After building the first W211 based driftable street car and attending Gridlife, I understood just how limiting that platform was for my growth as a driver. Sure I was able to link courses sometime in it but it was a lot of work and stress.
I needed a clean sheet.
For project concept continuity's sake (as well as an emissions compliance loophole in California), I decided W210 makes perfect sense. This page will summarize the resulting V2 of my Mercedes drift sedan journey. Compared to the last car, my design goals were:
Lighter
More powerful
Manual gearbox
More steering angle
More durable at the limit
Professional motorsports safety
Three years later, I can finally say that it all worked out.
Powerplant
In true drift fashion I went with an LS-based powerplant. There are endless reason to choose this platform which are better summarized in its own article. In short, LS packages are reliable, readily available, potent, well-supported and compact.
This car used a 250K mile 5.3L Vortec from a 2001 Chevrolet Tahoe. My and two other friends pulled it in a day at the local scrap yard. A complete motor with accessories, fueling, and intake components ran me $363 + tax. I did not bother opening the block up, it's still running all original internals with some small exceptions.
2001 LM7 5.3 iron block spun to 7K RPM
Canton Racing 15-276 oilpan, 5-5/8" deep , GTO front sump, baffled
Factory de-caped injectors flowing at 68 lbs
Melling 10296 high flow oil pump
JEGS Camshaft 555-200582 (Sloppy Stage 2 grind)
PAC 1218 1.290 beehive racing valve springs
Accusump 3 quart system with remote oil filter
Torqstorm Supercharger, intercooled
ATI Superdamper
Terminator X V3 w/ prebuilt engine harness
PCV catch can routed, vented to atmopshere with a filter
Factory radiator with 2x SPAL 30102038 1640 CFM fans
Additional notes and considerations:
I recommend running an externally routed oil filter, this also allowed me and easy hook-in point for my oil reservoir, my location is on the passenger side "frame rail" under the headers.
This requires the use of 90 degree AN lines and an adapter at the stock filter location, which then necessitates a front sway bar spacer of about 8mm to clear the lines. You _definitely_ want to run a front sway bar on a build like this, ask me how I know
Suspension
The suspension design in W210 is pretty interesting and is not well supported for aftermarket applications. There is obviously no angle kits to speak of, so this is fairly under-developed but gets the job done at the local track events.
The car uses the BC Racing kit, which comes with ride height and damping adjustments and is really affordable: BC Racing J-29 Coilovers Lowering Coils for 1998-2002 Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG W210
It's worth noting that there is a W210 wagon version so depending on your build's weight distribution, you might want to opt into that as well. My car is front-heavy due to iron S\C V8, so I figured this was my starting point, the P\N is J-22
Camber arms are readily available on eBay and through small time fabrication brands.
For front angle, it's as straightforward as cutting and re-drilling or re-welding the knuckles to bring the outer tie-rod points closer to the wheel's pivot point and farther our (in my case, this is to preserve maximum angle on stock-ish LCAs and eliminate Ackerman effect)
This obviously also requires cut and re-weld inner tie rod extensions
In the future, I might try fabricating my own LCA and relocating the spring/shock geometry to unlock more angle but this is currently not a big issue.
.jpg)