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More pictures in my flickr.com albums. My blog entry about the M Coupe, here |
By Autocar staff, interview with Gerhard Richter, head of M division's R&D. Clearly the Coupe would be more structurally sound than the Roadster, but surely there must be more to it than that? "For sure," said Herr Richter. "It’s all different. "Turns out that the Coupe’s chassis boasts precisely double the torsional stiffness of the rag-top’s, registering 32,000Nm per degree, compared with 16,000Nm for the Roadster. "But that is the start," he continues. "We have stiffer springs all around the car, revalved shock absorbers and a thicker rear anti-roll bar too." "The steering has a quicker rack because we reduced the ratio from 13.7 to 12.8:1, and we’ve altered the diff to make it turn in better." And when I suggested to Richter that, far from being a Roadster with a roof, the Z4M Coupe was a car with a completely different spirit - that of the high-focus, hard-core road racer - he did not demur. In fact, he grinned. He described it as "a tailor-made solution for a narrowly defined target group" - which is M-speak for crazies. "You will appreciate it most on the track." |
Click a picture to see a larger view.
Click a picture to see a larger view.
