TuningWerk's 350km/h BMW 7 Series

We’re well accustomed to go-faster Mercs from Brabus, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a BMW 7 Series with genuinely OTT performance.

Well, the await is over as the sinister black beast pictured alongside – created by Munich-based TuningWerk and known simply as the NR 7 – serves up a 350km/h top whack and a Porsche 911 Turbo-rivalling 0-100km/h split of 3.5sec.

Starting life as a regular long-wheelbase 7 Series, the car has been comprehensively tweaked by TuningWerk  – “tuning smithery” is their word for it – to yield staggering outputs of 529kW and 1090Nm, channeled to the wheels via a five- or six-speed automatic transmission.

The two-tonne rocketship is hauled up by a CarbonCeramic brake system featuring 396mm ceramic discs at the front and slightly smaller (the press blurb doesn’t mention the diameter) discs at the rear.

Tuningwerk claims the carbon brakes and lightweight alloys save about 70kg of rotating mass across all four corners, and a further 50kg has been saved elsewhere via a lightweight sports exhaust system and CarbonHybrid body sills.

The company boasts that the weight saving was achieved even though the NR 7 comes with a fully equipped Fonds Entertainment System.

Of course, all this doesn’t come cheap, as a long-wheelbase NR 7 with the full-house engine costs 198,000 euros – to put this in perspective, a standard 750 Li costs about 100,000 euros in Germany.

However, there’s also a less extreme version (costing 169,800 euros) with a HighPerformance steel braking system and a “small scale power augmentation” that yields ‘only’ 390kW and 740Nm (for a 310km/h v-max and 4.2sec 0-100km/h split).

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