When you think of a family SUV, like the BMW X5, you imagine daily school runs, occasional trips to the supermarket and a rev counter that hasn’t travelled up above three thousand revs since new. Lots of buyers opt for this type of vehicle because it’s roomy and it feels safe and secure. The majority of these prestigious SUVs hardly ever get really pushed out of their comfort zone. Most just do the boring day-to-day bidding of ordinary families, and invariably they do it at a snail’s pace in heavy traffic on local roads.
So when someone at BMW came up with the bonkers idea of putting a McLaren F1 engine into one, they must have raised a few laughs. Since the beginning of time, engineers just love to push boundaries, and taking a race spec V12 engine from a McLaren F1 race-car and cramming it under the hood of a BMW X5 is definitely one of them. But in 2000, that’s exactly what the guys at BMW’s M division did.
They called it the BMW X5 Le Mans, in honour of the victorious McLaren F1 GTR race-car which triumphed at the gruelling Le Mans 24 endurance races, in 1995 and 1999. BMW showcased this one-off concept car at the Geneva 2000 motor show to garner interest in their new family SUV, the X5.
Let's take a closer look at this crazy piece of engineering, that's trespassing in supercar territory.
Under The Hood Of The BMW X5 Le Mans
When you look under the hood, the first thing you see, besides a distinct lack of space, is the V12 BMW Motorsport inscription on the engine cover. And then its pretty hard to miss the bulky 6.1-liter V12 BMW McLaren P75 engine, packed in so tight, it looks like it wants to uncoil like a compressed jack-in-box that's ready to sping out of the engine bay. This awesome twelve cylinder race-ready lump has the equivalent to 700 horses.
And what’s really funny is that the original Le Mans race car, which used this engine, had to be throttled down to 570 hp to meet the race regulations of the time. So the X5 Le Mans SUV is actually packing more power than the McLaren F1 did when it was on the circuits! BMW engineers were able to unleash its full potential by getting rid of the engine's air restrictors and fitting a bespoke exhaust system, thereby giving the V12 the opportunity to fully breathe.
And it certainly did the trick, because according to BMW this unrestricted beast of a family wagon has 531 lb-ft of torque, and it can reach maximum torque at just five thousand revs. Even with the huge V12 engine occupying the front of this car, the engineers managed to get the weight distribution ratio over the axles just right; 51 per cent front and 49 rear.
So when we start to look at how this car performs, bearing in mind it’s twenty years ago now, BMW's M division engineering team can afford to be smug. Because, according to their figures, this family SUV can accelerate from nought to sixty-two mph in 4.7 seconds, and climb to an official top speed of 172 mph.
However when the team took it took the Nurburgring, in June 2001, and handed it over to their touring car racing driver (and production test driver) Hans-Joachim Stuck, he managed to reach a staggering top speed of 193 mph on the Döttinger Höhe section of the famous circuit.
And it was at the Ring that Stuck managed to achieve the remarkable lap time of 7 minutes and 49 seconds, matching the previous record that had been in place for two decades. Three seconds faster than a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 and six seconds faster than a Caterham R500. Not bad for a first-generation SUV that touches the scales at around 2 tonnes, and one that's about as aerodynamic as a garden shed.
Exterior Of The BMW X5 Le Mans
From first glance, the Le Mans looks just like the standard E53 X5 car. It’s only when you take a closer look that you start to see some of the refinements that the engineers made to transform it into one of the coolest SUVs on the road. The Le Man’s carbon-fiber bonnet has a large downward scoop opening in the centre, towards the front, which helps to keep the mammoth V12 cool.
Some body panels have been slightly widened, but they're not hugely noticeable, and the chassis has been lowered by 3 centimetres. 20” gold and silver BBS Le Mans wheels fill the X5’s slightly widened wheel arches, and if you look under the car, you can spot the cleverly customized exhaust system, with its two centrally placed outlets bolted neatly into place.
When you see the Le Mans up close, you just get a feeling that there’s much more to this car than meets the eye. Because it is so unassuming in appearance, you could almost imagine it being that quiet, brave little transformer robot standing in the background behind Optimus Prime, in one of the Transformer movies, waiting for the battle to begin. And when the action starts, or you turn the ignition key, it turns into something completely different; an almighty silver superhero that's capable of crushing it's enemy when commanded.
Interior Of The BMW X5 Le Mans
The Le Man’s instrument cluster is from an E39 M5, and apart from a couple of extra gauges, the dashboard is pretty much standard. But when you’re inside, the huge roll-cage, racing carbon-kevlar bucket seats, reams of metal surrounding the front seats, and the fire extinguisher behind them, are all kind of a dead giveaway. That’s when you know that this SUV really means business, and that it’s not just any family runaround.
When you fire it up, the V12 belches out a deafening roar, which sounds like you’ve just opened the cage door on a trapped lion that hasn’t eaten for days. It’s insanely loud. And with acres of power being transferred to the rear wheels (yes - its rear-wheel drive!), its mad fun to drive too. The Le Mans has a six-speed manual transmission, no flappy paddles though to make life easy for the driver, this machine is hard core. Those lucky enough to have driven it inform us that apart from loads of understeer, and some expected weight shifting around bends, its an absolute riot to drive.
But the Le Mans isn’t the only attempt at beefing up a family SUV. Renault did a similar thing with their Espace mini-van. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, they took a V10 Formula One engine from Alain Prost’s Williams racing car, and jammed it into the bland-looking SUV. With the 3.5-liter V10 uni, producing 789 bhp, and revving up to 13,800 rpm, they were able to achive a nought to sixty timing of a jaw-dropping 2.8 seconds, and push the brick-shaped SUV up to 193 mph.
Final Thoughts
So, whether this car is just a historic feasibility study into what can be achieved with a family SUV if you tinker with it. Or whether it’s an extremely clever marketing tool, that successfully managed to push the BMW X5 to the top of the SUV market at the time. Or whether the Le Mans is an honourable tribute to a '90s race car which had a couple of really cool podiums. It doesn’t matter.
Because what BMW did do, is they messed with Physics. They had some fun with a family SUV and in the words of Captain Kirk ‘Boldy went where no man has…”, well you know what I mean. They challenged the norm. They did something crazy, and produced something that, at the time, was unrivalled and quite remarkable, even by today’s standards.
So let’s hope that more carmakers in the future will give their engineering teams the same amount of freedom to experiment, to build machines that continue to push the boundaries, and to show us what is technically possible, even if it first seems impossible and quite frankly bonkers.