24 Hours of Lemons BMW Powered Corvette

Built in my garage in under six months, this BMW powered 1976 Corvette started as a basket case I dragged out of the woods. It’s built specifically for the 24 Hours of Lemons endurance racing series where racers bring interesting cars built on a budget.

Due to the complexity of the build this is the first and, to date, only C3 Corvette to compete in the series.

Keeping to the theme of obscure budget builds, it was built with a fuel injected BMW six cylinder.

True to my nature I dove deep on engineering while building this car for the task. The suspension geometry is modified for a greater range of static alignment adjustment and roll center adjustment. The bump steer, which is terrible on Corvettes, has been solved. Hood ventilation was based on CFD analysis as was venting for the rear differential.

I custom-wrote the ECU programming after tearing through the raw HEX on the chip and reverse-engineering the table headers. One problem remained: the missing vehicle speed sensor threw the car into limp mode the day before the first race. When faced with this problem on my E36 I built a deadbug fixed rate PWM emulator. Here I used an Arduino to simulate a proper signal.

This car is filled with little tricks, from the belt driven differential cooling pump made from a power steering pump to fluorescent color codes on the harness belts for quick driver changes. It was an exercise in iteration and challenge.

The car is still racing and is considered one of the fastest and more interesting builds in the series.

For more information go here: https://youtu.be/rhMSTPcSafI?si=uHIuSL1drHTxTMC6