A BMW with a Mercedes engine? Who would have thought? A BMW GT3 received a Mercedes-Benz-sourced V12 power unit. The model arrived at SEMA and looks like it’s the ultimate street car.
BMW never made a street-legal version of the Z4 GT3. But someone bought a Z4 GT3 race car in Lithuania and shipped it over to the US as a rolling shell, with the intention to set it up as a track car. Nobody knows how many racing hours the Z4 actually has.
Thousands of hours of work later, the car arrived at SEMA in Las Vegas with a Mercedes engine. The model displayed by the Florida-based tuner Gooichi Motors looks totally different from what the Z4 GT3 looked like. Body panels did not fit anymore with the new engine inside.
This car ran the 4.4-liter V8, which generated 480 horsepower. They dislocated that V8 and put the much bigger 6.0-liter V12 instead, codenamed M120, an operation which was possible without much interfering with the engine bay, since the Z4 came with a pretty long hood.
The V12 used to develop 402 horsepower (408 PS). But that was before the tuner came up with the Procharger Stage 3F1x mechanical supercharger. A six-speed sequential gearbox, supplied by New Zealand specialist Humbel Gear Technology, manages everything that the engine churns out.
Sam Morris, the one who worked on the eight-month project, says he wanted to piss off the BMW guys. To do just that, he put in a lot of Petronas green accents, similar to those used by the motor racing division of Mercedes. Fiber glass and carbon fiber cover the entire body. There is a massive wing at the back for more downforce, plus the super aggressive air diffuser.
Photo: Larry Chen | YouTube
Furthermore, they took out the BMW badge and replaced it with one that does have four sections, but those are between four star points, looking very similar to the three-pointed star from Mercedes.
The car now rides on center-mounted F1-style wheels shod with Toyo tires.
Even though it is going to be a street car, it is going to have a fire suppression system. There are too many videos of cars catching fire, Sam Morris explains.
The team has never dyno'ed the car. They don’t even have a benchmark. They expect some 1,500 horsepower coming out of the tuned V12.
Alcantara with Petronas green stitching covers the dashboard, setting it apart from the usual super basic GT3. The team reworked the roll cage a bit and installed an air conditioning system to make it comfortable on the road.
Morris believes the car they worked on for this year's SEMA Show must have been involved in some crashes because there are panels in the back quarter that look like they were repaired a couple of times. Crash or not, one thing is for sure: he and the team built the ultimate street-legal race car.
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