10 PERFORMANCE BMWthe same applies to Perttu and BMWs.
“I’ve liked them since 2001, back when I
was a kid,” he tells us, “and my first car
was an E30 316,” so he’s clearly a man
with good taste and that taste is geared
towards the classics. He clearly also likes
a bargain, which is how he came to own
the particular car we’re looking at today.
“I bought this E30 because of the price,”
he grins, “it was so cheap, plus it had an
LSD,” which was good, but there was one
thing which was less good, and why it was
so cheap... “The engine was broken,” says
Perttu, but seeing as he was never going
to keep this car stock that really wasn’t
a problem. “I bought the car in 2005 and
my plan was to just build the car faster
and faster year by year,” and we’d say it’s
mission accomplished because after 12years of building it’s very fast indeed. You
see, Perttu hasn’t spent the past decade
and change building this car just for fun,
he set out with the intention of taking it
drag racing and competes in Finland’s
Blacklist drag racing series with not just
the only European car but also one of the
fastest cars in the whole country...
It’s impossible to look at a car like this
without immediately being drawn to the
engine and what an engine this is. With
no engine to speak of when starting out
on his epic E30 build, Perttu was free to
choose anything he deemed fit for the
task in hand; it also had to be something
that could grow as the project grew over
the years and his engine of choice was
the M50B25. This sturdy straight-six loves
a turbo and there’s a lot of scope for bigpower, making it the ideal candidate, and
with some serious mods over the past
12 years it’s been transformed into an
absolute beast. For starters, it’s no longer a
B25 and has been stroked to 2.8-litres and
fitted with CP Pistons and Eagle rods, an
M52B28 crankshaft, ACL bearings, Enem
292° cams, chromoly valve plates, stiffer
valve springs and an uprated cylinder
head. This sets everything up nicely for
the turbo, and Perttu has chosen a Holset
Pro55 for this build, a mighty item rated
to 1000hp and perfect for this build. It sits
on an AIG Motorsport exhaust manifold
with the downpipe leading to a 4” exhaust
while on the other side of the engine is
an eBay intake manifold. Naturally the
fuelling has also been suitably upgraded to
ensure that the engine gets enough of the“
So just how much power does all this add up to? The
answer is a Tarmac-trembling 823hp, backed up by a mighty
601lb ft of torque, produced at a heady 1. 9 bar of boost
”PBMW217.e30_turbo.ed2.indd 10 07/08/2017 08: