robbodleimages Posted July 6, 2008 Share Posted July 6, 2008 I have a chance to buy a '99 M Coupe former Grand Am Cup car. I am told this car would be a GTS2. Seems that its in the same class as M3's that are 4 or 5 seconds a lap quicker. Am I missing something? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Eric W. Posted July 6, 2008 Members Share Posted July 6, 2008 You'd need to find out the HP/weight to be properly classed. M3 has better rear suspension, but doubt that alone is good for 2-3 secs. The GrandAm car probably has certain restrictions on it (not sure?) that you could do away with in either BMWCCA or NASA club racing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmwhite Posted July 7, 2008 Share Posted July 7, 2008 like eric mentioned, the rear suspension on the M coupes is the same design as the (old) e30's...couple that with a shorter wheelbase and you end up with a pretty twitchy car...the only team/tuner that i know of that has truly figured out how to set up the z3 based coupes and roadsters is TC Kline (nobody else really bothers with the the Z3 based cars)... honestly, an e36 is a much better starting point for a race car...better rear suspension and there has been TONS of development done for the E36 chassis...there are some gts and bmwcca guys out there running M coupes that have been sucessful though (like Chip Stabler) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Damon in STL Posted July 8, 2008 Share Posted July 8, 2008 I would think the power to weight ratio would put the M coupe in GTS3. I had a chance to drive a street version running R-comps on track and the car is very twitchy with the rear end wanting to come around fairly easily. In one high speed corner the pucker factor came into play when the rear started moving somewhat unexpectedly. Damon in STL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmwhite Posted July 8, 2008 Share Posted July 8, 2008 I would think the power to weight ratio would put the M coupe in GTS3. depends on what is done to it...stock power and weight, most likely gts-2 (where chip stabler runs his m coupe)...built to bmw prepared class rules, most likely in gts-3...add more power and make it lighter, 4 or 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robbodleimages Posted July 8, 2008 Author Share Posted July 8, 2008 I am a Mustang driver, AI. I was thinking a smaller, less expensive to race car for enduros might be better than doing a lot of 3 hours races in the Cobra R. With the price of travel it also struck me that more racing on fewer trips to the track might also be a good idea and if I could run the M coupe in a different race group as the AI car, I could do that. On the other hand we run a lot of Road Atlanta and loose sounds scary there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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