Well that was fun - maximum attack hoonage

[Marshy]

About four times a year here in the UK we have an event called VMax, organised by some of the folk at pistonheads.com. Essentially, it's an excuse for a bunch of people will fairly silly cars to get together at an old airfield, set up timing gear at the end of about a mile of runway, and fling cars along said runway to see where they top out.

Today was another one of these events and after having spectated a year ago, I was finally in a position to take the 540i along and drive it "properly".

I had an *execllent* day, despite being the slowest car in attendance. The car performed flawlessly, despite its 140,000 miles, and was a blast to cane through the bends that return you from the end of the runway to the marshalling area.

Like I say, the timing beams were about a mile, perhaps a little less, from the end of the runway, and I saw 142mph from a rolling start. To get any more I would have needed extra road, as I was still accelerating through the trap.

At the end of the day, I'm knackered, my tyres are looking a bit shabby on the left of the car and my brakes may need replacement sooner than before. That said, the brakes were superbly effective from big speeds - a lot better than I had feared.

I will post a link to the statistics page that shows the vital figures for the cars that attended, all 2.6 million UK pounds' worth, followed by a link to the top speeds attained and hopefully some video footage taken from a bullet camera attached to my 540i.

Can you feel the grin from there? Top fun!

[tim]

Sounds fantastic. 142 is nothing to sneeze at. Is your car modified? Some pics would be good. Did you get a 1/4mi split?

tim

[Marshy]

I'll post everything I can just as soon as pistonheads.com comes back up. It's a huge site, but has inexplicably disappeared off the 'net since last night.

Didn't get a 1/4mile time as there was only one set of timing gear and no defined start line: the name of the game was to get hard on the power as soon as you dared coming out of the hairpin at the start of the straight.

I'm hoping someone got some pictures of me cornering on the door handles - it must have looked pretty funny. I've also got video footage from a bullet camera mounted on the roof of the car. I say mounted... what I mean is stuck on with gaffa tape