With the white car down for the S62 swap for over a year and a half now I was getting antsy. I was also thinking about the good drivetrain I now had sitting, the M60B40 with the Dinan supercharger that had gotten the white car this far. I could have tried to sell it off, but it seemed like a mistake to let a good known drivetrain with a fairly rare setup go. Drifting has always interested me but the white car has become too nice to beat on to that extent, so I thought maybe I could build a second car with the old drivetrain for this purpose.
Naturally the perfect donor car would be the 530i. The three liter v8 cars were less desirable but still a good platform with a bombproof five speed and the four liter would go right in. I had this vision of these two builds side by side; the s62 swapped white car for track and street, and a somewhat matching black car again with v8 power but built to drift. I also thought if I could find a car with a good black interior I could swap the black interior into the white car which I always preferred, and strip out the drift car for weight and maybe a cage. Sort of a high car / low car approach.
I decided to put out some feelers to see if our friends in the E34 community had seen anything that might fit the bill, and quickly friends started sending me cars. There were some ratty rusted examples, some cars that were interesting but too nice for my plans. Eventually this car popped up in San Jose, it was listed at $6500 and some friends mentioned they had seen it for sale for a while. 400,000 miles. It was impressive. I had been around cars long enough to know that a well maintained car and a known quantity could be fine with high milage but it was sure to have some issues.
I spoke with the owner and my thoughts were confirmed. He loved the car, it was his daily driver while working outside sales since 2002 when he bought the car with about 50k on it. He may have been the third owner but at that rate he was practically the second. He had extensive maintenance records from over the years and the car was still on the original powertrain. The original clutch had been done around 300k. The car had been resprayed, and had a fender replaced at one point. It also had the interior recovered, which is somewhat nice but could have been done better in places. It had a magnaflow muffler and no cats, as well as some kind of chip apparently. Overall it was about what you'd expect from such a high mileage driver, but it was perfect for my purpose.
On referral I asked a local shop The Race Factory to do a PPI for me for good measure before flying out to buy it. The PPI came back with what you'd expect. Motor / trans mounts worn out, bushings on the arms worn out, small leaks, but nothing major. I had replaced all of the items on the white car already, and would have upgraded them to better equipment all around anyway, so I knew exactly what it would need.
The motor sounds great and has plenty of power, however one of the cylinders is down to 100psi (the others read fine). I figured it should be fine to enjoy as is while I work on refreshing the suspension etc in the mean time, which I plan to do myself on this car. With some of these items taken into consideration he offered the car to me for $4k which was perfect for me.
I flew out to San Jose bringing my little brother Robert along for the ride where the owner picked us up in the car. It's always cool to get picked up in a classic is a new location. We went over everything together and swapped stories. He gave me a large tub of junkyard parts he had been collecting as spares; heater core valves, rear seatbelt trim, climate modules, lots of little dash light bulbs, a couple fan resistors and more. I knew this stuff would come in handy and a bunch of it was NLA so this was awesome.
I dropped the car back off at The Race Factory for a new clutch fan because the fan had been missing a blade. This was pretty funny to me because if you had followed any of my adventures in the white car I was constantly exploding clutch fans. We figured for some reason they didn't like the supercharged setup.
After picking up the car we drove down to Pismo Beach for the night, about 4hr. I was worried that at some point on this journey we might break down. The more I drove the car the more I enjoyed it and could tell how well it has been cared for. While it was worn out, it was still fundamentally good, especially considering the mileage. It was so awesome to be back in an E34 just enjoying a road trip through California.
In Pismo we got to relax for the rest of the day after being exhausted by the travel. My brother and I were both gymnasts so we spent the day doing backflips off the sand dunes on the beach and walking miles to try and rid ourselves of the feeling of the red eye flight.
I realized that evening that Apple Valley Speedway could be a slight detour and I knew we could rent drift cars there through Drift Zone Booking. I had never had a real opportunity to try drifting in a controlled environment. Since this whole plan for this car was to get into drifting, I knew I had to try and make it. Timing worked out for both of us and as a bonus I knew I'd get to surprise Robert with the opportunity which was a blast.
The next morning we took off for Apple Valley. We stopped at a semi scenic pull off to shoot the car which is where I was able to surprise Robert with the news. The detour would take us on a remote route through the mountains, turning our four hour drive into six. The drive was awesome, empty backroads and we avoided LA. Although I was nervous for any car trouble being so remote, we made it without issue.
We stopped for breakfast at a small cafe in the middle of nowhere. It was run by a charming old Filipina woman who had been there for 50 years. We were the only ones there, and the place seemed to be in disrepair. Papers were stacked high in the back of the counter, the old red vinyl barstools were cracked and duct taped accordingly. Most people would have backed out, in fact two people entered then left later; impatient that the host / owner / chef was in the back cooking. She was a cool lady, and the food was great, her prices seemed about two decades old, about $12 for a full breakfast. She told us it was a bad area and not to get lost on account of the cartel essentially taking over the town. They didn't even have a cop. It had become a bad area, sold out to solar companies which she remarked took over the farm land that had provided livelihood and food to the locals. This place seemed forgotten by the rest of the state, these people and their needs and economy ignored. I wanted to mention it because it's sad to see so much of California ignored by its government, much of the central valley feels this way. Roadtrips show us so much more of a place then simply flying in and going to a destination vacation then leaving again.
We made it to Apple Valley Speedway, which was La Grange last time I was there (always reminds me of ZZ Top but I don't think they're related, we can pretend). I had gone to the first Drift Matsuri event at La Grange in about 2016. The event brought a legendary driver, Naoki Nakamura, from Japan to drive with the Americans. Americans which include pros like Forrest Wang, and Drift Team Animal Style. It was insane and this exposure to drifting had me hooked since then. It was a full circle moment to be back to try my hand at drifting for the first time. With my HPDE experience and understanding of weight transfer, the driving line etc, I was hopeful I would learn something but not arrogant enough to think I'd get it down in a day. For the price we split 20 laps (which wasn't cheap at about $600 if you're curious) ten laps a piece. My brother drives a new BRZ so he can drive manual but he didn't have any HPDE experience.
We had a blast, by the end of my ten laps I was at least starting to get the hang of it, I almost linked the track but I was going too slow and using too much angle, which would kill my momentum. The stock 350z beaters we were driving had just enough power to drift on the shitty tires, but not enough to make up for your mistakes in technique, which is perfect to learn on. Robert had a bit tougher time, he spun the car backwards off the hill a couple times but it was fine, that was the whole point of the experience. I wanted him to experience how easy it is to lose control of a car so that he wouldn't do anything dumb on the street.
From there we headed four hours to Palm Springs for the night and by the time we got there we were beat. Getting to swim after a long travel day is one of my travel hacks so I made sure we had a cool hotel with a nice pool to use. After that we hammered sushi until we were both nearly sick, it was perfect.
I haven't to say the rest of the trip driving home to Phoenix was perfectly uneventful. The car ate up the miles while we drove through Joshua Tree to make it a bit more interesting. Cold AC, something like 27mpg, a bluetooth head unit for music, great exhaust note, and a comfortable ride. The old 400k mile E34 was still crushing continents as designed.
After this whole experience I was having second thoughts about making this car into a drift car, and swapping the interior out. It's still just too nice. However, I think I'm still going to drift it. There's just nothing cooler to me than an E34 drifting, and to have the white / black matching builds, the whole concept is a vibe. I just want it to be a nice drift car, I'll have to take it slow and not do anything too high consequence with it. I'll leave the interior in, it's too damn good black and black, I can live with the tan interior in the white car, and I know even if I did swap them nothing will go back perfectly, I'd just end up making them worse in all likelihood.
SO anyway that's the plan for now, I hope you enjoy the blog post and the YouTube video. I'm looking forward to working on this car, getting my hands dirty, and executing this damn vision! More to come. Thanks for reading if you made it here!
