The rebirth of Joey Hazel's BMW E36 Show Car

The rebirth of Joey Hazel's BMW E36 Show Car

After the very recent unveiling of the new headquarters it's exciting to be working on cool cars so soon! 

Before you go any further, if you haven't done so already, check out the youtube video we did on this feature!

So, Joey Hazel reached out after seeing some of our recent content and noticed our passion for 80’s & 90’s BMWs. He decided to book in and entrusted us with fitting an Airlift performance suspension setup to his rather prestigious BMW e36 show car. 

 

Now, a little background on the car; Joey is an original member of the friendly Rollhard crew which was a nice icebreaker. The car features some cool eurospec modifications you don’t see often in this day and age, such as badge deletes and smoothed panels. There are AC Schnitzer badges everywhere, lurking under the bonnet is an M3 Evo lump and there are lashes of carbon everywhere. It was conceptualised in a time period between the mad Max Power days and the present trends of today. It really is a modern relic of the BMW world & UK car scene and had sat on his driveway for around 7 years.

 

 

Now truth be told, as we are fools who enjoy beating the underside of our vehicles to near death, we had never previously fitted an air suspension system to a car. What a better one to learn on? We enlisted the help of our homie Joshwaaaaaaa who’s awfully experienced in making cars go ‘psssssssssst’.  So with a day set we began bringing this car back into action.

 

Obviously, being an old BMW and one that had been off the road since around 2015, the first bolt (quite literally) snapped! Although she put up a fight thankfully that was the only hiccup and surprisingly the rest of the day went to plan!  The day consisted of taking off the old CA tuned coilover setup, fitting bags to the shocks, plumbing in the air lines and getting it all to come together and fit in the spare wheel well of the car, where the boot build would take place.

 

 

 

 We finished up on time - would you believe it. I think that’s our first time in the history of shooting or working on cars where something has actually gone the way it was intended. After the install that night,  we pulled it out of the workshop to quickly test the setup, and give a glimpse of what the car would look like when it was laid out on the floor. Jamie's face in the shot below is priceless.

 

Joey came through that weekend to check on the progress of the car and turned up in his identical coloured coupe 36, again fitted with an array of rare AC Schnitzer parts and which also features an M3 lump… As if we weren’t jealous enough already. We decided to have an impromptu photoshoot with the two of them, and also take some proper photos of the vert in the day time. What a cool pair of cars to have together! Check out the images!

 

We hope to get him back here with the coupe to do a proper build breakdown of that car and film some cinematic content with it, but it was rad enough having the chance two to photograph the two together.

A little more work was required on the car before handing back the keys to Joey, which consisted of tidying up the air system all over the car and creating a discreet but clean looking boot build, fitting some new ARB bushes, and giving everything on the car a proper assessment after many years of being sat idle. It was a very cool opportunity to learn and document an OG show car of the UK. Hopefully it is the first of many unique builds to feature at our HQ for your viewing pleasure!

If you have a car that you want to modify or build something bespoke for, make sure you check out our Service section on our website and shoot us a message to see if we can be of assistance somehow!

Big shout outs to Josh Gresswell for the spannering! Check him on insta @joshwaa__ @gresswells_ and of course follow @weaselwerkz :)
PEACE!