Lay asleep at night in the hills of eastern Tennessee long enough and you may be awakened by the sound of the feared Franken-bimmer. Pieced together by the most potent of Bavarian parts, even an angry mob of moonshiners run for cover. Replace Franken-bimmer with 318is, and moonshiners with Porsche road racers, then the above story is a little more realistic. Mike Akard, the mad scientist, built this mighty 318-that-could with no rock unturned. It’s safe to say that the only original VIN numbers can be found on the roof and the firewall.
Let’s get to the good stuff on the first beat. Mike chose the S50B32 3.2L M3 platform for his evil doings. For all you non-German linguists out there, that’s the engine from a 1998 Euro M3 which comes stock with 321hp. The engine was imported by ABL ORIGINAL PARTS and custom engine work was performed by Grand-Am Cup Crew Cheif Al Valenzo at Patrick BMW in Chicago, IL. Multi-throttle bodies, multi-angle valve job, porting, head milling Schrick 284 cams, Gruppe N head gasket – did I mention no rock was left unturned? The angry S50 spits fire out of the ceramic coated euro headers, followed by 3.5″ piping and a Borla X1 race muffler. To efficiently put the power the pavement ACTion Racing! supplied a clutch and flywheel combination that together weigh less than 11lbs. All these painstaking details and more result in an excess of 320rwhp with “an impressively flat torque curve.”
Wide-bodies are all the hype in the show scene, but ask Mike how to install a set of neons and he’ll look at you weirder than that time you confessed you peed the bed to your girlfriend. The custom lightweight E30 wide-body kit was built in conjunction with ACTion Racing! and Fiberartz. The fenders are 2.5″ wider than stock at a fraction of the weight of the original parts. The hood, EVO II bumper/airdam, doors, aero mirrors, skirts, and decklid are all ultra-lightweight composite construction leading to an overall curb weight of only 2175 lbs. Ok so what about that massive clothes hanger on the back of the car, does it really work? Mike can attest to losing a few bolts to the wing while hitting some hot laps and suddenly losing control and speed over the remaining lap.Besides a wing seems fitting on a car whose manufacturer once specialized in aircraft engineering. To top off all the unique body parts is (ironically) Porsche’s Guard Red paint. The lines and color of this car are quite unmistakable.
A race car is simply not a race car without a fully adjustable bladder torturing suspension. First off the 4-lug pattern had to go. Attached to the new 5-lug conversion are super beefy 18×10 SRR Comp H lightweight racing wheels with 305-645/18 Pirelli racing slicks on all four corners! They said it couldn’t be done, but Jon Siccardi and the guys at Treehouse Racing put that monster contact patch on this tiny E30 chassis! (with a little help from the custom wide-body fenders I might add) Underneath all that is a plethora of suspension goodies that would make even a spider feel incompetent, including a massive front swaybar, E36 M-Roadster rear control arms, Stop-Tech 14″ 4 piston brakes, and H&R springs to name just a few. No track record is safe when this mighty BMW is around.
Most BMWs this age are used for escorting cheerleaders to high school and back, but Mike decided to give this old chassis a serious overhaul. Maybe Mike felt his inner evil scientist come out when he first laid eyes on the car, either way this BMW is a serious monster on any racetrack.
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