Wildest BMW E30 Ever Insane Sounding Render-to-Reality, V8 Swapped E30 BMW

What's up guys? Larry Chen here. Welcome to another episode of Hoonigan Autofocus. If you guys don't know who Kaisa is, he basically builds these cars in the digital world and we were lucky enough to work together on a SEMA car this year. He designed a Mustang for me. So now this is what you're doing full time. You are designing cars, you're designing freelance, and you're also doing like a clothing brand. He used to work full time for another company, but now he's going to concentrate on his passion, which I completely support and just so stoked on seeing kind of what builds that you're going to actually come up with because he builds it with his mind. How can you compete against that? That's the craziest thing. Thank you. It's quite a risk, you know, but sometimes you have to take these risks to see where you end up and I've been wanting to kind of concentrate on designing body kits properly full time. You know, I want to, there are things I want to see come to life and the only way I can do that is to really dedicate time towards that. So you know, I mean, working at EA was great and I worked there for five years with a very talented team of people, but I felt like now is kind of the time to take my own kind of path and take my own, you know, journey on, see where it takes me in terms of lift roof end and seeing what else I can do. All right, cool. Well, congrats to you and let's, let's talk to the builders of this beautiful, beautiful car. All right, so let's check out this build. This one, top three, SEMA, Young Guns, Battle of the Builders. What's up guys? What's up? Ross Gredis, owner of Rebellion Forge Racing, Kyle Ray, other owner of Rebellion Forge Racing. Well, thank you guys so much for bringing this beast out for us to shoot and also for us to enjoy this. Just on the way up here, he started it and wow, the crispness, the sound, which we'll get into later, but what made you guys want to build this LTO E30? Well, I've had the car for a long time, but I've also been a big fan of Kai for a long time. And when they debuted the kit last year at SEMA, I don't think it was more than eight or 10 hours after seeing it. I was hitting them up on social media to see if they were going to do anything as far as a production run. And so, yeah, March, we made the decision to go with these guys. May, we were designated to be in the Meguiar's booth and two days ago, we were top three Young Guns, Battle of the Builders, first time at SEMA. What a way to kick off your SEMA-like career, just first time, no problem, top three. What did you guys do besides just the kit? So pretty much everything except the pillars were modified in one way or another, starting with the fenders and the quarter panels, they were both chopped to bring the arches higher for the tires to fit. The doors were shaved to get rid of the body moldings. The hood was obviously cut open to let all the heat out from the eight-to-one exhaust and the roof we just chopped straight off and replaced with a hand-laid carbon fiber piece that we laid up in our shop. So is this wider than the other LTO cars? It is. They could probably correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the rear is actually about an inch and a half to inch and three quarters wider than the original kit. So that makes the rear of the E30 about eight inches wider than stock in the back and then six inches wider than stock in the front. So it definitely widens the track width for sure. So what about this rear diffuser, did you guys make that? We did. Yeah, we did that in-house. That was actually a really fun piece to make. Kaiza kind of had thrown some renders together, you know, just for inspiration's sake. And we did our best to try to bring some of his crazy ideas to reality. So he always kind of has that futuristic sci-fi theme. So you know, you have a diffuser, but rather than your staple strikes that are just straight down, we decided to do a little kick out and make it a little more aggressive. Yeah, it really ties in very well with the exhaust. I love that it has that center exit look. That is awesome. All right, so let's take a look at the engine bay. This is pretty much kind of the centerpiece of the car. I think it's one of the big talks of the show. This thing is something else. So tell me the story about this. Everybody that's heard Tanner Faust's Passat that he built several years ago knows how awesome that was. And I remember the first time I heard it, I was like, I have to have that sound coming out of a car that I own. And so it had been kind of a concept, something I had thought about for a long time. And then, I don't know, last summer I was like, you know what, we're going to do it. And so we started putting this together. And it's super cool, sounds gnarly. It created a whole lot more work putting this car together, because as you can see, I mean, it takes up the front end of the engine bay. So Kyle and I hacked out the firewall, had to rebuild the firewall, had to rebuild the transmission tunnel, had to move all the seats back in the car, you know, which led us to having to put in like a Woodward NASCAR steering column and everything, just so you could have this goodness right here. But it definitely makes up for it when you start the car. You guys, you welded this in-house? Yes, we did all this in-house. Everything that you see on the car was done in-house. About the only thing that I'd say we outsourced just due to the time constraint with SEMA was the assembly of the motor. But I mean, all the suspension, all the fabrication, the composite work, the body work, the paint, everything we did in-house. That was kind of the fun challenge with the build was, you know, LS swaps are common. I mean, you can't throw a rock without about hitting one. But it was like, what happens if we do an LS swap that doesn't sound like an LS swap? And I mean, you look on social media, I don't know how many people have asked us if we have a rotary in this thing, because it's just, it sounds so different than your typical American V8. Yeah, the only way I can explain it is it sounds like really crisp. Like, it still has kind of that V8 throatiness, but it's just, I don't know, it has that crispness. There's no other way I can explain it, but it's really, really cool. Tell me about the engine. It's a six liter aluminum block LS with LS6 heads and a stage three Texas speed cam. As aggressive as you can go without doing forced induction. As you can see, the intake manifold is on there backwards because the exhaust takes up so much room in the front. So we actually had to push that through the firewall. And so the way that it gets air into the engine is it makes a 90 inside the firewall, underneath the dash, there's an air box. And then when we when we move this firewall back, I ducted in all of this area underneath the cowl. And so those two cowl vents allow the up those allow air to go in through a filter and then back around into the engine. So it uses the cowl as an active intake on both sides. Incredible. Because this is a stock piece. Yeah, yeah. So it takes all that high pressure air and it just sucks it right into the engine. That is genius. Really good work, guys. That is so cool. Like these are the things that I really appreciate this kind of detail. The fact that you're repurposing basically this was originally for the AC, I'm guessing for the intake. That is so cool. So how much power do you think this actually puts out? We haven't had time to get it on the dyno yet, just because of the constraints of SEMA and getting it out to Las Vegas. But a build like this should be in the ballpark of about 500 horsepower. Right before we pulled it onto the transport truck, getting it out here, we ended up twisting both axles on like a third gear pull. So tell me about the suspension. So the suspension is by Fortunato. They're pretty cool to work with on this project because as I mentioned before, all the control arms and trailing arms are custom underneath. So it's kind of like a hodgepodge, if you will, of custom stuff and BMW stuff, but from different models. And so they basically put together a custom setup for us, but it is two way. On the front, because it's a static setup and we're trying to keep the car low, we did go with their air cup system. So we can lift the front of the car up, gives us about two inches of clearance. That way you're not taking off any air or anything off the front of the car. So did you guys have to tub all? Obviously this is all custom. Yeah. So from the shock towers forward, it's a tube front end. And from the shock towers rear, it's a tube rear end. And then the top plates here on the shock towers were plasma cut and TIG welded in to make clearance for all the adjustment with the camber adjustment in these top hats. And then in the rear, we raised the shock towers three inches to bring the suspension up into the chassis to lower the car, but keep the geometry that was originally there. So we don't lose any handling or stability. It actually looks really clean. Like I can't even really tell just at a glance that it has a tube front end, but the panels, you guys did a really good job on fitting all these panels. I love that the trunk button still works. So we have a 22 gallon fuel cell, which it's a little big for just a race car, but we wanted this car to be something that we could take on a short road trip or drive to the track and race all day and then drive home and maybe stop and get burgers on the way. So with 22 gallons, I mean, we should see a range of maybe 150, 160 miles comfortably. It doesn't help to have a little weight in the back of the car. Yeah, yeah, definitely. We put this interior together in like two and a half days. With the air cup system in the back, there's actually an air tank and a compressor, and we kind of have it hidden behind the fuel cell. So we built in an access panel into the back bulkhead, so that's accessible. Put the roll cage in kind of like Kyle touched on in the front. Same accent color, but it's all gloss. We wanted a finished interior, but we didn't want to go over the top. But I mean, if you still look, all the A, B, and C panels are all covered. With the carbon top that laid out, we kept all that exposed. But then we just put some of your cut loop carpet in it to kind of finish it and clean it up a little bit. Underneath all that, we laid down some boom mat so it didn't sound like we were running around inside of a tin can. Some of the other really cool stuff that Kyle came up with that you can't really see, but you know, your typical dash in a lot of cars, everything that's behind it's attached to the dash. Well, we hid as much of the wiring harness for the engine behind the dash. All your coil packs for the engine are behind the dash. Your ECU, your car tech controls, all that stuff is behind the dash. But he mounted it to the firewall rather than to the dash. So this is really a completely modular piece. You have two bolts on this side, two bolts on that side. It pulls out and everything is serviceable. You don't have hours and hours of pulling everything out. You literally pull off the steering wheel, take four bolts out, and you can do any service or anything that you need behind it. So there was an aspect of racing and serviceability. And if there was issues, to be able to take care of them quickly while kind of keeping a very clean flow through the interior, your typical tilting pedal setup. Some of the really cool stuff that even Kyle came up with, like if you look inside of here, everything was moved back and we wanted to have a clean look for the shifter. So Kyle designed this billet shift bezel. But what's really neat is since we're sponsored by Haltech, we decided to make this our key. So you plug that in. What? Turns on all of our accessories. And then... That's, wait, this is a USB drive? Yeah. And that turns on the car? Yeah. That's your accessories. And so that basically activates it. And then, you know, you can control your ignition and everything independently of that. And so he did that. And then we machined this so that our brake bias and everything is right by our shifter. So all that stuff can be done on the fly as well. It's a 350Z, so the CD009 six-speed transmission. That's why the transmission tunnel is so big. Everything had to be refabricated all the way through the center of the car. I mean, they're bulletproof transmissions, but they're not small transmissions. So there was quite a bit of work to get stuffed inside of there. So very, very tight, very short throw. And just a lot of the different stuff, like the battery and everything like that, is kind of covered behind that kick panel. But we designed that kick panel so, you know, if there's a passenger in the car, they have something that they can push their legs against. So they're somewhat supported. And there's a lot of detail, like when we were putting the car together, like what makes it the most functional, you know, drivable, yet, you know, somewhat comfortable, if you will, vehicle to sit inside of. So we were fortunate enough to work with Rotiform on this setup of wheels. We wanted to do something crazy. So what we did is designed and machined a custom center lock adapter that takes the bolt pattern from five lug into center lock. And so Rotiform custom machined wheels to fit the adapter that we made. So if you look down here, it's just got one giant nut in the middle of the wheel. And that unscrews and the whole wheel comes off just with that one nut. And behind that, it's just a normal five bolt pattern that you would have on a typical BMW, the five by 120. So that was... In a way, this is a true center lock. Yeah, it's a true center lock. So if you just take this nut off, the wheel comes off. And then behind that, the adapter is bolted on with the typical five bolt pattern. What about the brakes? So the brakes are kind of a mashup of different vehicles and parts that we found. So we got a full set of Brembo brakes from a Porsche Cayenne Turbo. They're six piston in the front and four piston in the rear. And they were just a $500 set of brakes on eBay shipped to our door. The front rotors are C6 Z06 rotors. And then the rears are E36 M3. And then we custom machined and designed a set of brackets that would bolt between the calipers and the spindles. Wow, talk about a mishmash of parts. It's one of those things that the concept of the car is obviously to race it, but also display the shop abilities, right? So there's certain things that weren't necessary, but we wanted to do. People know that if you're looking to have something built, we can do it for you. So are center locks like this necessary? No. Are they cool? Absolutely. Same thing with the brake setup. You can go buy off the shelf stuff that'll fit this, no problem. But having the ability to take stuff and build it, and it'd be functional and run and drive and do everything is kind of a testament to what we're able to do with the vehicle. I don't have anything to add after that. It's really, really an honor to be able to shoot this car. The fact that this was just in the show basically 24 hours ago, right? Yeah. I mean, I was looking at it in the Meguiar's booth, and then now it's here. And I'm able to kind of just scan and look and touch and feel and hear and smell everything about this thing and really kind of enjoy your hard work. So thank you so much for bringing it out. And thank you so much for kind of showing us your awesome E30 build. Thank you. We appreciate it. Well, that's it for our SEMA coverage. I hope you guys enjoyed it. We'll have a lot more videos coming out over the next couple months. And I'll see you guys in the next video.