Hyperleggera

2007 BMW 335i Coupé

In the Name of Science, Seven Thousand RPM

Words: Peter Orosz | Pic­tures: Gergely “AlieN” Antal

It is when you approach six thou­sand RPM that the quick­sil­ver rasp envelop­ing the tight cabin takes on the urgent menace of some­thing not quite meant for public roads. As the tach shoots for seven thou­sand, your mus­cles tighten for the robo­t­ized upshift, chief amongst them the ten­sors tym­pani in your middle ears.

Their func­tion is to pull on the malleus, the largest of the ossi­cles in the middle ear. The malleus in turn tenses the tym­panic mem­brane, pro­tect­ing the audi­tory system from extreme ampli­tudes of noise. Which is exactly what BMW’s N54 engine pro­duces in copi­ous amounts at high revs.

The exam­ple at hand powers a 335i coupé and we are on a mostly deserted stretch of black­top, making speed runs for science.

Clenched in my white-​gray fin­gers is an iPhone 3G and I am about to have a 180-pound hair­less monkey land on my sternum.

I have never before sat in the 335i, a car con­sid­ered by many to be on par with the E46 M3, which makes the great­est noise this side of Emilia-​Romagna. The per­for­mance fig­ures are within a few per­cent: the M3 has 333 horse­power to propel 3,460 pounds to 60 mph in 5.2 sec­onds, while the 335i needs only 200 mil­lisec­onds less to do the same to its 3,527 pounds with 306 hp from its twin-​turbo six.

Heavy, yes, but this thing will outrun a Lam­borgh­ini Miura.

Of said num­bers, we need the weight. The rest we mea­sure with our road­side dyno outfit: a pair of hands—mine—and a tele­phone. It is an iPhone 3G run­ning Dyno­li­cious, a piece of soft­ware that uses the phone’s accelerom­e­ter to record per­for­mance data. I hold it steady, press reset, then try to hold on as Han­dras, the car’s slightly edgy owner, drops the clutch. Or what­ever passes for a clutch in a modern Bimmer with com­put­ers wedged in between your senses and the mechanicals.

One g of decel­er­a­tion sounds barely more than bounc­ing up against a wall, espe­cially when com­pared to the g-load of For­mula One dri­vers and fighter pilots, yet the human body is quite unable to treat it a normal. The inner ear has evolved to treat one g coming from the direc­tion of your feet as dandy. When said accel­er­a­tion comes not at your soles but at your clav­i­cles, your vestibu­lar organ is vis­i­bly distressed.

A cush­ion of elec­tronic music keeps us giddy in the cool August night as we clam­ber out of the car to look at the results. When you con­sider that the mea­sure­ments were taken with a tele­phone instead of spe­cial­ized equip­ment, the results are all the more remark­able. Both accel­er­a­tion and decel­er­a­tion fig­ures are spot on with their offi­cial counterparts:

Those who have driven it say the N54 feels nat­u­rally aspi­rated. This is due to the fact that it uses two small turbos with the pres­sure dialed all the way down to 5.8 psi. This does get rid of the turbo lag but does not get rid of a BMW straight six’s unique sell­ing propo­si­tion: that noise.

That noise between six and seven thou­sand rpm.

Ama­teur sci­ence has never been such fun.

∞ Published on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

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