Feature
The Green Agenda
Words: Will Beaumont Images: Jordan Butters & AC Schnitzer
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, tuning firms had a pretty easy job when it came to upping the visual ante of the cars they tweaked. Most standard cars were sober affairs, styled with subtlety and restraint in mind.
L
ook at the E36 and E39 for example. You and I could spot the difference between an M3 and M5 from a cooking model in M Sport trim, but the extra exhaust pipes or more aerodynamic mirrors don’t register on most people’s radar. To the general public, they all look like regular saloon cars. Throw some big wheels, a jutting front splitter, a massive wing and some wide arches at a 90s car, at a 90s BMW, and you start to make a big impact. Today, however, it’s not so easy to make waves. Not when there are cars like the Honda Civic Type R with so many body add-ons it looks like a Transformer part way through its metamorphosis. Or
32 BMW Car Club Magazine January 2022
even the new M3 and M4 that don’t just ooze menace, they shout about their aggression louder than a drunk hooligan does late at night in a kebab shop. The M3 is an anomaly in the BMW range, it looks distinctly different from the non-M 3 Series. For most other models, it’s business as usual. A 116d M Sport and an M135i xDrive could only be separated in a line-up if you got a long hard look at each of them. The difference now is, though, both have the big wheels, spoilers, dark trim, prominent splitters and all the other paraphernalia of a performance car. The sort of parts stolen from aftermarket tuners. Who, admittedly, stole them from race cars.
At least modern turbocharged engines can be tuned more easily. No matter how well developed a tuner’s power increase might be, there’s not the need to break an engine apart to squeeze in long-stroke cranks, high-lifts cams and enlarge intake ports. Now that’s got to be some consolation to losing the impact a welljudged spoiler can make. Sadly, there’s no solace in the relative simplicity of turbo tuning for AC Schnitzer, not when it came to working on the F40 M135i xDrive. Because of the car’s Aisin eight-speed automatic gearbox is already close to its limits, the legendary Aachenbased tuners could only add 20-or-so bhp to the M135i’s 302bhp output. www.bmwcarclubgb.uk
