I love lunatic sleeper tuning jobs, this Mk2 Golf may just be the best yet.

Boba Motoring starts with a 1989 Mk2 Volkswagen Golf and a 1.8L 1Z diesel engine running on E85 fuel. With reenforced internals they spin it up to 9500rpm, force fed with a Garrett GTX4202R turbo charger good for 900 horsepower. Thats all fed to the unexpecting road through a 4Motion four-wheel-drive system and stock 6-speed manual. This lunacy equates to 2.7 seconds to 62 miles/hour (100km/hr) and 9.3 second quarter mile sprint.

Yep, faster than a Veyron. Here’s a video of yet more runs, and a video from inside the car. This was way too good for a little link.

Figurative inspiring words? Naw.

Behold: the definition of giving 110 percent in competition. Jason and John White recently took to the Targa High Country in Victoria, Australia in their Lamborghini Gallardo. The duo spent the final day of the event battling for the top spot with a menacing Nissan GT-R. The final stage of the day saw the Whites four seconds behind their rival when the green light lit, and the team proceeded to do their best to close the gap.

via autoblog

This was too good for just a normal bookmark.

BMW of the 70s was a much different company than the BMW of 2011. BMW had two platforms, the ‘New class’ including the famous 1600 sedan and 2002 coupe and the ‘New six’ which featured the larger 3.0 sedan and 3.0CSi coupes. Basically four product lines, with different engines, equipment and suspension gear within the model range. BMW didn’t even have any dealers in North America until sales of the independently imported 2002 were far better than expected. Apparently people loved the idea of sporty four seaters!

By the end of the 70s BMW had renumbered to their now iconic schema: the New class was forked into the 3-series and 5-series, the New six forked into the 6-series and 7-series. Starting with the E21 3-series compact coupes and sedans, the E12 5-series mid-sized sedan, the E24 6-series coupe, and the E23 7-series full sized sedan. The BMW brand began to grow.

Things changed over times. Everything grew. The 6-series was once a 7-series coupe, but when it was reintroduced in 2004, it was a 5-series coupe. BMW released a few sports cars, the M1 at the end of the 70s, the Z1 at the end of the 80s, the 8-series (a 7-series coupe again) in the 90s, the Z3 at the end of the 90s, and the Z4 in the early 2000s. BMW remained true to its target market the entire time, the best handling and thusly most enjoyable drives in their markets. The 3-series sedan and coupe was always BMWs bread and butter, the popularity and sales of BMW was at an all time high.

The BMW brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world, automotive or otherwise, so you can’t blame BMW for wanting to expand their brand. It began in the early 2000s with the X5, the least sporty car BMW had ever built. It sold gangbusters. Go forward 10 years and BMW sells an X1, an X3, an X5 and an X6 and a 5-series GT (yet another crossover thing) all cars panned by BMW’s original driver centric market. The X6 is a “sports coupe” that weighs as much as a small bus with a center of gravity to match, they even make an M model (remember when the M badge represented a car built, even just engineered by BMW M and not just shit bolted on?), what a joke… As of 2011 BMW now sells 11 distinct lines in our market…

Things looked good when BMW released the 1-series coupe in the North American market. A smaller (though not nearly light enough) sportier car at a lower price point, and as of 2011 BMW even has a 1-series M coupe. Perhaps there is hope after all? Perhaps not. Seems BMW wants to redefine the 1-series brand already. They intend to fork the 1-series coupe we know as the 2-series (more on that later) by 2013, and relaunch the 1-series as a front-wheel drive car (i.e. a stretched Mini platform) to be better aligned with the Audi A3. Thats right BMW is going to sell a front wheel drive car under the BMW brand. Why? Because the BMW brand is worth its weight in platinum, and a BMW badged Mini will sell better and for a higher price than a Mini badged one.

Next up is BMW’s decision to rebrand the 3-series coupe as the 4-series… That’s right, the car known as the 3-series coupe since 1975 will now be called the 4-series. Why? Not entirely sure. The 3-series coupe has always demanded a premium price over the sedan, and maybe BMW wants to give warm fuzzies to the brainless luxury target market they so love for spending an extra $10k to lose 2 doors and gain a better suspension… This action will ruin any residuals on existing 3-series coupes, confuse customers and obliterates 35+ years of heritage.

BMW? Do you remember what made your cars better than the cheaper, more reliable Lexus of the 90s? They were fun to drive. Why are so many 3, 5, 7 and all the X cars 4WD now?

BMW? Do you remember what made your cars better than the cheaper and faster Infiniti’s of the 2000s? They were more fun to drive. Why are you releasing a FWD 1-series and telling my the X6 is the evolution of the sports car?

Here’s the thing BMW, you are losing what made your brand awesome. I know things are doing great now, BMWs are selling better than ever. I can’t blame a company trying to obtain more money, that is their obligation to their shareholders. The problem is, the further you get away from what made you awesome, the closer you get to the competition. Look at cars up until the 200s, Audi made the most utterly boring cars on the planet, but have you seen the new S5? Gorgeous! Merc made slushy luxury cars, but look at the current C-class, and of course C63 AMG and SLS AMG, I mean come on! Fantastic cars. Look at Lexus, king of the sofas on wheels, they even have an M3 fighter in the IS-F… Infiniti is slowly eating out the bottom of the 3/C/A4 segment too, offering near 335i performance at 128i prices.

The further BMW gets away from its roots, the closer the competition seems to get to BMWs roots. The brand won’t stay strong on its own forever. This current obsession with 10+ distinct product lines has been tried before, look at what happened to all the American brands… Amusingly of all of the current 11 product lines, there isn’t a single car I like as much as the BMW I have and the one I had before that… Sure you can blame the fuel economy movement for the boring-up of the new M5 and M6 and surely the next M3s… How long before a 4WD M5 or even M3… Might as well buy an RS5 at that point, it certainly looks better!

Enough with the rant, I’ll leave you this video of Chris Harris slinging the new 1-series M and the Cayman R around.  Enjoy!

Quite a mean stance!

vs the original BMW M exhaust

So the weekend before last, Tom and I set up to install a free-flowing exhaust on the M Coupe. I was pretty picky with what I wanted from an exhaust, the stock BMW M units are pretty good, albeit very quiet and thus quite heavy. I didn’t want a boomy american (or ‘rice’) sound just to shed some weight and add a bit of top end power, so I ended up getting bespoke exhaust makers Hayward & Scott of Essex (UK) to build me one. After a month of pounding on metal in sheds, the men from Essex sent me a hand-made exhaust. We waited for good enough weather to perform the install and got to work…

Flying M-Coupe

The process is easy enough in theory. In fact our biggest worry, seized bolts/joints was a non issue. The real challenge was fitting hands/tools in places to remove joints. We put the car up on four jacks, as high as we pretty much could. One of our jacks was low on hydraulic fluid, and was located at the back on the driver side, so we shuffled it to the front passenger side where it would be less of a determent. After playing with the jacks for awhile we were ready to begin. We began by removing the BMW back boxes. Each one was held on to two brackets, rubber mounts. Getting them off of the brackets was much harder than just removing the brackets from the body, so thats what we ended up doing. Each muffler was connected to the mid-section with two bolts and a metal ring, easy enough to remove. Removing the BMW mufflers, you really got a feel for how heavy they were, in excess of 30 pounds a pop.

Car parts scattered across the lawn like hillbillies

With those removed we could focus on removing the mid-section. The mid-section is guarded by several heat shields, which also keep it snug with the chassis. Removing those was trivial. The mid-section is attached to the rear cats (the car has four catalytic converters in the North American spec) with six bolts. Removing the top bolts proved to be exceedingly difficult but we managed to do so. At this point we felt pretty pleased with our efforts. We began to try and jiggle and slide the mid-section out from under the car to no avail. It was being blocked by two large pieces of the rear subframe that cross the back of the car and add to the overall rigidity. After hesitating and trying to partially undo and move them out of the way, we gave up and removed both cross bars. This made removing the mid-section a snap, and we put it on the lawn with all of our other parts.

The H&S mid pipes look pretty

The stock BMW M mid-section is an X-pipe and contain a mid resonator, and was also quite a heavy part. The Hayward & Scott mid pipes we were replacing them with were a straight stainless steel X-pipe. This change reduces back pressure, reduces overall weight (although not by more than 10 pounds) and produces an awesome crackley overrun noise on lift off and during engine braking… After a short break, we installed the mid pipe, having similar trouble getting those top bolts in. After putting those in, we reattached the cross bars, and then put the heat shields back up. From there we were able to begin installing the H&S back boxes. We rotated and snug them onto the mid pipes until they lined up with the brackets. This wasn’t particularly hard, though the mid-section was not perfectly symmetrical (an issue with any non robot made parts), and thusly made fitment on the drivers side a bit trickier than the other.

The heat shielding in the exhaust housings is impressive

We finished up, put the drivers side wheel, and lowered the car. I then proceeded to fire her up. The sound of a cold start was pretty impressive, you could FEEL it. Pretty soon the car warmed up and it became silent as it hummed a long in neutral. I took her out for a quick spin. Low revs are a bit deeper than I had anticipated, but the scream at high revs is just spine-tingling. Better yet is the sound between gear shifts, as unspent fuel burns up on the pipes and crackles out the back. This becomes more pronounced as the pipes heat up, to the point where a throttle blip with a fully hot exhaust is just incredible. Highway cruising is completely silent thankfully, however any throttle under full transmission load is quite a bit louder than I had anticipated. Superficial (though important, since you have to live with it) criteria aside, performance is fantastic. Though its really hard to say as the car has always had a ton of power put down to the road, so detecting a predictably small peak power improvement is impossible, we’ll have to book some dyno time to really know for sure.

The weekend after we did a bit more fitment work on the drivers side, as the pipe still sits crooked, more so when the exhaust heats up and expands. We’ve not quite gotten it perfect. I’m also not 100% happy with the volume level, it’s a bit TOO loud for my taste, though it sounds fantastic and raw, not synthetic and big-tippy. Never the less it’s been a fun project, however it turns out! Thanks to Tom for his hours upon hours of work.

The following is a video I made with a cold exhaust, the overrun is not nearly as noticeable as hot pipes, sadly. I had made a better one earlier but had completely forgotten to TURN THE MICROPHONE ON (as was the fate of my ‘before’ video). I might make another one one day, but I generally don’t like sitting and revving the engine like a child in place, its rather anti-social :)

Last week was so busy, I’m way behind on blogging/replying to emails/looking at photos/etc. I apologize to everyone, the weekend was so nice weather-wise, you couldn’t force me to use a computer even if you tried. On that note, the following Dodge commercial is totally brilliant.

Sorry Nissan-GTR…