Posts Tagged 'M coupe'

I was going over some car pictures on the weekend and thought I really should just throw them all together in one place. Without further ado, here are my favourite pictures of the M Coupe….

We’ve had a very unpredictable winter this year. As of writing this, it’s -3 and we had a short snow squall earlier today.  However last weekend it was 17.5 C and absolutely gorgeous. There was only one thing to do: get the M Coupe out of storage.

Snow?

Last year was particularly bad for me and driving. I was busy, we bought another car and the M Coupe ended up in storage. With only brief jaunts here and there, it amounted to a sad 1000km of driving all year. Fall was nice for driving but then we were back in Kyoto, after that winter came. So the car slept. Thankfully I’d disconnected the battery, having learned my lesson last winter that if I’m not willing to go run it every few weeks in the garage it will indeed go flat. As hoped, the car started without issue, roaring to life with it’s usual furor. One of the tires was a bit low, but the rest had held their pressure perfectly. With air in the rear drivers side tire we were ready to convert some dinosaur bones into vapor.

Having not driven the car for almost 4 months it really felt very good to get back into it. Steering is communicative, being one of the last hydraulic systems BMW used, but no where near as good as the setup in the e36 M3s and Z3 M cars. 12.8 turns to lock puts it significantly faster than the roadster and even the M3 CSL. It makes it a bit twitchy at speed, but also makes things like lane changes a trivial affair. Steering is so heavy you need to have a solid grip at all times anyway.

The clutch is as heavy as always and while not as pleasant as earlier BMWs (i.e. 90s and prior) in terms of engagement feel it gets the job done. Engagement is linear and having been together all these years it feels very natural to me. Pedal travel is still too far, but a $2-20 clutch stop or bolt would fix that. The gear box I once loathed now puts a smile on my face. 2nd gear is as notchy as ever, something common to all cars that haven’t had transmission fluid and mount swaps. 1st gear is still high, meaning you never spend any time in it after taking off. Somehow it feels good though, once you know where & when to give it gas as you row your way, it’s quite smooth up and down the H. And the ratios are close, so you’re rowing quite a lot. The learning curve to avoid the distinctive 1st to 2nd bunny hop, widely reported across the car forums, was quite steep: nearly 2 years at my rather modest rate of usage. Now it’s just plain rewarding to drive.

The engine is still the primary reason to own the car. It’s 3.2L inline six debuted with 338 HP in 2000 known as the S54B32. It still managed to produce a rather respectable amount of torque (268 lb/ft) given its high rev 100+HP/L nature. That’s mostly thanks to a rather long stroke which puts its piston velocity ahead of the Lamborghini Gallardo (as I recall). Six years later when the e46 M3 retired from the market, the S54 made its final debut in the M Coupe and Roadster. Though now it was coupled to an intake further from the hot engine itself, an ECU that was an order of magnitude faster and a much better exhaust setup. (Not to mention a much smaller and lighter car to haul around!) No forced induction to dull its responsiveness, no direct injection to calm its over running fury. To put things in perspective: here in 2013 sports cars with modern direct injection engines are hitting the same power outputs are all still quite a bit bigger. Think Porsche Cayman S (3.4L, 321HP) or the Nissan NISMO 370Z (3.7L 350HP). Neither of those engines is as responsive and revvy as the S54, not even close. I can only imagine how much more interested I’d be in BMW had they done a direct injection successor to the S54 instead of going the forced induction route…

The most enjoyable thing about the car is that it never feels ‘normal’ to drive it. After the Nissan GT-R came out everyone commented that it drove like a Maxima around town. The M Coupe never feels anything but absurd at all times. Partially it’s the seating position, you have to fall in and your butt is only inches from the road. The controls help too, the twitchy steering and tricky transmission add a lot of character to the driving experience. The engine finishes it off, dogging it around town under 3000 RPM and screaming whenever you jump down a gear or two. The Hayward & Scott exhaust we installed helps. The car really grumbles around town and absolutely shouts when called upon, completely with coughing and popping overrun despite having all four of its California complaint cats. Even pulling away casually from a traffic light is an event. It’s an absurd car. Absurdly unpractical. Absurdly uncomfortable. I might be stuck in heavy traffic, but the car always manages to put a smile on my face. (As I grit my teeth and picture my left leg growing to be the size of a tree trunk…)

This coming weekend’s highs will be -1 and 0 so there is no hope for a repeat performance just yet. I don’t know what the future has in store for the car and I, but spring will be here soon and I can’t wait.

lying in wait

Since the M Coupe is sleeping over the winter, it’s always good to start it up at least once a month, let it warm up, and roll the tires a bit.  Thankfully it’s underground home never really gets particularly cold (~10-12C in the winter) but its still always a good idea. I decided to make some video of my warm up and trip around the parking garage.

 

I’d let the engine warm up for about 10 minutes before touching the throttle, oil had come up to about 60-70C. Garage was about 10-12C, not particularly cold. Never the less, car never really revs past 3500 or so while sitting there.

Sadly the ‘auto’ audio level on the 5D mk2 reduces most engine noise to minimal levels as if it were background noise. The mic also seems to lose the bass frequencies completely. I’ll have to play with it more another time, and I really should plug in an external mic. First time using iMovie 09 too.

Camera was situated in the engine bay and on the ground on a bag of bird seed acting as a posable mount.

I also took a chance to attach a BMW CCA grill badge, which is a bit trickier on these guys than most cars, since the grill isn’t attached to the bonnet:

Headlight glow shows that the lens filter was kinda dirty.  :) I probably need to straighten the badge a bit better some day too :P

So about two weeks ago, my flat tire monitor chimed on driving on the QEW. We pulled over, checked the tires, they all physically looked fine so we drove off. When I got home I took out the tire pressure gauge and sure enough the drivers rear tire was low. I refilled it using the cars onboard mobility kit. While these are definitely *not* run flats, they are carbon fiber side walled, and as a result will never have a bulged appearance until they are critically low, which these were not. Watching it during the week, it appeared to lose a consistent about 2 PSI a day. After missing the noon closure last weekend, this weekend I managed to haul over early enough to Jensen Tire to get it repaired. A modest $25 later, a 2″ nail was removed from the tire, the hole enlarged, filled with new rubber and epoxy, patched, and then shaved down using a Dremel tool. After a balance and remounting, I’m ready to smoke them once again drive cautiously and in a mature fashion.

The other cool factoid of note is that the car is equipped with the FTM (Flat Tire Monitor) as opposed to the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitor). US cars all got TPMS in 2007+, though the guys at the garage told me some Canadian and European models kept the FTM. The FTM works by tracking wheel rotation and can detect if a tire is spinning too fast. It has to be calibrated after changing tire/wheel size or extreme temperature change, but at least it doesn’t have the breakable/losable wireless stem monitors.

The e86 chassis is so stiff, with the rear tire barely off the ground, the front tire freely spins around :)