BMW Z4 With A Nascar Engine Was Made To Conquer Hillclimbs

An American heart in a German body competing in South Africa.

Photo by: Cars.co.za

Iulian Dnistran

By: Iulian Dnistran

Jul 2, 2023 at 9:01am ET

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Motorsport events all over the world have at least one BMW on the participants' list, and they’re usually modified in one way or another. But as you’ll see in the video embedded above, there are some people out there who think that simply turbocharging a naturally-aspirated BMW engine is just not enough.

Meet Jimmy Giannoccaro. He owns G&H Transport in South Africa and has raced in the past in Zambia, so he’s got both the money and the history to put together something special. And his latest creation – a BMW Z4 with a Nascar V8 engine stuffed under the hood – is quite the creation.

The journey started with a roughly 10-year-old 5.7-liter naturally-aspirated Nascar engine that was shipped as a second-hand unit from the United States to South Africa, where it was painstakingly shoehorned in the BMW’s engine bay. But as the owner puts it, the car was “a disaster” last year, so they went back to the drawing board to make it better for this year’s Knysna Simola Hillclimb, which is widely regarded as South Africa’s premier motorsport event.

Among the modifications, the Americanized Z4 got a sequential gearbox that sends power to the rear wheels via a drivetrain borrowed from a BMW M5. Furthermore, the engine was converted from carburetors to fuel injection, which was a bit of a nightmare to get right, and the brakes were upgraded to an AP Racing set with 15-inch (380-millimeter) rotors all-around.

But that’s not all. The hillclimb machine also received luxuries like a traction control system, ABS, and launch control, all of which were nonexistent last year.

The 5.7-liter Hendrick Motorsports engine sits behind the front wheels, essentially making the German coupe a front mid-engine machine, and can run at up to 10,000 rpm, but as Giannoccaro says, the Z4 is currently limited to 7,500 rpm, with an ideal target of 9,000 rpm sometime in the future.

What do you think?

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As it stands today, the car makes around 590 horsepower and 468 pound-feet (635 Newton-meters) of torque, which the owner says is very good for a naturally-aspirated race car.

In the looks department, the team imported a genuine GT3 body kit from Germany, making Giannoccaro’s Z4 the first in South Africa to have such an appearance. It’s quite a wild creation, but we’d like to know what you think, so after watching the video above, head over to the comments section below to give us your thoughts.