50 PERFORMANCE BMWproject manager, working on all sorts of
racing cars including Lambos and Marcos.
“I’ve always loved BMWs,” Darren
continues, “my third car was a black
E30 318iS I owned when I was 18, and
after that I had a 320i, a 323i and another
318iS,” he says, painting a picture of quite
the BMW fan, before adding “and then I
went through a bunch of hot hatches,” but
hey, nobody’s perfect and he’s built this
E36, so we can forgive him pretty much
anything. So how did Project Nordschleife
come about? “Around 2011-ish we were
walking around Spa while racing there
and chatting about the ’Ring; we thought,
as did most people at the time, that it was
going to close so we decided to do a trip
out there. I went out there with anotherTopcats engineer in a TVR Chimaera 4.0
with RSREvents and we loved it but the
TVR was not ideal for the track. That’s
when I decided to build what would
become Project Nordscheliefe, or at least
the first one.” Wait, what? That’s right,
much like the Matrix, this is not the first
Project Nordschleife, as Darren goes onto
explain. “I wanted an E36 328i Sport,
specifically because it had an LSD, but the
car that I found for sale and that I ended
up buying didn’t actually have an LSD as
the owner had sold it,” he chuckles, “but it
was a solid car so I went for it. I stripped
it, fitted a cage, some seats; it was sweet,
handled beautifully. Then I sold it to get
married...” and we can see where this is
going. “It didn’t work out,” says Darrensimply, “so after that I decided I wanted to
build another one and ended up getting my
hands on a cheap 3.0 M3,” the very car you
see before you now.
“The car had been kept in an
underground car park in Manchester,”
Darren explains, “and it hadn’t moved in
a few years. Previously it had been used
as a promo car for Project Gotham Racing
3, Sabine Schmitz had driven it, but now
it was dusty and looking sorry for itself.
It was solid and sound, though, and from
experience I knew what to do to get the
most out of it and where I wanted to take
it, so I bought it and got started.” The
project began with removing weight and
Darren set about stripping out the carpets,
seats and all the sound deadening before“
He’s built the car as a Super Tourenwagen homage,
the ’90s racing series where BMW fielded E36s and won
three out of the six seasons that were held
”PBMW217.e36_track_car.ed2.indd 50 07/08/2017 08:24