In this 3rd chapter to our huge Forum Build Thread and series of GRM magazine articles we cover some major prep work to the Pontini Racing 2014 BRZ. This time they have a roll cage built, and we dive deep into the choices for doing this critical and required safety step.
After the method of having the cage built was decided, the shop picked, and the deed completed the team jumped into prepping the floors and cage to be painted. We cover 3 methods to paint the cage and 2 methods to remove tar paper off the floors. Then the window net was installed, then the fire system mounted and plumbed.
The team also installed a motorsports style defroster, tow hooks at both ends (including a custom soft rear strap), Lexan rear window, multiple CNC cut and hand made aluminum panels for various controls and switches, and all manner of other details. Then the car was weighed and off to the track the team went for Track Test #3 – one week before their debut ChampCar Endurance race! Hundreds of pictures, tech tips, in-car videos, and more are covered in Part 3 of the Forum Build Thread. Thanks for reading!
This might be a blast from the past for you long time Vorshlag fans – we purchased this 1991 BMW 318is back in August of 2024 that we sold in early 2009. Purchased originally in 2007, this was one of the first four cars we built up when we started Vorshlag. We had a Forum Build Thread for this car that we started in 2007 but decided to kick off a new E30 Development Thread for this new chapter.
This one had been sitting for several years in the hot Texas sun, which baked off the paint and damaged some things like the dash. But we couldn’t just let this car rot away and the sellers were happy we could buy this back and restore it to its former glory.
While restoring this car we are also using it to develop some new products for the BMW E30 chassis, like these brake cooling deflectors (above), new seat brackets, and much more to come. We have even picked a Time Trial race class to build towards, with an eye towards competition later in 2025.
After replacing brake rotors, pads, hubs, and other fluids we got to work on the interior. Now this E30 has a new dash pad, Sparco tilt back seats, Sparco harnesses, a MOMO steering wheel and NRG quick release. The paint needs some serious attention but we will attack that, all in good time.
We have chronicled ALL of this work from August of 2024 to February of 202 in this new Forum Build Thread. The forum coverage stops right before we got these 225mm Bridgestone RE-71RS tires mounted, earlier this week. We have done several test drives and the car is loaded up to go to MSR Cresson for some baseline lap testing later today. Thanks for reading!
As of January of 2025, we have discontinued all of our Bilstein based website entries. This was not a choice we made lightly, as we have been a Bilstein dealer for over 15 years and have developed numerous unique products using their dampers. The availability of the Bilstein dampers has been extremely limited, and once they run out of stock we have to wait months (sometimes 6 months or more) before product is available again.
As a small company, we at Vorshlag can only afford to hold a limited amount of stock of Other People’s Parts (OPP), and we rely on being able to restock frequently direct from the manufacturer or a wholesale warehouse. The way Bilstein is functioning the last 8+ years we would have to buy a full years’ worth of stock for every part number we need from them – then hope that we can sell it, or that we don’t run out.
With so many Bilstein based kits we listed on our site, we constantly ran into long lead times for items that our customers ordered. With the “Amazon-ification” of online shopping habits, customers have nearly zero tolerance for waiting. Those delayed orders inevitably turned into cancellations and refunds, which costs us both time and money – and it hurts our reputation with those customers.
We were happy with the quality and function of the Bilstein monotube OEM replacement dampers and PSS coilover kits, but we simply rely on their inventory. To complicate things, Bilstein has an extremely low profit margin for their authorized dealers (due to a very big gap between their set MSRP and allowed MAP pricing). That is almost acceptable if we can order products as needed (and add something to them like our top mounts, to make some sort of profit), but that slim margin does not cover the holding costs to have a full years’ worth of stock sitting on our shelves.
We recognize this creates a hole in our suspension offerings for our lower cost of entry “StreetPro” kits (see above), the PSS ride height adjustable coilovers, and even the modified coilovers we made from their monotube B6 dampers we called the “TrackPro” (see below) – which we built when Bilstein didn’t make a PSS kit for a particular car model.
We have identified a potential replacement supplier of quality, monotube dampers with ride height adjustability and a huge model range. We will be testing this more attractive option soon, but we also need to verify inventory of this brand before we add them to our website. Stay tuned!
The 2nd installmentin our very detailedForum Build Thread for this 1995 M3 shows work we have done from July into December 2024 on this barn find E36 we call Project #Hellrotten – both from the “Hellrot” factory color as well as the fact that it needed a good bit of restoration to make it into the Vorshlag team of track cars. Hundreds of pictures and videos are linked within this latest post. Vorshlag co-owner Amy will pilot this car next season in SCCA Time Trial competition, so we had a lot of work to do this Fall to get her ride reliable and fast. We have already put this car through two track tests and have another lined up in just a matter of days, to get ready for the 2025 season.
In this linked installment we show the restoration and race prep we performed over a 5 month period. This included a complete cooling system upgrade, with Mishimoto radiator, electric fan, radiator hoses, reservoir, a new water pump, and more. We also chased vacuum leaks in various forms, replaced an injector, added Vorshlag engine and transmission mounts, and so many other little repairs to get this 2.99L S50 BMW engine running strong and reliably. Of course we added an oil pump shaft/sprocket upgrade as well as an oil pan baffle kit from Achilles Motorsports, to keep this inline 6 supplied with oil when pushing hard on track. A good bit of detail time was spent underhood making this M3 look better than the day when it was new.
The suspension upgrades made to this car were extensive and included Motion Control Suspension “RR2” remote reservoir double adjustables, with Vorshlag camber plates and shock mounts. SPL Parts rear arms and sphericals, the entire Powerflex catalog of poly bushings, Whiteline adjustable swaybars, and even some elusive Hotchkis rear end links. The venerable RTAB bushing was replaced with sealed spherical Moog parts, and a Vorshlag welded RTAB pocket reinforcement keeps all of that squared away. We completely rebuilt the entire rear subframe assembly and detailed everything we touched along the way.
The interior needed a major clean up, but it turned out nice with Sparco EVO QRT racing buckets, MOMO Montecarlo 350mm Alcantera steering wheel, and an NRG QR hub – with a working horn button. We cover the development of new Vorshlag E36 seat bracket base mounts, which evolved over several weeks in this car. This E36 also got a custom mount for the Garmin Catalyst lap timer, USB ports, a modified 4-point roll bar, Sparco 6-point harnesses, and a custom rear bulkhead panel to separate the passenger cabin from the trunk. You can read the huge 5-part forum entry starting here. Thanks for following along and encouraging us with this 30 year old race car build – we’ve had fun developing new parts for the E36 chassis, which is as popular now as it ever was!
The latest entry into our long form chronicle of our LS swapped 2015 Mustang Time Trial pig we call Trigger is up on the Vorshlag Forum. Inside this 3-part update we cover the major upgrades we made in late 2023 with this car. We wanted to catch up on all of the 2023 struggles, victories, and breakthroughs we had with this car before 2024 was in the rear view mirror. After reading this, maybe you can learn something from our trials, testing, and tribulations.
A big part of those late 2023 updates included improvements to the aero balance of this car. Our version 3 of our “C-pillar mount” swan neck wing uprights lowered the dual element Nine Lives Racing carbon wing and moved it forward, effectively reducing rear downforce. We also added a new splitter with a full 12″ forward extension, large ducted fender vents, and new end treatments on the splitter that acted as both an end plate and a wheel wicker.
This latest update also includes a few more race and test events, with video and results. And at the very end of 2023 we took the car to Rapscallion Motorsports and had them install a Haltech 2500 Elite EFI system replacing a troublesome Holley Dominator EFI system we fought with throughout 2023. That solved a lot of problems, added some new capabilities, and the initial dyno pull even uncovered a dead ignition coil – who knows how long that 110 hp was missing? We tell our customers all the time to have an annual “check up” dyno pull done, which if you do this at the same dyno every year can show mysteriously lost power – so those errors can be tracked down. Again, you can read the latest here – and we’ll get to work on writing up what we learned in 2024 now!
We love endurance racing and so do a lot of our customers. Our friends at Pontini Racing were building a new race car and I was able to chronicle both their decision process and the build up to their first ChampCar Race. I was also lucky enough to share some of this in an article for Grassroots Motorsports Magazine, which is in the December 2024 issue. I cannot link to the digital version that is on GRM+ because it is behind a paywall, but if you are a subscriber it is easy to find on their site. Pick up an issue, which is out on new stands now!
The second part to this multi-article series is now live on our little forum. That will be cleaned up and edited for GRM in a future article, we suspect. Thanks for reading!
We custom ordered this 2024 Mustang Darkhorse with the optional handling pack and received it in October of 2023. We utilized this car to test fit many of the S550 suspension parts we sell, and even developed a few new products for the S650 chassis using this car.
In August of 2024 we stopped driving this car then detailed it inside and out for a quick sale. At the time we had MCS triples and aftermarket wheels on the car with an elevated price.
That “hopped up” Darkhorse did not sell, so in October of 2024 we removed the aftermarket suspension and put this car back to stock. It has 1765 miles and many parts have fewer than that. We have it priced aggressively – you can see all of the details and a lot more pictures at this classified page.
Please first check the classified page to see the status of this car (has it sold yet?), but if its still listed with a price it is still available for purchase. This car has always been stored indoors and looks flawless in person. Give us a call to schedule a test drive. Thanks!
We haven’t introduced a new Project Build Thread onto our forum in a minute, but we started writing this one of our E36 M3 “Barn Find” (Project Hellrotten) back in July when we took it out of long term storage. That goal was to see if we could restore this car to a running state and/or make it into a usable race car and product test mule.
The paint + interior condition and 214K miles prevented this one from being a good “restoration” and flip candidate, but a race car don’t care about any of that! In only 3 weeks our crew had this car running again, swapped in new rotors / hubs, developed a new brake cooling solution for the E36, and began much of the deferred maintenance that this car needed.
This link goes to the Vorshlag E36 Development thread which will cover the build up of this car as well as bring in some E36 tech we have learned over the last 20 years of owning and racing these cars. We stopped our first entry after we got the car running, but will go back and fill in the blanks of everything we have done to date. Stay tuned for track test #2 in this car soon! #E36tech
The last year competing with our Time Attack Mustang we call Trigger has been pretty amazing, but it wasn’t without some tough beginnings, from January to October of 2023. In our latest update to our S550 Forum Build thread we cover the challenges we had in the summer of 2023 – with low oil pressure plaguing the performance of our HPR 454″ LS7, to the lack of grip before we added some aero enhancements.
This thread updateextensively covers every step of the front splitter construction and rear “floating C-pillar” wing installation on our S550 Mustang track car shown here. We delve a little into the theory, the rules, the tunnels added, the rear mounting bracket, and the exposed splitter struts. We also talk about our dual element Nine Lives Racing carbon rear wing, how we mounted that, and then our initial testing with aero – which was still with the factory GM “LS7” based internal 2 stage dry sump system.
Adding aero and more lateral grip made our low oil pressure issues even worse, so we immediately paused the race season so we could add an external 4 stage dry sump pump. That “bolt on” job snow balled into custom machining virtually every part we started with to fit correctly. This was a huge amount of work, and once it was finally mounted, it was still a lot of plumbing. We take the time to explain all of the steps of this external dry sump pump conversion, with pictures and warnings to others, in the forum thread. But all that work paid off, big time.
At our first competition event after this work in October of 2023 we had our biggest lap time drop and a huge win, which we discuss in the forum build thread with pictures and video. We have since changed the aero package in several ways, which we will cover in future updates, but this initial setup was a massive upgrade to this car and makes it much more enjoyable to drive on track. Thanks for reading!
After 7 years of ownership, and spending way too much time and money building it up, the Vorshlag “parts runner” 2000 Chevy regular cab / short bed Silverado 1500 has a for sale page, that reads like a build book.
This Arctic White truck has a lot of unique modifications and parts, including a Belltech 5/7 drop suspension kit (with numerous customized tweaks by Vorshlag Motorsports to get the ride height level), C-notched frame kit, an auto leveling Air Lift rear bag setup, Bilstein 5100 monotubes with remotes, and an upgrade to the biggest OEM brakes from this GMT800 trucks and Tahoe.
The engine was changed for a spicier LS variant built by Erik Koenig of HorsePower Research, which is a 5.7L inside an iron LS block, all forged internals, and completely rebuilt and dyno tuned by Sergio at LG Motorsports. It has a port matched Dorman TrailBlazer SS style intake, American Racing Headers 1-7/8″ stainless long tubes, and a custom stainless 3″ exhaust with a massive MagnaFlow muffler. The 4L60 is rebuilt with a 2800 stall, and the rear end has a new Auburn LSD and 3.73 gears, as well as new bearings and seals.
The body was repainted in 2021 with a 2005 Silverado SS front end conversions, which includes: new fenders, hood, lights, grill, bumper, and SS nose. This truck sits on Weld Racing 20×11″ wheels and 315mm Bridgestone rubber, which are also new. The interior is immaculate. This truck has numerous Vorshlag details throughout and will make the new owner very happy, and popular every time it pulls into a parking lot.
We are here to answer any questions – just call us at Vorshlag at 972-422-7170. The classified ad also has a LOT more information inside, linked here. Thanks!
