Our last part told our story of how it all began. Starting with the acquisition of the vehicle, technical parts and the engine swap. After the successful swap,
FF Retrofittings (and Oliver), a specialized company on the matter of recoding, changed the coding for the vehicle. Thank you very much for the great and long work, that lasted way into the night at some points!
After the swap the engine started immediately but ran very unsmooth on neutral and didn’t respond to the pedal. No programming was done until that point, during the first test the car still thought it was a 550i. The first coding resulted in the car not starting at all, which would stay this way for several weeks while we frantically searched for the error, exchanging injectors, spark plugs, etc. to eliminate any mechanical problems.
The big difference between our project and regular recoding is, that you have to make two different cars to match one. Two cars, that differ completely, not only in the body, engine or powertrain, but also with completely different software. The control modules are two completely different things with individual settings. Features from the 550i, like the rear air suspensionare just not present in an M5. And of course, since we are the first ones to try this, there was no way to read about these issues anywhere.
So in the end the M5 Touring consists of 33 control modules. 7 only for the propulsion itself.
So we needed to make some very complex thinking. Which control module would we exchange with M5 control module? In which control module would we have more freedom to code and which would help us find errors quicker? In the end we decided to equip the car with M5 hardware control modules and equip these with an F11 software to give the coding after this a sustainable basis.
Extremely hard to solve were for example the steering hind-axis or the air suspension, which were availably for the F11 but never for the M5. To solve this, we had to create a lot of control modules that were both: A M5 and a F11.
Because this was such a big project, the coding experts from FF Retrofittings had to work via remote connection which created new problems since nobody could check if a cable was actually attached or not right away. Endless telephone conferences, hundreds of changes in the way cables were attached and corresponding tests finally brought the desired result: The engine started up again.
On a sidenote: In the end, the car is supposed to bring +800 hp to the table when the coding is complete and the TTE upgrade turbos are installed.
With time, a small arsenal of sensors, cables, switches and control modules were exchanged. At this point we can honestly say that we all imagined this would be much easier. The weeks of long nights and super frustrating moments were a success on the end. The “provisional” result is awesome to look at and feels extremely good. It gives a perfect impression of how special and perfect this car is going to be, once it is truly done.
And last but not least: A repeated THANK YOU at Alex and his company ECN2Film for the great pictures.