Vorshlag customer and ultimate “destructive parts tester” Bill Caswell is at it again. He’s taking his specially built BMW E30 back to the Baja 1000 and the trip is being chronicled at a blog called mylife@SPEED. Vorshlag sent Bill some of our BMW steering shaft parts for the E30 buggy this week and our favorite Pike’s Peak class winner and Rally Goddess Brianne Corn is heading down there to crew/co-drive/whatever. Give em Hell, guys!
We finally brought McCall’s BMW Z3M LSx swap to the Vorshlag shop to finish up a few things, namely the custom dual 3″ stainless exhaust. We’ve got some pictures and details in the build thread, located here.
2011 Queen of The Mountain Brianne Corn Will Race Again At The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb Next Summer
Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Press Release:
Brianne Corn became the first woman to triumph at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 27 years when she shocked the field in winning the Time Attack 4WD division last summer. The experience for the driver from San Marcos, Texas, must have been rewarding enough, because she has registered again for a return to America’s Mountain on July 8 next summer in her 2005 Subaru STI and a shot at a repeat crown.
Even with a blown clutch during the final stages, Corn reached the summit in the winning time of 11:56.422 to become only the second woman in the history of the nation’s second-oldest motorsport race behind the Indy 500 to win. The other was Michelle Mouton in 1984. Corn had competed at Pikes Peak twice before (2009, 2010) in the motorcycle division. But longed for the challenge in an automobile, so she registered a year ago with a rebuilt auto and won.
Vorshlag is an American Racing Headers dealer and we have added the 2011-2012+ Mustang GT “Coyote” 5.0L header to our catalog (click here). We *LOVE* these headers and use them on our own Mustang!
(click to enlarge)
These full length headers are available in your choice of 1-3/4″ and 1-7/8″ primaries, and both with and without catalysts. We put a set of these in 1-7/8″ primaries with their X-pie and high flow cats on our 2011 GT and it made a big bump in power at all RPMs! ARH claims +35 whp and we agree – its a nice increase across the board. We’ve got an installation gallery and can give you more tips for the work needed to get them on. If you see another ARH application you want to purchase from Vorshlag, drop us a line or give us a call and we can get them for you.
More progress and some great pictures are shown in the latest build thread update (click here!) for the prototype BMW E46 LS1/T56 build (and swap kit) we’re making here at Vorshlag. We now have the prototype motor mounts + transmission crossmember completed and are delving into the prototype full length headers next.
Stay tuned for more updates as progress is made!
This is our car with the CCW 18×11″ wheels (not used for GRM competition, of course!)
Vorshlag’s own Fair, Amy and Costas towed 17 hours to the Kumho Tires $2011 Grassroots Motorsports Challenge over Oct 6-8th, with our little BMW E30 LSx V8. We had covertly added a new “BMW Art Car” theme with hand cut vinyl a few days before leaving for Florida, and that extra attention to detail helped us place well in concours among the 48 car field, where we placed 7th in judging.
Then with Costas driving, and our hard work testing and perfecting the rather compromised suspension set-up, we won the autocross event! That was a huge goal for us, and it paid off in a big way when the Saturday drag race portion was cancelled, due to rain. The drag racing was attempted, but shut down after a handful of cars made runs, including us (it rained all the way down the drag strip).
In the end they threw out the drag times, and lo and behold the Vorshlag E30 was sitting on top! We’re extremely thankful to all of the volunteers that helped build this car, and would also like to thank GRM and the event sponsors: Kumho Tires, CRC Products, RacingJunk.com and NASA.
Left: Our 1st place Autocross Trophy. Right: Our GRM “shrine” at our new shop, with the Overall Trophy + 2010 Magazine Spread
You can read more about the GRM event at this forum post. This is an epic forum post that had to be broken up into 3 parts, due to size constraints by more forums. We have almost 1000 pictures and videos, including in-car video of our autocross and drag race runs, as well as video of other driver’s entries. Over the past 2 years of building this car, on the 5 forums we cross post the build thread to, we’ve now topped 500,000 forum views on this build thread. Wow?!
If this is what we can do with a BMW V8 for $2011, imagine what we can build you with a better budget?!? 😀 Vorshlag is now building turn-key BMW LSx V8 swaps at our new state-of-the-art facility, including BMW E36, BMW E46, and maybe even an E30 build or two. Shoot us an email and we can build your dream car.
Costas and Terry spent last Friday afternoon testing the E30 V8 before next weekend’s $2011 GRM Challenge. We learned a lot and had a great time putting 43 laps on the car. You can read more on the Vorshlag forum thread or just watch the compilation video below. See you next week in Florida!
We’ve worked on our $2011 GRM Challenge BMW E30 V8, the scrappy little junkyard dog, for the past 6 weeks. In that time we’ve pulled and reinstalled the drivetrain twice: once to swap out a broken transmission, then again to repair the clutch hydraulics that failed in the interim. Crazy thrash time, but it drives under its own power once again. We have a week before we leave for Gainesville, Florida for the $2011 GRM Challenge shootout, being held Oct 6-8th. So much power + so many junkyard parts = fingers are crossed that we don’t break another transmission or halfshaft. Read more about the latest updates on our forum thread, here.
You can catch up in 1 minute 3 seconds by viewing the video update above.
For some reason our main phone line in our “hunt group” of lines is down today (Sept 15, 2011). If you need to call us and our main line is just ringing endlessly, please try 972-422-7069 (our second line). Thanks!
Amy and Terry ran the Vorshlag STX Mustang 5.0 at Texas Motor Speedway last weekend, and almost came up with a double-win. Amy won her class, but Terry coned away the win in STX. Oh well, still lots of fun at this atypically fast autocross, held annually on the infield road course at TMS. You can read more about the event, and the mods done since out last thread update, on the Vorshlag forum.
Click the picture above for in-car video.