BMW E30 track project

The difference between owning a car and loving one? Dale's new purchase could be the perfect example

This particular little BMW E30 318is has always interested me. It's small, light and simple. With no ABS, no power steering and a sub-1,000kg weight, it's the very antithesis of modern performance cars. When I heard my friend might be putting it up for sale, I played it cool, got the details, nodded and walked away. But all that night, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

What if somebody else bought it? My regrets list is pretty short, but one of them is not buying a clean Cat-D Elise S1 for £3,750 back in 2008. For some reason, this diminutive 3 Series was ringing the same kind of bells.

Seemed a crime to leave it idle...

Getting to know you
The next evening, the owner offers me a test drive, just 10 minutes, keep it local. Bend it, buy it. Luckily for me, local is pretty damn good.

It's dusk, it's raining, it's autumn. But accelerating hard up the hill to Hohe Acht gravity's fingers don't seem to have such a good grip on the super light BMW. It started life as a two-door 316i in Atlantis Blau, good condition. But then a previous owner converted it into a caged-up track car, sacrificing a rusty 318is to the gods of the engine swap. That's when my old boss Fredy bought it, and it's appeared on PistonHeads before .

Then, last winter, Fredy upgraded it even more. Plastic windows, totally stripped, lacking even a heater. Every moving part serviced, renewed or replaced. And then there's the new motor...

This is a proper track tool, no corners cut

Aussie rules
The grin on my face is threatening to take on Cheshire Cat proportions. Revving easily to 7,000rpm, the clatter of solid valve buckets is lost in the wail from the race exhaust. This is no normal 318is! With an M44 bottom-end (from the face-lift E36 1.9) and an original M42 up top, it's definitely grown in capacity. Forged pistons and 256-degree Schrick cams ensure the top-end of the rev-range is explosively hilarious.

The gearing is aggressively short, and the ratios closely spaced. Through the Eifel hairpins the unassisted steering is alive with feedback. The NVH might be off the scale, but the full complement of Powerflex bushes, H&R suspension and Eibach anti-roll bars ensure the driver is better connected than a politician on the take.

When purchasing cars, it's always wise to take a knowledgeable and preferably sceptical mate. Rounding another hairpin with clumsy snatches of opposite lock, I shout across at Aussie Dave in the passenger seat, in search of a second opinion.

Non-assisted steering takes some arm twirling

"WHAT DO YOU THINK?!"

He holds up both thumbs, with a grin even bigger than mine.

"F***ING AWESOME, MATE!"

Sold.

It's a date
Ever since selling my Eunos turbo, I've struggled to really love a car. I've bought good cars, I've bought bad cars. But I've never really loved one like I did that NA Roadster. I started to love the RX-8, but it broke my heart. And now, only a few days into ownership, I'm falling in love again. If our first date was that poorly-lit fumble up the Hohe Acht pass, then our second date should be something classier. Something to remember.

Luckily for me, I'm already signed up for a trackday with Trackdays.de. As the names suggests, they do trackdays, in Deutschland (sometimes Spa) and today they have the Nordschleife. Dates with track cars don't get much better than that. But this is a working date.

Diff, track suspension set-up, loud exhaust - sorted

Just warming up
It starts slow, sighting laps with a student behind me. Ducks and drakes with a 136hp Suzuki Swift in tow. The lack of power assistance, combined with over four turns of steering lock, means I can't slide this car around as effortlessly as my old E36 328i. Go too far the wrong way, and it's a struggle to haul the steering wheel all the way through the range quick enough to prevent a spin.

Lap after lap, the pace increases, and the little E30 comes to life. It's not a car for dawdling or driving slowly, truth be told. The steering is a little heavy, and the 16-valve engine prefers to be revved. At low revs it's still got pick-up thanks to the low ratios.

Enough with the foreplay!
It's nearly the end of the day, and the Swift is all done. Off the leash, full throttle to the redline in every shift, the E30 is flying. No students, no sighting laps, just driving for fun.

The performance is impressive, with genuine 200hp cars yielding to the little 318is in a straight line. The new LSD locks up really nicely on corner exits and the car sits just a couple of hundred rpm below the 7,000rpm 'advised' redline in top gear. The stock redline is a little over 6,000rpm, in case you were wondering. The engine note changes around 5,000rpm, but it's from 6,200 to 7,000rpm that my new car makes its finest noise.

Where else was he going to test drive it?

And that four-cylinder BMW is so much lighter than the six-pot in my old car, the balance is sublime. Not only is it smaller by two whole cylinders, but the weight is further back. That short M44 block resting behind the front axle, not over it.

You can feel it as the car rotates, both into and out of corners. Pitching in to the long curves like Miss-Hit-Miss and Angstkurve, the stiff rear ARB keeps the car balanced on a knife-edge. On full throttle the steering wheel still needs to be gently coaxed throughout the whole corner, it's so balanced. The driver is in control. This is a car that you really have to drive. Mistakes are punished, perfect driving is rewarded. It makes me feel good.

It might nearly be a historic now (actually a Youngtimer in German racing parlance), but this car is pure driving pleasure. And I'm properly in love. Regular PH Fleet updates to follow...

The inevitable 'ring lap...