It's been about a year and a half since I started this project and today was the first time I considered writing about it. Somehow, despite my best intentions, capturing the process on video as I have been doesn't feel as informative as I’d like it to be. It shows the “how” but not the story behind it, not the “why.” Anyway, this might be a better spot for it, even if no one reads this or future posts like it. In the end, when the car is done I can say, hey- I actually wrote about this process and while it was happening all this other stuff in my life was happening too circling around it. I do best when I have projects. They help snub and average the chaotic spikes from everything else.
For about a year before I started on the M3, I had been thinking about selling my Lancer Evo II, a car I'd owned since 2004, almost 18 years at that point. I really liked the Evo but after competing in it for the third time at Mt Washington Hillclimb and putting a bunch of work and money into the car, my time in 2019 was nearly the same as in 2016! Everyone else got faster so I didn't place as high in the results. I started thinking that the old car had reached it’s peak of developent and that any further improvement would mean a full overhaul. I wasn't enthusiastic about that. I started talking to friends about selling it, posting it online here and there. At the time, I wasn't really sure what was next. I considered one of those Dytko Sport Protos which even now in November 2022 seems like it would have been a cool idea. For one, the car would have been done by now. Second, it would be a contender for overall wins at the right events. That option was being weighed against building an E30 M3, a car I had owned before in street trim and a car I was always nostalgic about. “The best M3”, the most winning sportscar in history maybe? Rally, hillclimb, DTM, JGTC, BTCC, you name it and it was winning. Financially it could be explained because a car like that, done right would always be worth money, especially if it started with a real M3 and wasn't a replica. “It was an investment!”
Once I decided on an M3, the next order of business was how to get started. I originally aimed at buying a prepared shell from Vink Motorsport, Mats Motorsport or Matter and building it slowly. That plan matured into negotiation with Ton Vink about preparing the whole car, and then to Mats over the same thing. They were both great to talk with. Vink was always wanting to talk on the phone, not email which was tricky, Mats wanted to do some maneuvering with my buying a whole car from him and then his parting it out, then selling him the title back. Neither wanted to deliver me only a shell. It was the whole car or nothing and quite frankly I couldn't afford to pay either of them to carry the project straight through as their build pace would have been much faster than my spend pace. For those two, selling only a shell made no sense because they subcontract the shell preparation and they would therefore not make enough money from the job to justify dealing with me. Matter would have prepared a shell for me for 40k Euro which I should have done. We questioned Matter’s fabrication skills despite their lengthy palmares in motorsports, we knew we could do better, despite the cost inevitably being the same in the end. Both of those guys have customers lined up with blank checks to be signed. There’s little value in negotiating with a customer like me and I was at least aware of that so I never pushed. Engaging in a really big transaction with someone thousands of miles away is also not easy. Hiring anyone in Europe therefore felt a little stressful from the outset and a fun project shouldn’t start that way.
You're reading this, an abridged version, a compression of several months of planning and car searching, parts hunting and obsessing over different shells, books, magazines, photos online.. it was probably over a hundred hours of research. I’ve been logging my work hours in a journal. We can talk about that one later.
After I parked my hopes of having someone else do the most laborious part of the project for me, I started looking stateside for a shell or a car that needed work. After a couple months, my friend Nick found a shell on Facebook Marketplace, an 88 in Salmon Silver Metallic with 70k miles and a lot of parts. It wasn’t too far away (Ohio) and already had a roll cage. The car was built for BMW CCA and used once or twice then parked for 7 years, it’s parts being picked away and slowly sold for whatever reason. I talked to the seller and we settled on 27k for the engine-less rolling shell and an assortment of parts. My first M3 I bought for 10k in 1998. It was a running car with some dents but all original. Times had changed.
If my memory serves, the shell came with:
Circle track steering column (Ugh..)
US Spec Getrag 265/6 5 speed
Fenders, (front wings), one dented
Rear windscreen
Two tail lights, one cracked badly
Grilles, several, some broken
axles
Gas tank
Diffs online 4.75 short rear diff with uprated LSD (brand new w/Motorsport gears)
front subframe (stock)
Rear subframe (stock)
Rear trailing arms
original doors with the inner skins cut out
Original rear bumper cover and boat anchor reinforcement
original steel hood
carbon fiber hood
“Mark McMahan” roll cage (well constructed but confusingly engineered)
When the deal was done, a good load of parts were included but not many that I was actually interested in. My interest was in making as big a parts grab from seller as possible in hopes that I could recuperate money by selling them. I sold the gearbox to a guy with a 3.0 coupe, I sold the gas tank to an M3 owner, the subframes I kept as spares. I’ll have to modify them to the new spec but it’ll be worth the time later. It’s amazing all the things you don’t have when you don’t start with a complete car. Window trim, interior trim, seals, gaskets, blinker lenses, the list goes on. In late February 2021 I wired this guy the money and a week or so later he loaded the car, with all the spares stuffed inside, up on an enclosed two-car trailer driven by a transporter who I would soon meet in my dark work parking lot outside of Boston MA. Next up, the delivery.
The M3 sits in the dark parking lot after a huge effort in getting it out of the trailer.