People talk about golden eras a lot when referencing cars. Honda had a golden era in the ’90s and early 2000s. BMW had one in the ’80s and another one in the early aughts as well. Mercedes had one too and it was best represented by the super awesome and super intense-looking 190e 2.5 Evolution II. Those cars are unobtanium now, so our favorite Euro car parts house, FCP Euro, built its own take on one and we wrote about it back in February.
Fast forward eight months and that car has now seen some serious track time, and in true project car fashion, Project Golden Era has evolved to be faster, safer and smarter and of course, FCP made a video showing the changes. Some of them are pretty rad.
During the building of another FCP project (the Volvo 850 wagon BTCC homage), the company hired an automotive design engineer with tons of rapid prototyping experience. This is what’s known as a “good hire” because he has not only designed and printed adapters for that Volvo to put BMW S85 V10 individual throttle bodies on its five-cylinder, but now he’s turned his attention to things like air intakes and heat shielding on the Mercedes.
Underneath things have had some tweaks, too. Notably, the E46 M3 steering rack has been moved on an adjustable mount to fix some bump steer issues and the team also added suspension limiting straps (or in this case, cables) to prevent the W204 Mercedes suspension components from extending further than they should on tracks that unweight the car, like Watkins Glen.
Overall, this remains one of my favorite project cars that the FCP folks have built, and I need to start emailing them to let me take it for a rip if I make it to the east coast.
