First Drive: BMW Z4 M Coupe With Intrax Suspension
Bipolar in a good way
There's been plenty of cars I've written about and most of them have turbos, superchargers or a compressor slapped onto their engine. Hell, I've even driven my fair amount of EVs. Damn quick ones too. So someone asking me to drive their heavily modded, naturally aspirated BMW Z4 M Coupe made me very happy, even happier when they mentioned the brand new Intrax suspension the car was riding on.
Unique is a word you can slap onto the BMW Z4 M Coupe, it is essentially a car made up of parts from various other BMWs. One of those parts is the E46 M3 engine, which has been reworked to deliver 343hp and 365 Nm. That boils down to over a 100hp per liter of displacement, without turbos. And yes, that is a very addictive thing to control with your right foot. Once you floor it, it goes, the EDR helping a hand. But this specific Z4 has even more punch because of a reworked differential, which runs a closer ratio. Is it good? Yes it is good, so good that I was wishing more affordable cars were on offer with naturally aspirated engines like this.
Zero to a hundred? Somewhere below 5 seconds, but I was too busy enjoying the engine to notice it. It climbs, and you want more. It climbs further and you still want more. You shift from 4th to 5th at 7000 rotations, only to start all over again. Let's not talk about fuel consumption though, that reworked differential does make it a thirsty little coupe.
In a straight line the BMW Z4 M Coupe is joy but not the quickest by far. Where the nearly 1400 kilogram car will be one of the quickest, is on twisty roads. A thing that comes down to the mods too. Special race braking-pads sure help this specific BMW slow down quicker than a stock one, but the real magic happens due to a company called Intrax. I personally only heard about them once or twice but never looked into them, until I drove this car.
Intrax can easily be labeled as a group of magicians, their work is that impressive. Many manufacturers claim to have mastered the ideal combination between stiffness and comfort, and 9 out of 10 times that's plain bullshit. Not for this set of Intrax 1K2 springs, our trip into Belgium and its infamously bad roads being proof enough. The nearly deserted town of Doel was where I headed, mostly because of the scenery and the twisty, abandoned roads leading towards it.
Those roads, and the potholes in them, demanded a lot from the suspension and it held up brilliantly. The combination of the Z4's chassis and the suspension did miss one thing though: understeer (pun intended). A week later I'm writing this and I'm still confused at how good the springs switched between comfortable and stiff enough to go trough corners faster than the speed limit. But testing its limits wasn't possible, this specific BMW Z4 M Coupe and its mods made it a track-weapon. One that doesn't cost you a kidney, but might cost you your drivers-license when you forget to release that damn accelerator.
