Performance BMW — September 2017

14 PERFORMANCE BMW

exit exhaust complete with heat shield.

While everything you see has been done

for a reason and with a purpose behind it,

the fact that it all also happens to give this

E30 an incredible sense of menace and

huge road presence is most definitely a

good thing.

As for the interior, with this being

an out-and-out drag car, you can forget

about creature comforts, it’s all about

stripping weight, removing every non-

essential component in order to make

the car as light as possible so it can go

down the drag strip as quickly as possible

but that doesn’t mean it can’t look good,

though. Everything is very neat and tidy

in here, there’s no mess, no exposed

wires, it’s been executed with real care

and precision. At the back there’s an

upholstered rear seat-delete panel, the

door cards and side panels are made

from aluminium, there’s a full roll-cage,

a pair of OMP single-piece bucket seats

with Williams six-point harnesses so that

Perttu can scare his friends, and a Luisi

two-spoke steering wheel. While you

would usually expect to see a big power,

turbo BMW’s interior absolutely covered

in gauges, Perttu has kept things nice

and simple here, with just the essentials.

There’s a boost gauge mounted in the

centre console but there are two oil

pressure gauges, one next to the boost

gauge and one right on the steering

column, allowing Perttu to keep an eye on

the car’s vital fluids, and there’s also a shift

light, essential when you’re hammering

down the quarter mile faster than the

fastest cars money can buy.

To call Perttu’s E30 epic would be an

understatement. He’s taken a broken

bargain of an E30 and turned it into a

full-on, no compromise drag beast and

it’s one hell of a machine. We feature a

lot of turbocharged BMWs and they’re all

awesome but very few of them have been

built with a purpose and that’s what sets

this car apart. It was built to go down

the quarter mile as fast as it possibly can,

that’s what it does and it’s very good at

it. Perttu’s not done, though, he wants

to go even faster... “I want to break the

Finnish quarter mile record, which is 9.

seconds at 155mph,” he says, and based

on what this E30 is capable of now and

how capable Perttu is at extracting vast

amounts of power from his E30 and

driving it extremely quickly, it’s only going

to be a matter of time ●

Side-exit exhaust

looks awesome

Built for drag racing but

happy out on the road

PBMW217.e30_turbo.ed2.indd 14 07/08/2017 08: