Posted by With my final track day of 2012 coming up just over a month away (Saturday 17th November at Donington with the lovely folk from BookATrack.com) I was hoping all I’d need to do in way of preparation was check fluid levels and pack stuff into the car.
Unfortunately when I moved the car over the weekend to fetch something from the garage I noticed a rather ominous trail of fluid leaking from underneath. I’d only just switched the engine on so it couldn’t be the air conditioning outlet, the car does have a tendency to embarrass itself when hot leaving small puddles in the pit garage. A quick “finger and sniff test” revealed that it was leaking coolant, after jacking up the front of the car it became obvious that the radiator was in the initial stages of springing an impressive leak. BMW in their infinite Teutonic engineering wisdom (one suspects to save a few pennies) decided to bond an aluminium radiator core to a pair of plastic end tanks, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that bonding metal to plastic usually doesn’t end well.
Now I could have attempted to “fix” the leak using Radweld but with an approximately 400 mile round trip to Derbyshire and back plus a track day it wasn’t a chance I was willing to take. The thought of having the rad fail while going the Crainer Curves was enough to convince me something more permanent was required. In keeping with my mantra of replacing critical stock parts with something more suitable for the job in hand I decided to ignore an OEM replacement and get a new performance radiator from Mishimoto. It’s 100% aluminium and really does look the part.
I shall be looking forward to fitting it at the end of the week and hopefully that will be the last of the jobs I need to do this year!