Today’s car enthusiasts adore BMW’s remarkable inline six-cylinder engines, but it’s worth recalling that these descended from one of the world’s most astute 4-cylinder designs, the BMW M10 engine.
After WWII allies bombed their factories to smithereens, German car makers needed a decade or more to rejoin the business. In 1960, following the failure of the Bayerische Motoren Werke’s attempt to return Germans to the road with Isetta-designed microcars, the company was bailed out of bankruptcy by industrialists Harald and Herbert Quandt. (With assets topping nearly £30 billion, the Quandts are still Germany’s wealthiest family.) That rescue enabled another go in 1962 with a range of small saloons BMW called its New Class.
Engine chief Alexander von Falkenhausen was tasked to design the New Class powerplant. Certain that larger, more powerful engines would be essential to fulfil BMW’s aspiration – cars aimed at aufsteigers (social climbers) – von Falkenhausen unceremoniously rejected the 1.3-litre displacement he was assigned. Instead, he convinced his bosses that 1.5 litres was the appropriate starting size, with room for growth to 2.0 litres absolutely essential. This wisdom ultimately paid dividends neither von Falkenhausen nor his BMW colleagues could have imagined.
Von Falkenhausen – later dubbed BMW’s Baron – joined the Werke in 1934 as a racing motorcycle rider and designer upon graduating from Munich’s Technical University, where one of his professors was aircraft genius Willy Messerschmitt (who later became a leading German armament manufacturer). Von Falkenhausen earned victories in the 1936 and 1937 International Six Day Trials using an experimental rear suspension, which convinced BMW to approve that feature for series motorcycle production. In preparation for WWII, he worked on sidecar applications and armoured vehicles, including a tank powered by BMW’s nine-cylinder radial aircraft engine.
After the war, von Falkenhausen won the 1948 German Sports Car Championship driving a BMW 328 and other home-built cars. His own AFM race car manufacturing enterprise failed in spite of his decent Formula 2 finishes in 1952 and ’53 (against Cooper, Ferrari, and Maserati), prompting his return to BMW in 1954. After three years onboard, he became head of engine development.
Defying BMW’s prewar tradition of powering its cars with inline six-cylinder engines, von Falkenhausen selected an inline four-cylinder design for his M10 engine to maximise the New Class cars’ cabin space. BMW had ample experience with aluminium for aircraft and motorcycle engines, but von Falkenhausen picked cast iron for the block for two reasons. Though iron weighs nearly three times as much as aluminium per unit volume, it’s 50 percent stiffer. And, unlike aluminium, the iron bore surfaces would be durable without liners or expensive surface treatments – important considerations for a carmaker striving to get back on its feet.
Von Falkenhausen did select aluminium for the cylinder head before that was common practice. One notable exception was Chevy’s Beetle-inspired Corvair, which had aluminium crankcase and head components. Bolt-on parts such as the M10’s front cover, intake manifold, and clutch housing were also aluminium.
A key von Falkenhausen achievement was convincing company superiors that a forged-steel crankshaft supported by five main bearings was a necessary expense. His bosses would have preferred a simpler cast-iron crank carried by three bearings to cut costs. In addition, von Falkenhausen extended the sides of his block (aka skirts) well below the centreline of the crankshaft to enhance the stiffness of the engine and transmission assembly. A more rigid powertrain combination minimises flexing at high output levels, thereby reducing noise, vibration, and harshness in the car’s cabin.
Bottom-end rigidity is crucial in any engine with performance aspirations because the crankshaft – a long, kinked rod with each offset mated to a connecting rod – effectively serves as the powerplant’s legs. At high rpm, significant flexing can trip the engine, resulting in the car equivalent of a broken leg.
Tapping his decade of motorsports success, von Falkenhausen configured the BMW M10 engine with a chain-driven overhead camshaft opening two valves per cylinder via rocker arms. Hemispherical combustion chambers and a bore significantly larger than the stroke provided room for large valves, aiding volumetric efficiency (flow in and out of the engine) at high rpm, thereby raising power without harming fuel economy.
Canting the block 30 degrees from vertical lowered both the New Class’s bonnet and its centre of gravity. Doing so necessitated a specially shaped oil sump.
The resulting BMW M10 engine was a 1.5-litre with an 82-millimetre (3.23-inch) bore and 71-millimetre (2.80-inch) stroke, and delivered 80 horsepower at 5700rpm and 87 lb-ft of torque at 3000rpm, potent figures for a small engine in the early ’60s. The torque curve was nearly flat from 1750 to 4850rpm. BMW’s new L-4 weighed about 160kg, only 45kg more than the VW Beetle’s 40hp, 1.2-litre flat-four.
America’s Car and Driver first experienced the M10 in its review of a 1963 BMW 1500, calling that boxy four-door “an extremely pleasant and sensible automobile capable of outperforming more powerful cars, including some two-seaters.”
After progressing through 1.6- and 1.8-litre editions, BMW launched its 2.0-litre 114-hp 2002 two-door on a 2-inch-shorter wheelbase for 1968, moving Car and Driver to religious fervour. Reviewer David E Davis Jr. rated this BMW “the best $2850 sedan in the cotton-picking world,” and told readers to turn their hymnals to page 2002 to “sing two choruses of Whispering Bomb” (the 2002’s nickname). A 1970 road test of a 2002 equipped with a four-speed manual transmission reported 0–60 mph in 9.6 seconds and a top speed of 111 mph. What BMW had wrought here was the seminal compact sports saloon.
Replacing the M10’s single-barrel carburetor with twin Solex two-barrel side-drafts brought 20 more horsepower and a ti suffix to the 2002’s nameplate. In 1972, fuel injection arrived, raising output to 140 horsepower and changing the model designation to 2002 tii.
For combustion to occur, petrol must be vaporised and mixed with air. Unlike carburettors, which simply add liquid drops to the airstream, injection atomises the fuel into microdroplets that quickly vaporise when exposed to cylinder-head heat. The 2002 tii’s Kugelfischer system was timed to squirt a precise dose of fuel into each intake port in synch with the opening valve.
In general, longer intake manifold runners enhance low-rpm torque due to resonance effects that ram more air into the combustion chamber. Shorter, less restrictive runners increase high-rpm output. While electronically controlled fuel injection had been introduced in the early ’70s to meet tightening exhaust-emission requirements, BMW was late to join that party. The strictly mechanical Kugelfischer system added 26 horsepower, trimmed precious tenths off the 0–60-mph time (9.0 seconds), and added a few mph to top speed.
The M10 four-cylinder powered more than a quarter of a million cars by 1970, becoming so dear to BMW that Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer was commissioned to configure its new Munich world headquarters as four round office towers. Instead of resting on the ground, these 22-floor cylinders are supported by a low-key central structure. A nearby bowl-shaped building resembling a cylinder head houses the company museum. Following four years of construction, BMW’s striking headquarters opened just before the start of the 1972 Summer Olympic games.
The following year at the Frankfurt auto show, BMW presented a 2002 Turbo, the brand’s first car equipped with a boosted engine. The KKK turbocharger teamed with Kugelfischer injection hiked output to a hearty 170 horsepower. Unfortunately, BMW’s timing could not have been worse. Mere weeks after the Turbo’s debut, OPEC switched off the taps, plunging the world into the first oil crisis. Only 1672 Turbos were manufactured, distinguishing that 2002 as one of the rarest and most prized BMWs.
A new 320i, code-named the E21, replaced the aging 2002 in 1976, the year von Falkenhausen retired from BMW. (He died in 1989, aged 92.) The faithful M10 carried on in 2.0-litre form in this first 3 Series, now fed by Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection, a more sophisticated but still purely mechanical system. Emissions controls dropped output to 110 horsepower. That plus a 130kg increase in kerbweight resulted in the 320i’s 10.5-second run to 60 and a 108-mph top speed.
The venerable BMW M10 engine also played a pivotal role in motorsports. Von Falkenhausen’s stout 1.5-litre four’ was relabelled M12/13, bored and destroked to 2.0-litres, equipped with tougher titanium connecting rods, and fitted with a gear-driven twin-cam 16-valve cylinder head for Formula 2 competition, where it produced 300 horsepower. The new head designed by Ludwig Apfelbeck had hemispherical combustion chambers and an unusual radial intake-exhaust-intake-exhaust valve array intended to generate swirl in the cylinder, which enhanced exhaust-valve cooling.
Valve stems poked out the top of each combustion chamber like coronavirus spikes. Intricate rocker arms opened the valves and exhaust pipes sprouted out both sides; intake ports were at the top of the head between the camshafts. In spite of its complication, BMW’s M12/13 dominated Formula 2, winning six championships in March cars between 1973 and 1984.
In 1982, BMW progressed to Formula 1 with the only engine in the series derived from a mass-produced block. Nelson Piquet had an auspicious start, winning the Canadian Grand Prix in a Brabham powered by a 1.5-litre aggressively turbocharged M12/13 boosted to 640 horsepower. Simplicity versus the twin-turbo V6s raced by Ferrari and Renault proved to be the M12/13’s secret weapon. Piquet won the World Drivers’ Championship in 1983, the first for any turbocharged single-seater.
By 1986, engineers had tuned this screamer to an awesome 1400 horsepower for qualifying, an intelligent guesstimate because BMW lacked a dynamometer capable of measuring such lofty outputs. That said, there’s little doubt that the BMW turbo M12/13 was the most powerful Formula 1 engine ever to race. During five seasons, it helped earn 15 pole positions, 14 fastest race laps, and nine victories in the hands of Brabham, Arrows, and Benetton drivers.
One snippet of lore shared by Ridgeway Racing Engines, based in Chiseldon near Swindon, is that M10 blocks were requisitioned from road cars that had logged 60,000 or more miles to rid their castings of residual internal stresses. The blocks were allegedly seasoned outdoors for several months and occasionally urinated on to infiltrate their cast iron with nitrides for added strength. (Urine contains urea, a hydrogen-nitrogen-oxygen compound, and treating iron with nitrides is a common means of increasing surface hardness.)
In 1987, BMW introduced its fresh M40 inline four-cylinder motor, ushering the venerable M10 into retirement. Let the record show it served magnificently for more than a quarter of a century, supplying dependable power to three and a half million BMW drivers.
Clearly, the visionary von Falkenhausen had wielded a magic wand designing an engine that endured a 17-fold power increase – from its 80hp beginning to 1400hp in F1 qualifying trim. And when BMW needed a potent inline six-cylinder to power its upmarket saloons in the late 1960s, the astute von Falkenhausen created fresh 2.5- and 2.8-litre M30 ‘six the most expeditious way possible – by simply tacking two more cylinders onto his celebrated M10. With von Falkenhausen’s brilliance calling the engine-design shots, BMW was off and running with new straight-sixes that earned lasting admiration from car enthusiasts.
Don Sherman is a freelance motoring writer and the former Technical Editor of Car & Driver, one of America’s best-selling car magazines.
Provided by Hagerty US.
I was very interested to read this article since I bought a new 2002 in 1969 and owned it for 6 1/2 years. Despite the praise which was heaped on it by the motoring press (which prompted me to buy it) and by this article, it was the worst car I have ever owned and I never grew to like it. The five bearing crankshaft ran a big end bearing early on in its life, the gearbox developed a fault which the local BMW dealer was unable to rectify despite two rebuilds, the brake discs had to be replaced after 60,000 miles, it developed a crack in the cylinder head gasket which allowed gases into the water system and caused endless problems with the radiator (this was only discovered shortly before I sold it) until the problem was identified and the gasket replaced. The handling was lethal on slippery surfaces and the seats were extremely uncomfortable.
You were very unlucky. At least 10 of my friends owned both the standard 2002 and the Tii, and many more by acquaintances, and invariably loved everything about the car including the handling. I personally won the standard car class in car rallies many times in the early seventies. I loved the cars so much that I have just purchased one and completed a relatively small amount of work to make perfect and am now enjoying the thrill of 2002 motoring again.
As well being used in the early 3 series (E21 and E30), the M10 was also in some of the original 5 series models, 518 and 520 (E12).