My plans for the F10 is just to have a comfy reliable cruiser so I’ve done the following mods so far:
Purchased a set of 437M lightweight 19” rims of a M4 (the widths and offsets are great for a F10 and look quite nice)
Purchased a set of PS4S tyres I went with 255/40 19 up front and 275.40 19 rear. The rear tyre is 22mm bigger going from a 35 to a 40 profile but my speedo is now bang on and I love the meaty look of the rear tyres. This tyre fills up the rear guard gap and since I’m running oem springs the ride height is still nice and high to clear speed humps etc yet provides minimal wheel arch gap.
Dropped the engine oil, and used fresh 0W40 castrol LL04 with Liqui Moly ceratec additive
Dropped the diff oil and used fresh Castrol syntec 75W90
Had the ZF8 serviced with new genuine ZF LG8 fluid and a transmission pan/filter (the car had just over 100k kays and ZF recommend a trans service at 60kmiles/100k kays)
Have a xHP stage 3 ZF8 tune to go on the car (weirdly they didn’t offer a stage 1 or 2 for the 535d)
Installed a FMIC, the wagner was just under $2000 yet I bought a chinese rep for $460 landed which fitted up nicely (apparently the wagner use a Chinese core anyhow and just relabel and repackaged them)
Fitted a front M5 competition package swaybar and a rear M550D rear sway bar (the M5 rear sway doesn’t fit and this is a good upgrade combo commonly used by F10 owners)
Decided not to fit coilovers but use koni sport shocks and oem m sport springs (these are quite expensive on the F10 platform unfortunately, especially compared to F30’s!)
Have the intake manifold and intake cleaned from carbon buildup (apparently it was absolutely choked up with buildup and an astronomical amount had been removed)
Swapped out the oem chrome kidney grilles for black twin slat items
Fitted up some black euro plates – the white ones looked crap IMO on a black car
Now I have all of these items done I will look at a custom flash tune which will yield approx. +30-40 rwkw and +100nm of torque. I’ll also look at installing an EGR delete upon tuning the car.
After having the suspension work done and taking the car for a drive I was surprised how well composed the koni sports are (being adjustable dampers they’re currently at the mid setting) Hitting heavily potholed roads the dampers soak it up easily and in the bends the oem setup occasionally I would feel the rear tyre momentarily lose trac and skip out, whereas with the konis the car would maintain its line through the bend. The car feels a lot more responsive to steering inputs, but being an electric steering its not quite as nice as a hydraulic unit. Discussing with a fellow F10 owner he had coded his car, as apparently BMW had revised the steering tune to provide a more sporting nature. So now I have done the suspension and tyre mods, I’ll look into the coding so I can gauge the difference once it’s done.
The car was much more responsive to throttle inputs and pulled harder at high rpm with the intake clean (I had assumed it was lazy throttle mapping, as the car idled and ran sweet as a nut prior to the intake clean) The ZF8 fluid was apparently quite clean (had heard these come out filthy whereas the DCT’s fluid are generally clean) and TBH didn’t make a dramatic difference to how the trans felt. It’s definitely smoother when its cold and shifts are ever so slightly crisper, but thankfully it seemed the trans has had an easy life so far! But make no mistake the F10 still feels big and heavy compared to the E92 in the corners and under braking but it is now somewhat rewarding to hustle it in the twisties and it’s a great comfy cruiser out on the highway. Generally the economy for around town sits at 8.8L/100 which is respectable for a 6 cyl (by comparison my VW 2.0 TDI returns 6.5L) and out on the highway in the 6’s.
Not much left to do on the F10 once the EGR delete and tune is done, like all N series BMW motors it seems they have their own achilles heel… The timing chains on the diesel N57 can let go, the oil pumps can stop functioning and starve the engine of lubrication and the HPFP can also fail at high rpm (thankfully it has a mechanical waterpump and the injectors are reliable albeit these are bloody expensive like the N54 injectors) These are big $ items to repair I think I’ll hold off for a whole longer generally these fail at 150k kays + kinda thing and I only realistically commute approx. 7-9k kays P.A anyhow.. So for now it’ll be staying as a simple clean daily driver!
The toys at home in their new garage (sadly I couldn't build a massive 3-4 car garage due to the width of our lot, being in a somewhat premium suburb block of land are quite expensive!)
