they may not have chosen the car on which their build is based the entire point of the build becomes about making the best of your resources my first car was a Mercury minivan so my tuning options were limited to rear seat removal and mattress installation Kamran on the other hand was given a BMW e30 at the time it was just an old BMW but thanks to the Internet the 24 Hours of lemons and the e30 s combination of lightweight and rear-wheel drive it's developed a rabid cult following as a great starting point for a build now I have to take the car that Cameron's father once assumed would end up in a ditch and use it to punish a set of tires okay you're wondering when we're going to do any 30 it's been it's been a long time and finally we've gotten around the one that we feel is worthy of our trip to friggin Reno this is a 1989 BMW 325is cube two and a half liters six-cylinder engine up front 5-speed manual gearbox yeah and it's turbo making 19 pounds of boost and although he doesn't know exactly what the power level is my ass dyno tells me somewhere in the neighborhood 385 deliciously flat torque curve this is a very small car to have a turbocharged inline 6 engine 2,800 pounds what I like about it is it's still got balance it's not a crazy burnout it's got phenomenal power when you get your footage it wasn't milled to impress people on the internet it was built to be the best driver that it could be for Cameron and what I mean by that was he builds a motor that made like 460 of the wheels but it was pinky and it was crap to drive so he went smaller with the turbo and went in favor of a wider torque band I'm not sure exactly the torque figure here but there is a lot of it over a very wide paladin I've tried about three different turbos now the very first build on this was basically a budget build and with a used whole set turbo off of a Dodge truck and I thought it again I thought it was great until I got you know more experienced I realized you know it's really laggy you know just power deliveries not good and then I went to a GT 35 turbo that ended up being even worse I might have made the most like peak horsepower there but drivability wasn't too good and I just sized it back down to the 20g turbo and that gives me you know the broadest power band and the best drivability it's got a dual pattern turbo cam and the end result is I mean when the power kicks in I have the turbo size properly so it comes on to full boost right at about the same time so it really just packs a punch and takes off chassis very rigid actually considering it's 25 years old very possible he's got the philistine H&R combo suspension on here pretty good for an aftermarket BMW suspension usually BMWs are ruined by aftermarket suspension not so much here probably this is the combination they raise specky 30 up it rides really nice very smooth roads in Reno absorbs bumps well and considering there's no backseat it's just bare metal back there not much actual road noise makes it into the cabin Bridgestone tires have really hard sidewalls that's kind of what they're known for they're good for autocross they help with the turn in but at the same time I feel all the little pebbles and stuff on the road he literally taught himself how to work on cars by building a turbo e30 his house and I love the stories his dad gave him the car you know thought it would be kind of a write-off and now here is seven years later and look at this thing he takes the track takes the autocross I'll tell you what fufufu if this car doesn't run middle leavens in the corner or better i would be amazed everything is do-it-yourself on it I've welded the entire exhaust myself how to teach myself how to weld just to do that tad to teach myself how to tune just to tune the car and you know you know I'd have to do a head swap on it because the first head I broke a rocker arm on just can't stop like fiddling with the car I'm on my fiftieth tune probably every time I Drive it I see a little point where I can adjust it I got the car from my dad when I was 16 is you know my first car he basically thought I was going to wreck it instead I took really good care of it and she kept building a head you know it's been hit I've rebuilt it up in the bodywork I mean I don't want you know anyone else touches all my friends actually body 30s I've had the first one now we all have you 30s and now they're actually all boosted also everyone just like on the weekend just comes over to my house and we just turbo them you've been out here in the Sun all day driving back and forth running hard we run cars harder than their owners run them and that's usually when we might now that something's going to break on this car temperature gauge hasn't moved up the smallest bit we haven't been through very much gas at all we're using a lot more from the meth injection than we thought we would be there's a not a half a tank of meth left even though we've used less than a quarter of a tank of fuel while Tom and I are in the e30 doing our bid right now Fatih is took Cameron back to his house to score more meth the e30 needs its meth fix and refuses to boost properly unless it's properly messed up far as like the chassis and the wheel and suspension setup I'm on H and our race Springs with Philistine sports it's the common now specular tea setup have drop hats in the front to get the right height a little bit better I'm on you know just an Ireland engineering 22 millimeter front sway bar 17 by 8 oz wheels they're a 36 fitments the five lugs so I needed to run adapters to get them to work my brakes are stock size but they have hock pads and they're just Brembo blank rotors for tires I'm running the stock tires off of a Subaru STi 225 45 now Seventeen's there they make a really good auto cross tire but they do not fit on stock e30 fenders so I've had to you know even came up with a guy in California thinking of custom make me these fenders and our fender flares aren't always my favorite but something about 80s cars they really work the brakes on Cameron's car are would be fine if this was running stock power 168 horsepower plenty of power up there to stop and even with upgraded fluid Hawk track pads the rotors are still very small and the calipers are still single piston calipers so on this road driving fast I'm able to get very very hot to the point where I'm a little worried now before you get down Cameron's throat about doing power before brakes recognize this he built the turbo by himself and brakes are really expensive and there's no way to cheap out on them if someone knows the value solution for e30 brakes please let us know in the comments I'm sure camera you it's unpredictable you know one minute you have traction the next minute you're driving sideways down the road and km ring emerged lanes going straight burnouts it's always exciting it never gets boring you can drive sideways oversteer this basically all it does is over steers like there's not understood just touch the gas engine is very strong as I pull out of this corner open roads now it's hard to put a price or a value on a car like this because Cameron did so much of the work himself and who knows what that would have cost in shop labor rates but as a speed per dollar value I'll put this right up there in the same level is that rsci earlier the season not much money invested I'd be amazed if this car cost more than 10 or 12 grand and actual money to build same as those RS CI is very fast four dollars spent I get why people like these things now and mad respect to a young dude with very limited resources building a stupidly quick one in his garage you really do have to admire a kid with limited resources and using his car as his own personal tuning Academy who stays committed to a project like this for so long to the point where it becomes a business all the work on this ether tea he's done while teaching himself how to do it how many people do you know who've taught themselves not just how to build a turbo system that works but bodywork paint work suspension tuning ECU mapping designing building and then selling fender flare kits this little red car in its baby-faced owner are a shining example of grassroots tuning done right a couple of takeaways from today one is that the e30 is yes an excellent platform for going fast and it's good for adding boost with its low compression bottom end too is that if you learn enough off of YouTube and have enough free time you can turn a pedestrian a30 into a Corvette beating car for probably less than $10,000 and 3 judging by the fact that all three of these cars behind me that haven't been here before have tamarins turbos on them you can also make a business case for it about that but if you want one you better buy it now because lemons is taking all the good ones I'm Matt Farah we'll see you next time you're on to

Channel: THE DRIVE

Views: 2,793,741

Rating: 4.915617 out of 5

Keywords: BMW, e30, m3, turbo, boost, kameron, baker, kamotors, reno, nevada, nv, burnout, drift, matt, farah, tuned, drive, tst, smoking, tire, thesmokingtire, thesmokingtire.com, 325i, m20, bov, blow, off, valve, alpina, review, test, turbocharged, exhaust, sound, note, gt35r, tom, morningstar, meth, injection, bridgestone, autocross, subaru, sti, race, track, BMW 3 Series (E30) (Automobile Model), BMW M3 (Automobile Model), Turbocharger (Fuel Delivery Method)

Id: adU1V9aiZqM

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/TheSmokingTire]

Thanks for sharing! Loved this car... so fun to drive.

[u/Genuine_Luck]

"My first car was a Mercury Mini-van, so my tuning options were limited to; rear seat removal and mattress installation."

Gotta love Matt Farah...

[u/stakoverflo]

God I wish I had the money, tools, and skills to do this. I absolutely love E30's, my favorite generation of them all.

[u/HimTiser]

I really feel like this is the epitome of a TUNED episode. Like Matt said, it was an interesting take into the grass roots tuning and DIY world. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't jealous of that E30.

[u/widgetsandbeer]

The e30 has such clean lines. Definitely a future classic. People will be screaming around in them for decades.

[u/battle_cattle]

E36 5lug swap gives you brakes for a 3000lb car and the 5 lug he is already running.

[u/westonenterprises]

The white one in the back on the left at the end has been for sale a few times recently. Its just too far away for me to go get.

[u/cder]

i would like to know if this guy is selling any turbo kits.

[u/[deleted]]

I almost feel like /tuned would benefit from an offshoot series where we get builds explained in technical terms for idiots like me. Just a few scenes explaining, how, where, how much and what went into the car, and how I could do the same at home.

Don't get me wrong though, I love /tuned. The legacy EP meant I nearly bought one