May is the anchor month of the Rocky Mountain Chapter Spring Driving School. This year our chapter added a new element to the mix in the form of time trials, held separately under BMW CCA Club Racing jurisdiction.

    The opportunity for a new venue besides NASA and SCCA to race against the clock brought out some fast characters, people who might not normally be seen at a BMW driving school. As I was having a skateboard around the paddock between instructing sessions and time-trial heats, I noticed what from a distance appeared to be a highly modified E46-generation M3 race car. At first glance, it didn’t seem all that remarkable against a backdrop of purpose-built racing iron that filled the paddock. Then, just as I dodged an asphalt crack—men with gray hair probably shouldn’t skateboard—I caught a glimpse of what looked like a four-cylinder engine under the hood.

    In the U.S. Market, no E46 3 Series ever came with a four-cylinder engine—especially not the M3. I was intrigued; there were substantial suspension and aero modifications that seemed like significant overkill for a four-cylinder-powered car. I circled back around for a closer look, while making a mental note not to crash my skateboard into someone else’s race car.

    The engine was an S14, the famous power plant that propelled the iconic E30 M3. It had no business being in an E46 M3—and it looked like no S14 I had ever seen. In place of the intake and individual throttle bodies were double sidedraft Webber DCOE carburetors; the exhaust was made from equal-length headers constructed so that the gold-coated suspension and frame components could literally pass through them. That exhaust exited in a side pipe where the passenger door should be.

    A dry-sump oil system and a remote cooling system were the only engine-powered accessories. The power steering was electric, and there was no alternator to be found anywhere in the engine bay. The body was made from carbon-fiber panels fitted over a steel tubular frame with aluminum interior panels.

    The interior was completely custom-built, down to an individually fitted Butler Built racing seat. In the trunk was a fuel cell, a fire-extinguishing system, and a carbon-fiber driveshaft. A belt off that driveshaft powered the alternator—I found it!

    The whole car had an aviation-grade feel to it; it was clearly professionally built, from the organized system layouts to artisan welds and neatly routed wiring and stainlesssteel hoses.

    Then its owner greeted me from his trailer—and everything made sense.

    Jim Valdez is a fellow BMW CCA instructor whom I first met in 2012 at a BMW Club Racing school. I may not have torqued a strut-housing bolt correctly, and he may have saved me with a cordless impact wrench—but that’s all rumors and legend. Yet somehow I had no clue until now that this was Jim’s car.

    Valdez is an FAA-certified airframe-and-power-plant technician who works as an avionics specialist for the same airline that I do; he’s been there for over thirty years. He has spent a lifetime building, engineering, and problem-solving in airplanes and cars. His path to racing started in the 1980s, when he was competitive in SCCA autocross. He always custom-built and modified his autocross cars, the last being Chevy Corvair with a small-block V8 where the back seat normally resides. In 1996 he decided to move up to road-racing.

    The genesis of his current car took place on large drafting tables obtained from Boeing, where Jim hand drafted full-scale images that he later used as templates to construct the frame; he started with the suspension-pickup points and designed the rest of the frame around them. The wheelbase and other components had to comply with SCCA rules, but everything else was custom-designed for optimum suspension geometry.

    When it came time to build, Jim cut every bar and welded every tube. The aluminum driver’s-compartment tub was formed from 43 aluminum panels, some later converted to carbon-fiber. Valdez’ custom suspension incorporates unequal-length front arms to C4 Corvette uprights and brakes, with custom rear arms and Wilwood brakes.

    His first engine was an M10 from a 2002—incorporating the same double sidedraft Weber DCOE carburetors. For his first body, he opted for an E21 3 Series shell painted in BMW Motorsport colors. Working a full time day job, then working nearly full-time hours on nights and weekends, it took a total of two years to design, and four years of building, to complete the project. Valdez had no clue how many actual hours he has invested, but if the build were measured by angry ex-girlfriends, the total is three!

    Jim’s goals were reliability—and honing the platform into a competitive car. In his first season with SCCA, he completed nineteen races. Over successive seasons, he continued to improve; then in 2007 he gave the car a major overhaul into how it sits today. He replaced the M10 engine with the S14, but retained the Weber DCOE carburetors through a custom-fabricated intake plenum. When asked why he stuck with carburetors over fuel injection, he says he wanted to keep it old-school—and his thirty years experience in tuning carburetors surely helps.

    The S14’s bore and stroke must be stock to conform with SCCA rules, but Valdez removed all power-robbing accessories except for the dry-sump oil pump and water pump. The result is over 250 horsepower at the rear wheel. That power is routed through a Quafe six-speed non-synchronized sequential gearbox, the carbon-fiber driveshaft, and a Speedway Engineering quick-change rear end. The quick-change rear end allows him to optimize final-drive gearing for a specific tracks. The sequential gearbox requires no clutch on upshifts and a “dip” of clutch on downshifts, making for lightning-fast shifts. Steering is accomplished through an electric Woodward custom racing rack with adjustable assist.

    For the exterior, the E21 shell was replaced by an E46 M3 carbon-fiber body kit that weights only 35 pounds. Valdez chose the E46 M3 body style largely for aerodynamic reasons, and he engineered the front spoiler and rear wing to optimize the form. The car is classed in SCCA GT2 and weighs only 1,972 pounds.

    Valdez’ years of designing, building, and evolving the car have resulted in one thing—speed! On High Plains Raceway, our home track, he runs a 1:53 lap time, which is certainly a professional-grade time in SCCA GT2. At our BMW CCA time trials, he was second only to a highly modified Porsche 911 Turbo, and only by a few fractions of a second. For comparison, talented drivers in fully prepped E36 and E46 M3s hover in the mid-1:50s; vehicles closer to stock, like my S544-powered M coupe, hover in the low two-minute range. My best lap ever is 2:00 minutes even.

    Certainly, Valdez’ success is as much due to driver as it is machine, but having literally designed and built the car from scratch, he has insight beyond that of most people. His race results support this. One of his most notable race wins was in 2015 at Circuit Of The Americas, where he bested an SCCA national champion. He has won the overall Mid-States Conference SCCA GT2 title and placed as high as fifth in the SCCA nationals—in a field of 82 cars.

    Valdez is certainly results-driven—but not as much as he is driven to improve his car, which is nothing more than an extension of himself. He also says that he doesn’t take it too seriously—this from a man who literally drew his car on paper, then built it from scratch, then went on to become one of the fastest guys in his class. Yeah, not too seriously….

    The thing that most attracted me to this story is the particular character of Jim Valdez. Besides being an excellent instructor, a gentlemen racer, and an overall good guy, he is an outlier in an age of instant gratification. In a time where you can buy virtually anything with the click of a button, he built a highly competitive car through a mix of old-school drafting and engineering, brilliant craftsmanship, and even a few failed relationships.

    The sound of an S14 breathing through hand-tuned Webers and exhaling through equal-length headers must be heard to be appreciated. The utter absurdity of an S14-powered E46 M3 looming in your rearview mirrors on the track is laughable—until it passes you at a nerve-wrenching closure rate. When that happened to me—in every session—I couldn’t help but quietly root in my helmet, “Go get ’em, Jim!”—Alex McCulloch