YouTuber Mat Armstrong must be a glutton for pain. He’s constantly buying heavily damaged, often entirely wrecked high end sports cars and tries to fix them up. It seems exhausting but it’s good entertainment for viewers. In his latest video, he buys a seriously mangled F90 BMW M5 Competition, in the hopes of bringing it back to life.
You have to really, really, really want an F90 M5 Competition to buy one this wrecked and try to fix it up. The M5 in this video was absolutely smashed in the front, destroying the hood, both front fenders, and even some engine components. It was so wrecked that the first person to buy it, in hopes of fixing it up, gave up before they even started. And they must not have disclosed that reason to Mat Armstrong because he didn’t find out until after he took delivery of it and started digging in.
After removing the hood and starting to get an idea of what needed replacing, Armstrong found a pretty sizable hole punched into the passenger side (UK) strut tower, under the hood. While the fender and strut tower bracing seemed fine, meaning that nothing was bent, something must hard must have pierced the strut tower during its crash. And that’s something very difficult to fix.
Not only is the strut tower part of the structure of the front end, it’s made from an aluminum alloy and is bonded to the chassis. So it’s not something that can be unbolted and replaced. Nor is it something that you can fix with a bit of welding. It’s a very difficult fix and one that could doom the project.
However, Armstrong was determined to see if the engine would run first. Because the front of the car was so heavily damaged, the oil coolers were smashed in and the engine had very little oil left. So he was hoping that it didn’t run for any significant period of time without oil and that the turbos were OK. After rigging the oil system with some hoses and topping it off, he tried to start it up, to varying degrees of success.
Overall, this seems like an immensely difficult project, one that could end in emotional and financial heartbreak. Although, that sort of drama is exactly what makes these videos interesting. It’s essentially the whole business model of the discovery channel, after all. So will it work or won’t it? Check it out.
