Anyone who races cars knows that weight is evil. More or less anyway. However, weight at the top of the car is the worst kind of weight. Especially the sunroof. You want the center of gravity to be as low as possible. So we did away with the E30 sunroof.
Its not exactly a small en devour. After removing the sunroof itself, all motors, cables etc, we then had to remove the inner cassette that the sunroof fits into when opened. You can drill the spot welds out and it will eventually pop out. This modification saves you about 50lbs off the roof! This changes the handling dynamic of the e30 dramatically. At first we welded the roof shut with our delete panel. We then decided, lets save even more weight, cut the whole roof off and use a carbon fiber unit instead. So we did.
The new carbon fiber roof weights in at 3lbs. The metal we cut out was another 18lbs. So a total weight savings of 68 lbs off the roof was removed. Not bad!
To make it look right, the guys at Kings auto body then riveted on the roof and blended it in to make it look as OEM as possible.
Being that this was one of those "while we were at it" mods that we did not account for, we realized that our half cage wasn't really a safe idea anymore. So eventually a full cage is needed.
