Two M-Power BMWs Face Off for Ultimate Dyno Numbers
Does BMW’s ‘Competition Package’ really add power? Well, the dyno doesn’t lie.
Remember back in the day when a car company would advertise a particular car or engine as making obscene amounts of power and it never really seemed to be true? Well, with the advent of more modern measures, car companies have had to be more honest. That’s why the YouTuber Blake’s Garage decided to test two S55 powered BMW’s.
What Blake wanted to do was to see if BMW‘s claim of 19 more horsepower for a BMW M3 or M4 Competition Package was really true. Blake owns a BMW M4 without the competition package, but his friend, Travis, had just bought a BMW M3 with that option. Blake explains, “we both just got our break-in service done, so I’m at about 1,400 miles, and his is right around the same mileage.” Since they are both being tested on the same day at the same shop, all variables apart from the cars themselves are removed for this test.
BMW claims the Competition Package will add an additional 19 horsepower, which is significant enough to tell on a dyno. The first set of dyno runs revealed a bit of a surprise, as the wheel horsepower and torque numbers were extremely close to each other. The Competition Package landed a solid 16 horsepower advantage at 402 HP of the 386 HP laid down by the standard M4. After Blake and Travis waited for the cars to cool down for a second run, some more numbers came up. But yet again as Blake points out, “the numbers are very very close.” But that could be because the cars were run on 91 octane fuel, as that’s all they had available.
To see what would happen with some better fuel, a bit of E85 was mixed with the M3’s tank to raise the effective octane rating into the upper 90s. “Just splashing a little bit of that fuel made a huge difference,” which Blake said as a reaction to the horsepower output to 417. All that’s left to wonder is if it would make those same numbers on healthy, pure 93 octane fuel.
Join the 5Series forums now!
