I just read this from beginning to end for the first time and enjoyed it very much. I expect that many owners will benefit from your thorough lists and notes in the coming years.
At some point I expect that you'll begin to consider aerodynamics. I had great success with one of this outfit's products:
http://www.djracecars.com/carbon-fib...-aerofoils.asp.
After a workup performed on my E36 M3 racecar by Simon McBeath, I ran their SM203 on the car. I'd run a number of wings prior to that. Compared to those wings, the 203 provided a remarkable amount of real, effective downforce.
A bit of a bonus was that the car's top speed was virtually unaffected - a tribute to the wing's efficiency, and something that McBeath had touted during our interchanges before I hired him to do the workup.
DJ Racecars sells only wings and endplates; the wings come with attached brackets for uprights. My shop fabbed the uprights and bolted them to the rear frame rails. Slots were cut in the rear decklid for the upright plates to pass through.
The shop also made an adjustable front splitter out of MDO (
https://www.andersonplywood.com/mdo-...nsity-overlay/). This material is heavy, inexpensive, and it's quite easy to cut it and to shape a bullnose leading edge with a router. Once we were set on how long it needed to be, we were going to replace it with a lightweight version. I sold the car before that, though.
One thing that I think is interesting about our cars is that the bottom of the car is flat enough that a real, motorsport-level diffuser may well be an option. When I proposed that the shop create such a diffuser for my E36, the owner said it would be a wasted effort without a flat bottom on the car. This fellow had been Chief Engineer at March Engineering when it was an F1/F2/F3/Indy Car/IMSA constructor, so as badly as I wanted a really cool diffuser on the back of my car, I had to give that idea up.
If we had put a flat bottom on the car (a very do-able project), I would then have been looking at transmission and diff coolers, along with the attendant racket they would have produced. Working up all the common sense I could, I decided to continue working on the driver mod.
In the event they're of interest, I've got photos of:
the mounted SM203 wing,
the wing uprights the shop constructed,
the upright attachments points to the rear frame rails and the trunk,
the deck lid with slots cut into it, and
the splitter, showing its adjustment points and stabilizing turnbuckles.
If you think any of those may be relevant, I'll PM you the links. You may have seen many of them already, as they're scattered about in different threads here on 2addicts.
Re: importing the wing and endplates from England. The transaction took place in the spring of 2012. They were sent by air, and the process was much easier and cheaper than my importation of three heated windshields from England. These were my total expenses for the transaction (note that the now-£1,095 wing was discounted due its being a 2nd (I no longer recall the 2012 list price, but I'm guessing it was £995)):
