BMW 135i Brings Single Turbo Madness to Half-mile Drag
With more than 700 horsepower, this 135i is a sleeper among muscle cars.
Jake Spence is a Wisconsin based YouTuber, and an avid fan of all things BMW. Currently his weapon of choice for fun on the street and half mile drag races is his built single turbo BMW 135i which makes about 750 horsepower on a good day.
A good day it certainly wasn’t at No Fly Zone Midwest’s half-mile drag racing event at Rantoul National Aviation Center in central Illinois. With temperatures in the upper 90s, all boosted cars were struggling quite a bit. Spence points out how it is affecting everyone, saying, “it is 95 degrees, and really humid. So everyone is running hot.”
With the heat in play, Spence turned down the boost to 22 psi on the BMW 135i, with the result being about 100 horsepower lower than normal, at 650 horsepower. This played a big part on whether Spence had a win or not, as the event didn’t time your distance to travel over a half mile, but rather your fastest speed at the end of the course. Spence managed to get into the low 160 range throughout the day.
Day two of racing wasn’t much better. “Currently there’s a heat advisory. It’s 93 degrees and not even 10 am yet. And the “real feel” is already 103. It is just so humid out here, and everyone is running about 10 miles per hour slower than usual,” regards Spence about his trap speeds from the day prior. Boost was bumped up two psi to a total of 24 at the beginning of the day, and then another two psi added for the last runs. In all, that netted Spence a fastest run of 167.2 mph over the half mile.
Not bad for a car that was driven a few hours from Wisconsin, rather than be hauled in from a trailer.
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