One Lap of America

I emailed Ben Greisler who is the editor of the Bavarian Motornotes, the Del Val Chapter of BMW CCA bi-monthly publication, to ask if he knew of anyone that was interested in the 2002 OLoA. He forwarded my message to Dave Flogaus who happened to be my instructor once at a Del Val BMW CCA Driver’s School. It turns out that both Ben and Dave were each interested in entering OLoA, and the notion of teaming with someone crazy enough to thrash a 740iL on a racetrack, was appealing enough to the both of them, so TEAM S.B.D was formed. Baby was officially entered in the 2002 OLoA one November evening when Ben, Dave and I had dinner with Brock Yates Jr. and VAC Motorsports was given the green light to order the parts.

BMW E39 M5 Clutch and GeTraG  S6 S420 6-Speed Transmission

Old Transmission Cross Member (Top)
New Transmission Cross Member (Bottom)

While VAC was gathering the parts necessary to do the transmission swap, my research into high performance mods for Baby continued. I called the Dinan folks and at the time they could only say that a supercharger for the 7 Series was under developement but a ready date was unknown. With One Lap of America coming up, I immediately placed the order for a supercharger for Baby with European Supercharging Systems by fax.

ESS Supercharger Major Components

Letter From ZF Outlining the Power Handling Capabilities of the ZF5HP24 & ZF5HP30 Automatic Transmissions.
This was the letter that made a manual transmission the obvious choice.

Fortunate Choice

Picking ESS proved to be fortunate. The manual transmission is not be limited in its power handling capability as the stock automatic transmission is, and Europe is where the E38 had the option of a manual gearbox. Therefore, the ESS people had some experience with the E38 in manual form. Another advantage was cost. The ESS system is less than half the cost of the Dinan system they advertise for the E39 5 Series V8.

Continue to Chapter VI

Back to the Project Page