Here in Minnesota, we as residents find a lot of ways to keep ourselves occupied through the frigid skin cracking cold that we’re so used to between November and March every year. Most take up a hobby like cooking, woodworking or something equally productive to pass the time and keep occupied between the 9-5 grind on the coldest of Minnesota winter days.

Some people though willingly go outside, get in their cars with doors that are frozen shut, or worse yet, frozen open and drive to a cold venue to meet up with their cold friends and have fun that way. The Polar Run is definitely much more column B than it is column A in this case.

In late 2014, I was scrolling through Facebook on my iPhone 5 with a heated blanket draped over my legs in the living room of my house as was usual after work on a chilly November evening, and as I mindlessly flicked the news feed further and further into history, I saw a shared post for an event called ‘Polar Run – Rally for a cause’.. That wasn’t a cat photo or a friends post, and this was before the auto play videos, Facebook ads and other targeted nonsense was integrated in to the feed, so naturally I clicked on it. My phone navigated to a white screen in Safari, slowly loaded a home brew looking word press site with just 5 tabs – one of these tabs across the top said ‘about’, another white loading page, a result of budget web hosting, I read through the event description. “Twin cities to Lutsen by the way of back roads only!” and I looked further down to find that all of the proceeds go directly to Ronald McDonald house. I emailed my family to ask if our property on lake superior just north of Grand Marais was rented (we have it in a vacation rental pool with a north shore rental company called Cascade) and within minutes, I had the all clear that it had not been rented that weekend in February 2015. I asked to reserve it, and paid the very modest $150 registration fee to get my vinyl package and registration.

Shortly after registering for this brand new, completely unknown event, I started to see familiar names in the registration alongside me, and only then, weeks after registering, did I think about what I was going to drive on this rally. Now, if you’re reading this, chances are this isn’t the first issue of Northstar chapter’s newsletter and you know I’ve got options. Fun options with good winter tires, heated seats, stability control, you name it! That’s all well and good, but this event being of such modest scale and distance, I decided instead of playing the smart safe card with Mr. Wags or something like that, I’d take a 1989 325i coupe 5 speed that I just traded some parts for and was destined for part out and scrap on this drive. The car ran and drove just fine, but it had an open differential, horrible tires, questionable brakes, a bone stock unopened 2.5 liter M20 engine and missing lots of original steel. Stupid decision right? Putting hundreds of dollars in to new old stock 2.93 limited slip differential, new brake pads, one new shock absorber, a set of new 185 section 14 inch winter tires and some glorious purple wheels. This is already a pretty sketchy financial decision, but I keep telling myself that the car will be worth the same in parts when I’m done with it, not to worry! That naïve sentiment rang true until the turbo parts started showing up with ebay boxes on my door step. Yes, that’s right. There is not an abundance of ear wax in your ear (well, not more than 5 minutes ago), I had decided to take this ratty, used up $350 BMW E30 325i coupe and strap a 53mm turbocharger on the bone stock engine using parts almost exclusively from china through ebay. original 25 year old BMW parts started coming off, and the shiny but cheap new Chinese parts started getting installed. First order of business was bolting on that turbo exhaust manifold — immediately a clearance issue with the oil filter housing on the car as the manifold had been designed for the lesser 2.7 liter car that did not come with an oil cooler. Great, we’re at a stand still and have to order another manifold, right?

Heck no! we do what every shade tree back yard mechanic does and remove that pesky oil cooler and install a special briggs and stratton low profile lawnmower oil filter on that engine and proceed as per the original plan! The manifold is now on, great! bolting the turbocharger on is a doddle, plumbing the oil feed and return are easy as drill tap and torque – charge piping and intercooler take one person and a sawzall no more than 45 minutes to perfect in to the glorious final massively efficient charge system. Moving on to the exhaust.. I didn’t have much 2.5″ stainless tubing laying around, but I had a 45 degree pipe left from a J bend that was purchased for a prior project. Now, I refuse to fully believe in coincidence with a situation and car like this because this scrap remnant of pipe was a picture perfect fit for a hater pipe through a newly created ‘hood vent’. With the hood on, there was a 3″ exposure at a 45 degree angle right off the turbo. Worried about moisture and snow getting in to the engine, I hopped right back on that venerable ebay.com and ordered up a 2.5″ universal tractor exhaust flapper to solve this potential design issue.

Bolt-on ebay turbo kits are a horrible idea, I grant, IF you attempt to do it with no supporting engine modifications! if, however, you spend most of your budget on a good set of nice big fuel injectors and a megasquirt standalone engine management system, I firmly believe to this day the fun per dollar with a nasty ebay turbo kit cannot be matched. Plugging this old megasquirt 2 in to my 1998 Panasonic Touchbook CF-47 with a pentium 233mHz processor and 192mB of ram (my only notebook with a real serial port), I slowly downloaded the tuner software and started talking to the brand new ECU. Questions pop on the screen like a middle school book report. How many cylinders do you have, what is the working fuel pressure, what size injectors did you use, what’s the displacement, is this batch fire or sequential injection? After what seemed like 20 minutes of prompts, the window mysteriously and suddenly vanished and gave way to a massive display of 8 very old school looking digital gauges. I had done it! I had loaded a base map on a standalone ECU in a $350 car with an $800 turbo kit form ebay and I was actually ready to calibrate sensors and turn the key! Saying that the first turn of the key was tense with half of the bastardized engine harness laying across the top of the intake manifold and exhaust, strapped together poorly with parts store butt connectors would be a tremendous understatement. Turning the key, eyes transfixed on that 800×600 display reading out engine RPM and injector duty cycle, I see the RPM jump from 0 to 150 and the injector pulse rate gauge shoots up. Moments later, the fuel pump kicks on and the first exhaust farts through that glorious tractor flap equipped hater pipe shoot a fuel heavy fog across the cracked windshield and the 200,000 mile neglected M20 2.5 liter engine snorts to life once again with a hilariously high idle and pig rich fuel ratio. Leaving the sea of electronic gauges alone and taking my shaking hand off of the ignition key, I walk around to the engine bay and crack the throttle body open by hand just a little bit. The turbocharger spools for the first time and I’m absolutely hooked. I crack the throttle again, but this time a much more aggressive blip which gave way to a very responsive and muscular straight 6 shreek through that whistling Chinese turbo. Walking back to the drivers seat, I key off the car and celebrate with a beer! Months later, after road tuning the computer with a wide bank, re routing the exhaust away from the cabin air inlets and putting some more body work back on the car along side the polar run vinyl graphics package, we had a seriously fast, seriously gross looking sideways hoon machine that returned about 9 miles to the gallon on average, combined with a 12 gallon tank and no functional fuel gauge. ready then for the final rally morning!

Arriving at an unlabeled parking lot in stillwater amongst a wide gamut of other makes and models all adorned with the same vinyl package our E30 was, we got out of the car which we couldn’t leave running for heat out of fear we’d all be poisoned by the exhaust and started socializing with a new family, most of which are still on this crazy road 4 years in along with us!

This E30 was dubbed the ‘Hoonicorn’, it finished the 2015 rally in good form, although did develop cooling system issues on the way back to the cities post rally that necessitated driving the car in 3rd gear on the highway to maintain cooling system pressure. Shortly after returning to town, I followed through and parted the car after one of the front steel brake lines broke in half. This car’s legacy wasn’t forgotten and many of its bones went to the 2016 rally steed, the ‘HoonicornV2.0’, a 1988 325iX which was in similarly bad shape, had tons of miles and was given the great gift of ebay turbocharging with all of the V1’s turbo goodies. Version 2.0, after a month of trying to figure out why head gaskets were only lasting about 5 minutes (it was incorrect ignition timing) was absolutely solid the entire rally, and was actually solid enough to take down to cottage grove after the rally and do some runs on the dynamometer to see just how many horsepowers that 287,000 mile AWD BMW could put down with the aid of a Chinese exhaust hair dryer. the result? very impressive actually at 289 horsepower and 322lbft of torque at the crank through 11 of the worst tuned PSI ever fed through a BMW engine.

 

Version 2.0 though also was mercy killed, this time not because it had broken in some way, but because the 325iX transfer cases are worth so much money. The car simply had to be dismantled and gotten rid of. A bitter sweet moment as it carried my team of three effortlessly through the rally and safely back home, got the only speeding ticket on the 2016 polar run, and had that trusty old dog personality that wouldn’t let you down. Arriving in Lutsen on the 2016 rally, we drove this car through the worst north shore snow blizzard I have ever seen. white out conditions, no other cars on the road – literally driving up the center of highway 51. Arriving at our overnight, I couldn’t help but feel like Clarkson, Hammond or May from Top Gear at the end of one of their challenges, when they said ‘I became so attached to this car that I had to keep it’. My difference though is I still followed through and parted out the rusty dumpster and started shopping for HoonicornV3 for Polar Run 2017.

With the end of Polar run 2016 came the end of the Lutsen destination, a choice that was not well received with the rally veterans, but the camaraderie carried through just the same with a new route, a new destination and different blustery challenges and checkpoints against the clock.

2017 brought our V3.0 along — a true departure from the original car, a 1995 525i/A. What happened to me, you’re probably asking — did I get hit in the head unusually hard with something heavy? this is an automatic non turbo BMW. Trust me, I get it, I understand and I most importantly AGREE. Before you stop reading though! this car came with a set of nice snow tires, it had working heat, a working stereo, coilovers, monoball control arms and several other goodies all for a cool $250 price tag. See? you’re not many anymore, good. the 2017 rally brought us through rural Wisconsin and culminated after several checkpoints and challenges my team did very poorly with at the creepiest near abandoned Jewish children’s summer camp called the Perlstein, a complex we accidentally entered on the wrong end of, something we quickly realized after driving our lowered 20 year old BMW 5 series through the woods, alongside hand painted windowless cabins, seemingly abandoned for decades. After a groundskeeper sorted us out, we turned back and found the real entrance and headed in for the team dinner with the few other teams fortunate enough to arrive in the top 5. Shortly after arriving, we decided to get some beer from the car (our final checkpoint was to stock up at a nearby liquor store in the Dells). After opening the 12 pack of Takate like inbred neanderthals, we snapped open the frosty aluminum cans and brought our drinks together to celebrate our arrival on the third annual Polar Run. Two beers in, most of the teams had arrived and the gathering hall,  lit by 1970s fluorescent light fixtures, institution grade tables and chairs, and an inadequate climate control system, we were approached by an unassuming man from an unlabeled back room, where he presumably lived stating that he was the owner and rabbi of this facility, and he didn’t approve of our beer because it was not Kosher certified. We explained to the man that we weren’t Jewish and we had rented the entire facility for our event which luckily encouraged him to concede and everyone started turning up the party wick!

Retiring several hours later to the dormitory block, we found our room had been taken over by another team, and the room we were relegated to had childrens’ bunk beds and no bedding.. Capping off an already creepy day in a creepy place with terrible conditions, we wished the other teams a good night in the common area and hopped on our smart phones to find a nearby hotel, which in just 5 minutes had been booked for next to nothing and promised a hot tub, free breakfast, internet access and real bedding!

The glorious morning after, all filled with Hilton breakfast, we headed back to the dreary gray gates of the Perlstein and met up with the hungover, cold and generally unkempt rival team members, trying to not look too smug about our alternative arrangements. One last day in the dells partying and exploring with our Polar Run family, we awoke to a hole in the wall breakfast joint on the way out of town and cannonballed hwy 94 back home with another rally year in our back pockets and some new faces in the rosters for the Polar Run!

2018 is looking up for Team Hoonicorn and the #HoonicornV4. We’re registered, the $400 BMW 540i now has a 6 speed manual transmission swapped in and daily driving the beast has helped track down several previously neglected maintenance items that are being or have been taken care of now, one by one.

When a car starts getting up there in miles like HoonicornV4, 173,000 or so, there’s bound to be things overlooked by owners if they’re not causing a significant drivability issue, so getting under a 20+ year old vehicle with lots of miles a many owners can be a bit scary. This car was no exception to the rule! Starting at the front end on the right side, the outer steering tie rod end had over a quarter of an inch of play, something that should be stiffly rigid, the left front? the thrust arm was similarly wallered out and had significant play, further exacerbated by a worn pitman idler arm in the steering linkage. The rear end actually fared quite well given the mileage, and beyond a few cracked ball joint boots and a failure to comply ABS wheel speed sensor disabling the ABS, ASC and often times the speedometer, the car was solid in the bum end! The 20 year old V8 though had a bit of a cough to it, and was visibly dumping oil on the ground. A cheap set of champion platinum plugs later, and the miss was gone — the full 282 angry horsepower from that non vanos BMW M62 was back! Narrowing down the source of the oil leak on the lift, I found the oil filter housing o rings were perished and the valve cover gaskets were seeping, a problem that still has yet to be addressed as they’re not urgent enough to wrench on the car cold! Mechanicals aside, the washer fluid pump was seized and needed replacement, the wiper blade inserts were older than my nephew and the original DSP stereo sounded like an adult in the Peanuts cartoon. After a quick trip to RockAuto.com for the washer pump, a couple of cheap Vaico wiper blades to cannibalize for the inserts and the local BMW classifieds for a used EONON touchscreen android head unit, the car was beginning to actually be really darn respectable, and dared I say… Rally ready!

Not always is a used high mile BMW story bad though, even for a V8 car. Prior to my purchase of the machine, the previous owner had done brand new Textar/Balo brakes which cleaned up perfectly after a few hard stops!

Rally morning. After getting my navigator and copilots out of bed, the coffee maker’s contents added to our stomachs and a brief stop at the BK Lounge for some very high-brow breakfast, we hit the road in our tired old beast for Cottage Grove and the VFW starting point for this years Polar Run rally.

Waiting for the coolant temperature to build and that still functioning automatic climate control to warm our barely conscious bodies, we hit highway 94, 10 S and then Jamaica in Cottage Grove. Sliding in to the lot sideways revealed no other teams had arrived before us, a theme that would be common for the rest of the day, we headed inside and met up with the rally organizer to get our paper route and score book before sitting down in the VFW banquet room and waiting for 40 plus some odd other teams to arrive and follow suit.

Just after 10AM, we adjourn from the drivers meeting and head on to checkpoint 1, a rural wisconsin bar and bowling alley, where we’d been asked to bowl one frame each for points. Since we were first to arrive at checkpoint 1, the venue had to set up the lanes for us as well as we selected the finest alley balls for the challenge. Bowling a 7, and 8 respectively, our score averaged out to 7.5/10 or 15/20 for this checkpoint! Back in the 540, we key in the route for Checkpoint 2, a horse farm, where we would find a pair of Morries employees who would issue us a written test about Morries trivia! Once again, we arrived before the individuals issuing the test, but I confidently scored a passing grade in the written test as we went on our merry way to checkpoint 3, a stop at a small general store where we were tasked with buying a souvenier! Entering the front doors of this small general store (once again, first team to do so), we were greeted by a man named Bob and his wife who were both ecstatic to see us show up! A bottle of grade A maple syrup, local squeeky cheese curds and a few other trip snacks later, we bid adue to the couple and continued on the route to checkpoint 4, a liquor store about an hour and a half from the final destination.

Somewhere along the route between checkpoints 3 and 4 we were apparently called in by a civilian for ‘weaving in and out of traffic in an unsafe manner’ as, after our shopping and loading up the car, a black early model expedition pulled up perpundicular to the hoonicorn in the parking lot and a casually dressed individual approached with a lanyard badge ‘Good morning, I’m special investigator blah and I’m talking to you today because X’. After engaging this fine gentleman, I ask if he was sure he was talking to the right person about the right vehicle — he claims yes to my surprise as we really weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary anywhere near other motorists, and pointed to our GoPro on the windshield saying we’d be happy to prove we weren’t doing anything unsafe on the route. The individual understood my replies and concerns about that call being false and he wished us a fun weekend at our destination as we parted ways.

Enroute to checkpoint 5, the final destination, we found several lightly plowed roads which we traversed confidently at a slight angle after finding the resort hidden away on a wooded peninsula in rural Wisconsin. First, once again, to arrive, followed shortly by our suite mates in the V10 touareg, we found the office at some considerable effort and checked in to our home for the weekend.

The next 36 hours of teams arriving, stories of the day being told, heavy indulgence in tasty beverages and games with friends were a welcome reminder of why we do it, and we we will continue to be a part of this event next year as 5 year veterans!

Landing back in St Paul after 687 miles of driving, I pull the data from the Hoonicorn’s OBD2 trip logger, dismiss the 7 DTC fault codes in the engine computer and find out that we were somehow able to coax 21.1mpg out of our giant, heavily laden German V8 steed! An impressive showing. Hoonicorn really only had one fault on our trip, the passenger side heater controls ‘temp up’ button stuck down and tried to make the car 90 degrees for about an hour!

The future is unknown for this Hoonicorn, but it impressed us all with its reliability, economy, power, comfort and capacity!