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Originally Posted by chunterer
This maybe a topic to explore a little within the thread because I could never understand how a car with roughly 100bhp more than the Rover in standard trim could be so utterly outclassed as a pukka race car?!
I'd guess that's because the Vitesse was the equivalent to BMW's M version as alluded to by John Turner earlier in the thread and as John says if Munich had homologated that car (did a hack ever run?) then things might have been very different.....
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The racing 635CSi gave no more power than the European spec road going M6. The racer had 285 bhp to the M road car's 286 bhp, and the latter developed its peak power at higher revs, and accelerated faster to 60mph, would you believe! Those extra 12 valves make such a difference. I can smugly confirm that even now, as a road car, this is still a highly sonorous rocket ship! Now we know that the M engine could be tweaked to well over 100bhp per litre although I don't know what engine restrictions, if any, applied to Group A. However, you can safely say that had they gone down that route, an 'M' racer would have been giving substantially more than its CSi sibling. Do we know what the power output of the racing Vitesse was, Chunty?
I don't think a 'hack' racing M6 was ever built, although BMW did build a special road going M6 for Nelson Piquet, which gave 320 bhp. Just to clarify BMW didn't homologate the 'M' version because as well as getting 'old', they didn't build 5000 of them in any one year which was the the requirement of that time.