M-B lover

Remember too that the GTO was an automatic, which puts a 4-speed against 6. I think that and the lack of the passengers weight gives an honest kill to the Bimmer.

rodybmw

We made several runs with my 545i SMG and my friend's GTO Manual gearbox last year. There were two of us in each car,although some were heavier than others. Either way, the heavy person switched cars we also had two drivers for each car and this is what happened in all the runs: I did not use the SMG launch assist,so I don't know what difference it would have made, but each run started with the 545 jumping ahead about half to one car length until about 60 MPH and then the GTO would overtake the 545. We stopped when we reached 100 MPH and each time the GTO was half a car length to a full car length ahead depending on which car the heavy person was in and who drove the cars.

I don't know how much of a difference Launch Assist would have made.

One other thing that I believe made a difference is that at the time I still had my B&B exhaust and I truly believe that my car was slower when I had the "performance" exhaust on. It "felt" considerably faster immediatly after I put the stock exhaust back on. So with the stock exhaust and SMG Launch Assist it may have been even closer.

At first I was shocked because I did not know about the GTO and I thought it was one of the smaller low power Pontiacs. But when my friend told me that it had 400 horsepower and used the old Corvette engine I did not feel so bad. Afterall with 75 less horsepower the 545 was still within half to one car length at 100 MPH......that's not so bad now is it?

By the way, a few weeks after that my friend totalled his GTO on a freeway onramp when he skidded out of control. Fortunately he was OK, but the car was totalled.

Bimmer32

Very nice info. Was that with a 5.7 GTO or a 6.0? It seems that the bigger displacement has an advantage closer to the triple digit speed.

znod

Very interesting and good story rody.

rodybmw

It was a 6.0 with a manual gearbox.

It's also interesting that the GTO was built in Australia and was basically a Holden Monaro (sp?) with a Pontiac grill. The Holden itself was based on the Opel Omega platform. Of coarse both Holden in Australia and Opel in Germany are part of GM. GM in the US has "borrowed" already engineered and completely developed cars from Opel and rebadged them for the US market many times before and they still do. Although most of the time they try to make it look a bit different (uglier) than the original Opels, in some cases they look almost identical (like the Holden/ Pontiac GTO, and the Opel Omega/Cadillac Catera).

Busta

kill!