The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Lemons Newcomers → Beef up the front bumper?
My team is racing in our first Lemons race in Sept for the Lemons south fall race. We are racing a '84 bmw 318i. Would it be a good idea to take off the stock bumper and weld up something made out roll cage tubing. Basically a more beefer bumper to protect the radiator?
Nah, just don't hit anything.
Nah...That would just make you more likely to hit me & everyone else, And we all know what that leads to...
While I do agree with the other in that if you're driving right, you shouldn't need a big bumper, I have seen several BMW "diving board" bumpers get ripped cars after contact. To prevent this from occurring on our E30, we welded our bumper mount "shocks" solid, and attached chains to the bumpers so they will stay on the car if one of the mounts gets trashed.
However the welded shocks turned out to not be such a great idea when one of my drivers accidentally got into the back end of another car and the body got mangled where the solid mount pushed into it. So this time I'm running stock mounts but keeping the bumpers chained up. The bumpers and mounts can be the sacrificial lambs in the event of a wreck
We also welded big blocker bars behind the grille in front of the radiator to protect the rad.
80s BMW bumpers are pretty serious pieces of aluminum. I got whacked into a tire chicane at about 50MPH in Thunderhill. The bumper did its job and didn't even register anything more than a scratch. The only risk is another car hooking the outside of the bumper which sticks out from the body an inch or two.
We also welded big blocker bars behind the grille in front of the radiator to protect the rad.
I wish I could redo those things... the welds look like they were done by a retard who escaped the short bus...
LTDScott wrote:We also welded big blocker bars behind the grille in front of the radiator to protect the rad.
I wish I could redo those things... the welds look like they were done by a retard who escaped the short bus...
Hey hey... they never asked to be that way. No reason to drag them down by comparing them to you. 
Well, it used to be kinda crash-em-up derby, but if you are hitting things now, you'll get yanked off track, so just keep er' clean... From an engineering standpoint, if you weld on other stuff, you just transfer the load further back in the chassis which is usually a bad thing. For our work team, we put cage tubing in the front, and one of our drivers hit somebody. Instead of saving the radiator, the tubes sheared off and the radiator got trashed anyway, and the frame got mangled way back instead of just keeping the hit in the crumple zone where it belonged... So, some sort of debris shield up front is probably a good idea, but I wouldn't weld a bunch of stuff up there.
I started to reply to this last night before a lot of these comments had been made, got distracted and now there's lots of other commentary.
We made a tube bumper to replace our stock bumper. One of our main reasons was the stock bumpers can barley stop a mosquito. It's actually tighter to the body than the stock bumper.
I believe the early E30's had pretty good bumpers to start with. So you can probably just make some improvements to the stock ones and be in good shape.
Here are some suggestions:
Fix, delete, weld the stock mounts if they are shock mounts so it is solid mounted.
(See LTD Scotts post, may not be a good idea)
The most important thing to me would be to make sure the ends of the bumpers are supported and smoothly flow into the body. The early E30 has big plastic/rubbery bumper fillers between the bumper and the body. It looks nice and all but doesn't do much. If you have any contact up in the front, the ends of your bumpers may get hung up on another car. If this happens, it will probably cause both cars more trouble than the bumper may have helped. So making sure the ends of your bumpers don't hook stuff is a good idea.
A friend of mine backed out of a parking garage in an E36, caught a pole which snagged the inner bumper though the plastic and it pulled the front of the car out a good ways.
These are all great comments. I think I'll leave the front stock bumper alone and maybe put some bars in front of the radiator like LTDscott was discussing.
Bars in front of the radiator aren't a bad idea, but a better idea is to put some 1/4" hardware cloth in front of those radiator bars. Those will keep the smaller debris (rocks, dropped bolts, chunked tires, the bottom end of a Mini) from unintentional ventilation of your radiator. Cheers.
Here is how my car looks, including the bumper mount carnage from last race (after it was pried back into shape and welded).
I thought according to the rules, you could not make any changes too beef up the front of the car, and that it had to be stock?
I thought according to the rules, you could not make any changes too beef up the front of the car, and that it had to be stock?
You should not go passed the original body line with any additional support structures. I.E. nerf bars, chains, Road Warrior contraptions.
There are a lot of teams that buy cars that have no front ends and need to build some kind of bumper and radiator supports. Your best bet is to ask Jays permission to add anything that might extend passed the car and or looks like your setting up your vehicle in expectation of hitting a lot of "road kill" at the track.
PilotiPete, All of what you see above is behind the stock body lines, so it's 100% legal. It's only there to protect the radiator and oil cooler.
If we hit anything hard enough to impact any of the bars we have welded on, we have much bigger problems to worry about.
The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Lemons Newcomers → Beef up the front bumper?