The Toyota Supra is probably one of the most famously tune-able cars ever made. Toyota’s history ‘JZ’ line of engines have always been capable of making just gobs and gobs of power, due to their inherent strength and durability. Now, though, the new Supra no longer uses a 1JZ or 2JZ but instead uses a BMW B58 engine. Still a turbocharged inline-six, but it speaks German this time. It has some Supra enthusiasts worried, though. Can the BMW B58 put out anywhere near as much power as the older 2JZ they know and love? The folks at Papadakis Racing decided to find out.
Papadakis Racing is a legendary racing team in Formula Drift and builds some of the craziest drift cars on the planet. So when they decided to get a Toyota Supra and pull its B58 engine to see what it’s made out of, we took notice.
In this new video, Stephan Papadakis, the owner of the racing team, does a complete engine tear-down of the BMW B58 engine to see how it’s made and to get an idea of how much power it can make. Their goal is to make 1,000 hp out of this engine and you can’t do that without doing a full engine tear-down and replacing/strengthening a bunch of components. What’s interesting is just how durable the BMW B58 engine seems to be, though. While it’s obviously still going to need some beefing up, Papadakis seems to think that its block and crankshaft are already plenty strong.
He also seems genuinely impressed with a lot of the tech built into the engine. Certain features like having an intercooler built into both the intake manifold and the throttle body were very interesting. Also, how the exhaust manifold is sort of internally built and only two pipes come out from it, into the turbocharger assembly. There’s a lot of interesting engineering going on with the B58 engine and it might explain why it’s such a brilliant engine to use.
If you like mechanics, this is a great video. I like to wrench on my own cars myself a bit and, while I don’t have anywhere near the smarts to take an entire engine apart and put it all back together, this video fascinated me. So check it out.