David Linklater.
New model puts the M-touch into luxury 7-series with extreme results. By
Which BMW model do you reckon has bragging rights as being the fastest roadcar ever produced by the marque?
It could be one of those BMW M track-focused specials, because the Munich maker is great at those. Or maybe an i-brand electric car, because current mythology tells us plug-ins are by far the quickest things on the road.
Actually, the fastest BMW road car ever made is a 2.3-tonne luxury limousine: the M760LI. It rockets to 100kmh in 3.7 seconds, leaving an M3 and all that highperformance heritage in its wake. It also happens to be the most powerful BMW road car ever built with 448kw, and it stands to reason it’s also the largest thing in the company’s current fleet.
Yet after all that, the M760LI is not even a full-blown M-car. It’s part of the M Performance lineup, a kind of M-sub-brand that includes models like the M140i, M240i and X5 M50d. That means a suite of powertrain and chassis enhancements, but without the ground-up treatment of a proper M-car.
Never mind, the M760LI will manage. It has a 6.6-litre twinturbo V12 and M sports exhaust, M-calibrated eight-speed transmission that uses sat-nav to read the road ahead, all-wheel drive that can send up to 100 per cent of torque to either end, uprated brakes (note the blue M-calipers), adaptive suspension, active anti-roll bars and rearwheel steering.
Any excuse to pop the champagne corks with a $350k car, so let’s also pause to consider that 2017 marks the 30th year of BMW’S V12 engines.
If the 6.6-litre capacity of the marque’s latest sounds familiar, it is: it shares its architecture with the powerplant used by Bmwowned Rolls-royce, although specific components and tuning