BMW 3-Series | Long Term Tests | Car Reviews

The BMW's award-winning engine has worked its charms on Peter Tomalin

By Peter Tomalin

September 2007

evo trackday gave Tomalin the chance to get in some track practice ahead of his race debut

I have fallen deeply in love with the 335i’s twin-turbo 3-litre straight six. It’s an absolute jamspangler of an engine, the lower and mid rev-range swollen with torque but with an upper-rev reach that stretches into the lower stratosphere. It sounds terrific, too, that rich straight-six snarl summoning up the spirit of great BMWs past. No surprise, then, to read that it was recently voted International Engine of the Year.

Doesn’t seem to be using much oil either – though it took me a while to discover this. It was on my trip to Maranello a couple of months back that it occurred to me to check the level. So there I was on an Italian petrol station forecourt, bonnet up, looking for the dipstick. And looking. And looking. Where was the bloody thing? At one point I even closed the bonnet and reopened it, hoping that I’d been looking too hard and it was in fact right under my nose. But it wasn’t.

And then I did the very last thing you’re supposed to do. I looked in the handbook. Ah. There was a dipstick after all, but it was the bloke with the puzzled expression looking down the sides of the engine. In a 335i you do it all from the comfort of the driver’s seat, scrolling through the digital readouts on the dash until you get to ‘engine oil level check’. The readout said it was up to the digital mark, and two thousand miles later it still is. And since there really is no way of checking manually, I’ll have to take its electronic word for it.

I needed to be sure everything was topped up, pumped up and revved up when I made a rare excursion onto a racetrack recently. It was the evo trackday at Oulton Park, and the 335i was brilliant, displaying a lovely, playful, malleable handling balance, though like most road cars it suddenly feels a lot softer and a lot slower when you’re helmeted-up and on the wide tarmac of a circuit – especially when there’s a couple of dozen seasoned trackday goers and not a few racing drivers looming in your mirrors while you’re desperately trying to learn which way the corners go. By the end of a couple of short sessions my nerves were frazzled.

At times like this I wonder if I’ll ever be able to drive properly fast on a circuit. And later this year I’ll have a chance to find out, because Roger Green has somehow persuaded me and Ev (sub-editor Eveleigh) to do a round of the Dunlop Sport Maxx Cup in evo’s 350Z race car. Gulp.

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The BMW's award-winning engine has worked its charms on Peter Tomalin

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The BMW's award-winning engine has worked its charms on Peter Tomalin

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