People / BMWCCA

Anyone with $40/yr can join the BMWCCA, BMW Car Club of America. I don't even currently own a BMW but I am renewing my membership. There are people that have never owned a BMW yet are members of this organization! Why is that? It's because it's an awesome organization. It is a non-profit member-run network of local BMW chapters who run events in their respective areas. These events range from dinners and charity programs to autocrosses and full out track racing. Members receive a club magazine and the eligibility to attend events. Members receiving discounts when purchasing a new BMW, as well as a significant discount on dealer parts. I believe some dealers may discount labor as well. Your $40 membership may quickly pay its way back with one stop at the dealer! You're also able to borrow some potentially needed tools, and will definately meet some very cool people. In my opinion every BMW owner should be a BMWCCA member. It's easy to sign up and gets you a lot of cool stuff. Here's a link with my referral id of 301610 to join! I don't have anything to back it up but I'd say this is one of the largest and most active car clubs in the country. It's also not just for a particular car (like a Corvette club) but the entire line!

Personally, through the BMWCCA I've enjoyed the following:

• Roundel, the club magazine, is well done and a good read.
• I've gotten small to quite significant discounts on parts at the dealer. If nothing else the membership fee was worth it for this.
• Install a supercharger at the dealership: $1000. Install a supercharger with your BMW friends: Pizza and beer. My brother and a friend actually installed mine, although it is not hard (at least in Chicagoland) to find guys that are eager (and capable) to help out on something like this just for a chance to drive. It is not difficult to find a friend to assist for a more routine job such as changing brakes or something either.
• Autocross - this is a race against the clock and everyone else's times around a coned course in a large parking lot. The BMWCCA has frequent events throughout the year, and it's fun to drive as fast as you can, see how well you can do, and learn how to improve your driving skills. It also makes it pretty obvious to you that you have things to work on when you are in a supercharged M3 and are beaten by someone in a stock mid-80's 5 series with a few hundred pounds more of weight. Not that that ever happened to me... every event... :P :) If you are competitive enough to place you can also earn trophies at each event and at the end of the season. There are also ice autocrosses in the winter, where a much larger course is made on top of a frozen lake! I haven't done an ice one yet. Here is a video of an autocross. This is an MR2. VIDEO!. It's rare to get out of 2nd gear in an autocross, and some people hear that and think "pfft that's slow, I do more than that on the highway!" If you're thinking that, watch this video and let me know if you think you'll be able to make a run like this easily or that it's slow! ;)
• Track days - The Windy City Chapter of the BMWCCA visits all the tracks within a few hour radius and sets up driver education days, which are a good and pretty safe way to get into actually driving on a track. Whereas an autocross is usually designed to top out at 60mph, on a track you can top out at wherever you can get your spedometer to get to. Attendees are divided into skill levels based on experience and are assigned instructors to keep them safe and sensible on the track as well as teach them how to drive it correctly. The only track I've been to so far is Gingerman Raceway. There is plenty of space to run the car off the track if need be on all but one turn, it is also a flat track. It has a reputation for being good for newbies which I definately still am! Here's the MR2 guy at Gingerman. VIDEO! - he catches this guy because it wasn't warm enough for his tires to work properly. Good view of the whole track!

BMW Philosophy / Engineering

The coolest and one of the most well known things about BMWs is that they are sporty. Which one? All of them! Unlike most brands who produce one or two dedicated sports cars while the rest handle like couches, BMW builds cars with the same principles throughout their entire product line, making them inherently sporty. Aside from the coupes or roadsters they don't exactly set as building a sports car from ground up either; if you look at a Corvette it's built from the beginning to be purely a sportscar. However if you look at an M3 or M5 you'll see a sedan with usable rear seats, plenty of space for golf clubs and groceries, etc. Then the fantastic thing is when it starts moving and is competitive with the Corvette, or Ferrari or whatever else wants to play!

Ideally a car's weight will be evenly distributed 50/50 over the front and rear axles. I have heard that Mazda developed the Miata and ensured this by suspending the car from the celing with a line attached to the center of the car so that they could see how distribution was affected as design changes were made. All BMWs are at 50/50 or very near 50/50 distribution, from the 1-series to the 7-series! I believe this is also true regardless of age - this holds true for any bimmer ever sold in this country. The interesting thing is that a large number of sports cars do not even have this kind of balance! Google "weight distribution" and your favorite car and take a look at the results. You'll find that many aren't able to pull off what even a 1989 5-series is able to! Also part of BMW's philosophy is that all cars are rear-wheel drive. Although there are several BMWs also available as all-wheel drive, those with an x designation. Although the mini cooper is front-wheel drive (and an excellent car!) I doubt that anything FWD will ever show up with a BMW badge on it. RWD is the best in the dry and pushing a car to the limits. In poor traction situations then AWD is the best. In least-fun situations then FWD is the way to go. Even on highly advanced systems I don't think there's any AWD system out there that bests a RWD design on a dry track, the additional weight probably isn't any help either. Here's a link on why RWD is sweet.

There's probably nothing in an Audi R8 that is in an Audi on the street. However M3 racecars are just race prepped street M3s. BMW doesn't build cars to race, they race cars they build. The biggest, longest track in the world is the Nurburgring. There are little towns actually within it! I heard GM built a replica in Georgia to test cars on. Car manufacturers around the world bring their cars there to test performance - Nurburgring-tuned suspension is mentioned in every article on the Cadillac CTS-V and it is well known that the C6 Corvette Z06 was tuned there as well. Painstaking efforts were taken to replicate the track to scale in Gran Turismo 4, and people compare lap times in the game to compare their cars and skill. The same is also done to compare overall performance of cars in real life. BMW designed the M3 GTR in 2001 to compete in American Le Mans. BMW won the GT class its first attempt, I believe some rules were changed to make it ineligible the next year and it hasn't been back yet, but should be returning 2006. In the Nurburgring 24 Hour Race, M3 GTRs took both first place and second place. In both 2005 and 2004! You can pay a toll and drive your own car on the track, or you can get a ride from the ring taxi if you visit, it costs a heap of euros and you get a ride with the fastest taxi drivers on earth. I think there may be a couple? The one you want is Sabine. She set a lap record of 8:16 when she was 19 years old! The ring taxis are M5s. A list of car lap times, both stock and modified, can be found here. Here's a VIDEO of Hans Stuck doing a pretty quick lap in an M3 GTR and eating a lot of cars. To see how well Gran Turismo 4 did copying this track, you can take a look at this VIDEO as well! Oh and how about a Sabine VIDEO too. :) Looks like she's going for more slide than speed around the corners.

BMW transmissions are known to be pretty bulletproof, I believe ///M cars even share that of the actual cars BMW is using for racing. Here is a little dated article on various transmission technologies - note that overall BMW's is the quickest! BMW SMG II is tied with the Ferrari F1 technology used in the Maserati 4200GT. As of the e60 M5 SMG III is now available, with an up and downshift time of only 65 milliseconds! Audi's DSG shifts up at only 8ms but is far slower for downshifting, minimum 600ms according to this page.

The throttle body is what opens when you hit the accelerator to let more air into the engine. Ideally it would be located as close to the combustion chamber as possible. The closer it is the better throttle response the car will have. If you tap the gas on a regular car you will hear a rev after a pause, you can actually hit the gas and take your foot off the pedal before the car really revs up. On an ///M car when you tap the gas you won't get the hesitation because the throttle response is far greater. This is because instead of having a single throttle body, BMW has placed a throttle body before the intake of each cylinder and located them much closer to the engine. Intake space is reduced and less turbulent designs can be made allowing each cylinder to receive a more consistent charge of air while overall airflow is increased as well. I believe all naturally aspirated motors that are built up for racing will use this design. It is also used in ///M cars! Aside from the e28 M5 and US version e36 M3. I don't claim to be an all-knowing car expert but I don't actually think any other cars come like this stock that aren't supercars. The Mclaren F1 has these, but of course the engine was made by BMW! I believe Ferrari and likely Porsche use them as well but I couldn't say any specific cars as I don't know their lines very well.

BMW has very solid brakes. They simply don't do drum brakes, crappy rear brakes that you can find on the rear of lots of other cars still these days. The large disc brakes that are used resist fade and have excellent braking performance. My 1990 535i had a braking distance from 60mph to 0 of 130ft, which is good even by today's standards! On ///M cars now you will also find vented (front and rear) cross-drilled and floating rotors. The e46 M3 competition package comes with these, maybe steel brake lines too? The standard e46 M3 does not, as apparently BMW thought Americans would be too lazy to perform the proper maintenance on cross-drilled rotors; inspecting for cracks.

A testament to engineering efficiency on a naturally aspirated motor is how much horsepower it is able to create for its displacement. BMW has several motors that produce greater than 100hp per liter! Honda is also quite good at this game - the s2000 houses the engine that has the most power/liter - 237hp from 2.2 liters! Actutally this should be shortly bested as I believe the M5 CSL is going to be 542hp from 5.0 liters. It will be fun to see what this car can do, as it is the CSL they will also be trimming weight; all body panels will be carbon fiber!

BMW has also been coming up with some cool new stuff lately. They have an engine which can run on either hydrogen or gas, a 12-cylinder 5.4 liter engine, unveiled in 2000! They also have hydrogen only engines and hold the world land speed record for a hydrogen car, which is about 188 mph. 1/4 mile time is a little under 15 seconds. Already recognized as masters of the inline 6-cylinder engine, BMW has made even more improvements with the latest iteration. They are also one of the first players to make widespread usage of magnesium in the block. Versus the 3.0 liter motor found in the e46, that in the e90 produces 30 more horsepower, uses 12% less fuel, and is 44 pounds lighter! BMW are wizards of naturally aspirated motors but have made turbocharged motors in the past, and are doing so again now with the e60 535d. This motor uses two turbos in a sequential setup on a diesel engine. Most twin turbo systems use the same turbo, one for each bank in something like a V6. BMW only makes inline 6's though, which are balanced and theoretically vibration free as opposed to the V design. Side note - I think Mercedes recently stopped producing I6's and are now using V6's to save money. In the sequential setup, one turbo spools quickly at during the low rpm range and the other takes over on the high end. The 3.0 liter engine produces 272bhp and 413 lb ft of torque, 391 of which is available at 1500rpm!! 0-62 in 6.6 seconds, and oh yeah, 35.3mpg.

BMW has won a vast amount of awards. The 3 and 5-series have been in the car and driver's 10 best list I believe longer than any other cars! They are alwyas benchmarks in their class. The international engine of the year awards have awarded BMW with more awards than any other make! See current and previous years here.

BMWs are very practical - you can drive one in the summer or in the winter. You can load one up with groceries, a wife and a few kids. After you drop them all off you can run laps with competitive times on a race track. Isn't it obvious why it's The Ultimate Driving Machine??