N54 BMW E90 335i with 741 WHP and 624 lb-ft of Torque – Video
By about now, everyone in the BMW forums knows what the new S55 3-liter twin-turbo plant inside the BMW M3 and M4 is capable of tuning-wise. People have squeezed in excess of 500 horsepower from them easy, with just a stage one ECU tune but what about BMW’s previous generation motors?
The N55 engine that is the basis of the newer S55 is known for its potential also. People have been taking it to around 400 horsepower with rather small changes and that’s no surprise. Turbocharging has been very friendly to BMW engines.
However, let’s go back a little more, to the father of the N55 and you’ll find the Turbo N54 unit which was actually a twin-turbo inline 6. The problem was, unlike its successor, it has a bad tendency for overheating and causing the water pump to fail. Some people met with even worse problems over the years, but the potential the two turbos offered was hard to beat.
That’s exactly the motor used in this beast , with this BMW E90 335i being capable of putting down no less than 741 horsepower and 624 lb-ft (846 Nm) of torque. Amazing numbers!
That’s more then about twice as much the engine used to make stock and we won’t even talk about the huge amount of torque it’s putting down. To get a better idea of what we’re talking about here, imagine that the Charger Hellcat SRT, the fastest Sedan in the world, has 707 horspeower to play with and an engine that makes the 3-liter of the BMW seem like a bad joke in terms of overall size.
How was all of this possible you may ask? With some heavy modifications, of course. The turbos have been switched to some PTE 6466 Gen 2 ones, a JB4 tune was added to the ECU unit, boost has been taken up to a very high pressure 30 PSI, a new intercooler was also needed as well as an intake, new headers and exhaust.
Of course, that’s just the basics of what happened under the hood and, as you imagine, the result posted in the video below was achieved using E85 fuel but even so, this is as impressive as a N54 engine can be! Oh, and to top it alll of it is a manual car.