If you’ve been following us and the people over at Car Throttle, you might already know that, a while back, they started a new project. This time, they are using a BMW E46 330d Touring to show us exactly what you should change on your car if you want it to perform better on a track. From the get go, they set a rather ambitious goal: keeping up or beating a BMW E92 M3 on the track. Since this is a diesel 3 Series and a Touring model at that, this is bound to be a rather hard achievement to reach.
Nevertheless, they set out, ambitiously, and started improving the car in all the right places. First they changed the dampers and the coilovers, only to move on to the wheels and tires, then to brakes, new bushings and anti-roll bars and now we finally reach the point you are probably most interested in: power. As you may know, just adding power to a car doesn’t necessarily make it faster, especially if we’re talking about using it on a track.
We’ve seen it so many times: cars with just too much power to be usable on the track. The thing is, power without control is ultimately useless. On rear-wheel drive cars it will lead to oversteer most of the time or to excessive burnouts, turning the tires into piles of ash. On all-wheel drive cars, it will lead to understeer at times, depending on the car you’re driving and the way the transmission is set up.
On the 330d Touring though, adding a bit more power was done the right way, after everything else was upgraded. Now that the guys found the limits of the car thanks to their incremental improvements, all they have to do now is add a bit more grunt to the mix and things should fall right into place, right? Well, let’s check out the video and see exactly how much faster the car is on the track.
