Alpina B3 3.3

A

AlpinaPete

New member
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61
Car
BMW Alpina B3 3.3
Hi

New member here!

Has anyone here got any advice / suggestions for performance upgrades for a BMW Alpina B3?

Pete
 
Hi Pete, and a warm welcome to TorqueCars. Thats some car you have there. Have you done any mods to it yet? Where are you from? How much are you willing to spend on it?
 
Thanks for the welcome. It's an unbelievable car the B3 and the thing I like most is it's extremely rare compared to all those M3's (mine for example is one of 97).

I live in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and currently have no modifications on this car at all. As you can imagine, it's a very difficult decision to alter one of these cars from standard as most Alpina owners look down on this type of thing. As I'm only using this as a second motor, I'm a little more interested in making it stupidly quick. With regards to budget, well, I guess it depends on the potential power increase I might get.

Pete
 
I think I have seen 1 in my entire life! That counts as pretty rare. I've actually seen more deloreans than I have B3's!

How are you getting on with the "Auto" gearbox. I've read some complaints about it being a bit slow to respond?

Alpina have worked their magic on the engine and I really don't think there is much left to do to improve it. They have fitted lighter pistons, low friction valve train and a revised crank.

I would probably restrict mods to weight reduction now. Strip out the unnecessary weight. It would be interesting to add a supercharger to it and this will get you over the 300bhp mark.

There might also be a remap option around. The trouble is with so few around the off the shelf remappers have not got one in their library. The way ahead then would be a custom remap preferably done on a rolling road.

What tyres are you using? Please post up some pics for us when you get to 10 posts.
 
I'm amazed you have heard bad reports about the Swith-tronic box on the Alpina's. Every comment I have every seen gives it huge praise. I've driven many automatics and I can say for sure it's the smoothest, quickest change I've ever experienced. With the ability to use the switch-tronic manual gear changes via the buttons on the steering wheel allows a redline at 7,200 rpm. It's simply fantastic and in my opinion a much better box than the SMG (which itself is pretty damn good).

The tyres are standard (specifically tested by Alpina) Mitchelin Pilot Sports - 225 40 18 Front and 255 35 18 Rear.

I've recently had a quote via a specialist firm to do a supercharger conversion. Luckily, Alpina have uprated virtually everything on the car so I've been promised 460hp is definately possible. Apparently the engine is virtually unbreakable and can handle this without too much of an issue. The only potential problem seems to be fitting it under the bonnet with all the Alpina engine bay adjustments!!

The only thing nagging at me at the moment is the problem of altering what is such a rare car, basically taking away what it was supposed to be. Alpina's generally only sell to people that know these cars well and it would more than likely put off all hard core Alpina owners.
 
There were a couple of early reviews when these first came out that criticised the slight delay in the gearchange. I would be surprised myself if such a quality car as this had an inherent drawback. Perhaps it is an electronic gearchange that adjusts itself to the driver over time and the review models were still in learn mode?

The supercharger conversion sounds like your best bet then. DO IT! You can fairly easily take off a supercharger and put the car back to standard when you come to sell it. What sort of money are we talking about for a supercharger then?

If it has aircon then I would rip that out and replace the aircon unit with the supercharger. The plus side is that you will also lose the drag on the engine caused by the airconditioning.
 
Hi Pete,
I'm a big fan of bmw's specially one's that have lots of power!! :)
As waynne says there aren't many that remap these but guess what.. we do. :)
what about 12 bhp and 20 nm more.. these engines are built so well that it's hard to get much more out of them wothout going to forced induction... a remap on these just makes them more responsive..


steve


www.sr-performance.co.uk
 
Interesting... have you done this before on a b3? If so, how do you remap better than Alpina as I would expect them to do the best to their own engines?
 
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