“
This one has a beast
of a turbo: a BorgWarner
S366 with a twin scroll T4
turbine housing
”
HOT RIDE
WORK Meister wheelsWhile the big brother to this engine, the 3ltr 6cyl
OM606, has almost legendary status in diesel tuning, the
OM605 is less famous, so why use the 605? In fact, why
not use a BMW diesel engine? Well, the 606 is great,
but it’s also huge, and while the BMW 3ltr turbo diesel
engines are fantastic too, the electronics mean they’re
far more complex to install, and to be honest, they just
don’t rev and make the power like these engines doTuned cars are never exactly what peopleexpect
them to be at fi rst glance, especially to people who aren’t
into modifi ed cars. But this car, Scott Smith’s awesome
E36 BMW coupé, takes the usual clichéd expression
of ‘with a twist’ and seriously maxes it out, as almost
nothing is like you’d expect.
It’s a very fast E36, but is it an M3? Nope, it’s a diesel.
So a 330d engine? Nope, it’s not even a BMW engine; it’s
a Mercedes. So it’s got the famous OM606 6cyl engine?
No, the 5cyl OM605. It can’t be that powerful though,
can it, it’s a diesel!? It’s 450bhp! But diesel’s don’t rev.
Well this one pulls hard all the way to 6500rpm thanks to
a big BorgWarner S366SX turbo. So it’s laggy then with
that massive turbo? No, it spools up super fast. Okay,
we think you get the idea now. This thing blows all the
typical misconceptions out the water in style, and we’re
here to show you how it’s done.DIRTY (DIESEL) SECRETThe project started almost accidentally, as it wasn’t Scott
Smith, the current owner and builder of this beast, that
kick-started this awesome car into reality. A friend of
his fi tted the Mercedes OM605 2.5ltr 20V turbo diesel
engine and Mercedes six speed manual box to what
was otherwise a pretty much standard base model 316i
BMW, mostly to see how hard it would be to get the
combination running and driving. The answer to that
question was ‘quite hard’, and it was far from the easiest
engine to swap in, but once it was done, Scott could
see the huge potential in the car, so bought it, and quite
rapidly turned it into the absolute beast you can see
before you on these pages.