"You don't understand," said Randy, shaking his head. "Rust is your friend!" Randy, a fellow Improved Touring racer, isn't screwed together all that tightly, so his pronouncements are usually dismissed with scant credence...but not in this case. In this case, he has a point. Scrutineers for the Sports Car Club of America, the sanctioning body overseeing construction of our little BMWs, would notice subtle attempts to lighten the car, such as missing hood, trunklid or doors.
Therefore, in our neverending quest to get our cars down to the class minimum, we must avail ourselves of all the tricks of our nefarious trade. Either that, or take the really devious route and, as Randy suggested, let nature's chem lab help us out. Mild steel, in the presence of water and oxygen, tends to render itself into oxide of iron. In turn, in its brown, nasty way, this stuff will scale off, leaving...an 'ole, a bit of nothingness which, allowed to propagate over time, will expand to include the entire car. In our case, Randy and I would prefer to let the bits that don't show evaporate.
BMW, in its all-knowing prescience, has thus constructed the sills and other hidden parts of its '70s-vintage unit-bodies to accommodate us perfectly. They even went to the trouble on my 3.0 CS to make a three-layer rocker panel, providing plenty of nature-ready potential holes. Just add water, and...presto! A BMW 3.0 CSR (Rusted). That's my challenge here, folks. Because much as I admire Randy (one of the great pragmatic thinkers of our time), I hate rust. Hate it! And when I finish with my One Lap Wonder, it won't have so much as a speck of rust on it. It will be well and truly "rust free."
This won't happen overnight. Mitchell Sam Rossi has regaled you with tales of terror referencing removal of noxious substances from the floor and underside of his ride. I'll add a little insight here, acquired at great cost: Let someone else do it. That's right. Farm it out, bubba. Because unless you have enough time on your hands to build that nifty scale model of the Great Wall of China out of sugar cubes, you're doomed if you try to accomplish this daunting task yourself. Oh you can do it, all right. But at the end of several weeks of gut-wrenching labor such as grinding and wire brushing and more grinding and scraping and sanding and God knows what awful stuff, you will be so sick of that damned car that you will want to push it into the nearest rock pit, laughing at the commotion as it sinks. I've done it. I know. And the rock pit is a shallower place for the experience.
So I sent my lovely, fragile coupe to the paint strippers. You might have such a facility in your town. It will be located in a section of town you wouldn't go into after dark. The premises will smell...funny. There will be razor wire on top of the chain-link fence surrounding the place (to keep criminals from stealing, what?). And the people running your local strip-atoreum will be...um, unusual. I think it's the fumes.