By now, everyone in the BMW community knows what the new S55 3-liter twin-turbo plant inside the M3 and M4 is capable of tuning-wise. People have squeezed in excess of 500 HP from them easy, with just a mild ECU tune but what about its predecessors?
The N55 plant that is the basis of the S55 is known for its potential too. People have been taking it to around 400 HP with rather small changes and that’s no surprise. Turbocharging has been kind to BMW engines.
However, trace back a little more, to the father of the N55 and you’ll find the N54 unit which was actually a twin-turbo inline 6. The problem was, unlike its successor, it has a bad reputation for overheating and causing the water pump to fail. Some people met with even worse problems over the years, but the potential the two turbos offered was hard to resist.
That’s what we’re looking at here, with this BMW E90 335i being capable of putting down no less than 741 HP and 624 lb-ft (846 Nm) of torque. Yes, you read that right!
That’s a lot over twice as much as the engine used to make stock and we won’t even deal with the tremendous amount of torque it’s putting down. To get a better idea of what we’re talking about here, imagine that the Hellcat SRT, the fastest Sedan in the world, has 707 HP to play with and an engine that makes the 3-liter of the BMW seem like a bad joke in terms of size.
How was all of this possible? With some heavy tuning, of course. The turbos have been swapped for some PTE 6466 Gen 2 ones, a JB4 tune was added to the ECU unit, boost has been taken up to 30 PSI, a new intercooler was also needed as well as an intake, new headers and exhaust.
Of course, that’s just a small part of what happened under the bonnet and, as you imagine, the result posted in the video below was achieved using E85 but even so, this is too damn impressive! Oh, and did we mention it's a manual?
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