Sunday here today. Big day in Australasian motorsport......the Bathurst race. So as usual, the live coverage on the box begins here about 11:00am and goes through till way later.......hours of it. So I flicked the box on to watch the start and there was quite a session going on which was a tribute to the legendary Peter Brock. As some of you may know, Brock was killed recently in a targa event. His status as king at Bathurst, after having won the endurance race so many times over the years, is undisputed. Nowdays it's all about Ford V8 and Commodore (Chev)V8's but back in the good old days our E30M3's ran against these cars. Anyhow, they were showing historic film clips of Peter ' Perfect' (as he was known) screeming around the track in a V8 Commodore.......with guess what biting at his heels........looked very impressive indeed, the little 2.3L up against the 5.0L V8, desperately trying to keep up.......until whoops.......I think that given this was a tribute to Peter they could have edited the film clip a bit better. The unspeakable happened.......a certain little car that had been tailgating him pulled out and overtook. There shall be no mention here of course what sort of car that was :m:
Hi Rolland, do you know how much power those ford and chevy V8s had back then? in the DTM there was also a privateer running a Mustang in it but I dont know what sort of motor. The DTM cars ran circles around it. John
Hey John, what used to happen in the Bathurst race was that there is a straight called conrod straight........it goes on and on and you can figure from the name of it why they call it that . The M3's I think.....now I'm using a pretty f..... up memory here, were good for about 260 clicks. But.....the bigger hp cars would get them on that straight. Been there, done that.........you know what I mean. That Conrod straight is kilometres......they are nowdays at the rev limiter going down there. None of that of course answers your question about hp differences. The bottom line is that the M3 did not fare too well on that circuit.......well it did, but not in a winning sense. But there are some really nasty twisty turnys on the mountain and the M3 was spectacular in those conditions. I think all the petrol heads need to put things in perspective here.........you've got a 2.3L naturally aspirated engine up against 5 litre engines. And respect is due :m:
The guy that won pole position got nailed on the start line (slipping clutch) and then got shunted into a wall within 30 seconds. Big smash and out of the race. Now wouldn't that rip ya undies ;(
I have seen the video of these races, especially the one on the city course with the really, really long straights with one corner at each end, the Mustang used a 5.0 liter, with likely an EEC-IV ECU, in US version cars IIR 225hp, 300ft/lb torque, easily modified for big power. However, the brakes and chassis and suspension geometry were considerably less than desireable. In my drag racing days, we used the ford small block with a large single turbo to make well over 1200hp, fortunately, the brake zone after the quarter mile was very long.
Hi Mike. I think these V8's back then (circa 1990) would have had way more hp than the M3's.......think the M's were running around 330 ish. Torque differences would be huge of course because that is essentially a by-product of capacity. Usual story......the M's were awesome in the twisty mountain roads but lacked the grunt down the very long straight. Very sad.......one of our Kiwi drivers was killed there. Not the race day but in the lead ups. Spun and stalled in a section of the track that is blind to oncoming traffic. Got hit in the drivers door at around 180kph. Died last night. Imagine coming around a blind corner at 180kph.........
