Vorshlag Blog

Many of you know that Vorshlag has a lot of experience with the three generations of MX5/Miatas for chassis, wheel/tire, suspension and braking upgrades. This is a great chassis that has been sold in huge numbers, which any shop that dealt with autocross and track customers would be supportive of. One thing that is common on Miata owners upgrade lists is power upgrades. Vorshlag isn’t really an “engine tuner shop” but we do have one solution that always adds power.

What you might not know is that we started developing an LS1 V8 swap into the NB Miata chassis about a year ago. This quickly became our most involved swaps we had ever attempted, and in the end only the basic body and interior are going to be left unchanged. Each OEM system we tried to keep intact restricted reliability, so system after system has been replaced.

Late in the Fall of 2013 we made a lot of progress on this Miata LS1 swap and completed our prototype front tubular crossmember replacement. This beefy unit will allow us to have the room we need for the engine, oil pan and custom full length exhaust headers to fit, which the stock front subframe would not. This crossmember also allowed us to upgrade the hubs from the small OEM 4×100 hubs to stronger 5×114.3 hubs from the RX8, which also came with the aluminum control arms and RX8 uprights from this chassis as well. The tubular structure should add chassis rigidity to this convertible chassis as well.

The end goal is to use an 18×10″ wheel at all four corners with a 285mm wide tire, which should help tame the 450 hp LSx V8 that was built for this Alpha car. Once this car is on track and sorted we will look at kit production schedules, so look for this one to be rolling sometime in 2014. You can read the latest updates on this build thread starting here.

After the 2015 Mustang was delayed we had switched our 2014 race season plans to building and campaigning a BMW E36 LS1 race car. But then our customer service work increased to a point where we haven’t had a chance to complete our own race car. And our TT3 Mustang wasn’t selling, so what do we do?

Since we had no takers we decided to keep our winning TT3 Mustang, make it even better, and keep racing it next year! Read the latest 3-part update on our S197 Mustang Build thread to learn what we have in store.

Many of those “wish list” items we didn’t get to develop or exploit will get a chance in 2014 on this red 5.0 Mustang. This list includes all of our favorite things: bigger tires, better aero, less weight, and more power! Stay tuned in 2014 as we push the envelope on the S197 chassis further and further.

Have a Happy New Year from all of us at Vorshlag!

We have some updates to the build thread that we started in September 2013 for our BMW E36 LS1 project. This car is being built for NASA ST2 and TT2 classes, so it will have a full cage, fire system, FIA seats, and all of the wheel to wheel safety gear.

In hits, our 2nd update to this build thread, we cover the work from the past two months. This includes stripping and selling an hail damaged, engine-less E36 M3 4-door “donor chassis” that gave up all of its delicious M3 bits.

Once the M3 subframes were removed we had them bead blasted, then welded in several reinforcement kits and had them powder coated. The ST2 chassis also got a lot of attention including seam welding and additional reinforcement kits installed.

Last up we start talking about the cage that is going into this car, which has the main tubes already bent. This update has a lot of pictures showing what goes into a typical BMW race car build. You can begin reading the latest forum updates here. Enjoy!