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All of that main wiring, fuse boxes, relays, and ECU are hidden under the false floor on the passenger side - it can be removed with a few quarter turn Dzus fasteners for access, but otherwise stays out of sight.
FIRST FIRE OF ENGINE
After the Motec harness and ECU were installed, Ryan programmed most of the screens on the AiM dash. The starter was "bumped". The fuel system was tested. The dry sump oiling system was primed. Then it was time to fire it up...
Big milestone when you fire up an engine in a build this extensive for the first time! Mmm... that sounded good. G-SPEED did not give us any throttle control - they thought they had locked us out of the system entirely and it wouldn't start - but we at least got it to fire up, and made
this little video for the customer.
I was hoping we could get the car ready to dyno shortly after, but there were a number of details to wrap up before the tires were ready to spin the dyno drum. Things like the rear axles - we didn't see those custom ordered units for many more weeks, and then they came in at the wrong length. We're still fighting some small issues with their construction, but I will share that joy next time.
STRUT TOWER BRACE
One thing that we wanted to add for a number of reasons was a strut tower brace. Sure, there are some E46 M3 braces out there but I doubt they would clear a reverse mounted MSD Atomic intake on an LS7.
We started with the cast aluminum ends used by BMW on the E46 M3, shown below left. Ryan made a tubular aluminum cross beam that bolts to the BMW ends.
This cross bar clears the intake with about a millimeter to spare, and has integral "cradle mounts" for the MCS remote reservoirs.
The MCS remotes for the rear shocks also mount to part of the cage cross bar on the same "cradle" mounts we use on the front - as well as on a lot of other builds we do.
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