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How’s This For Different: A Malaise Era Olds Omega With A Turbocharged BMW Engine Under The Hood!


How’s This For Different: A Malaise Era Olds Omega With A Turbocharged BMW Engine Under The Hood!

One of the best parts of being a car guy in this day and age is accessibility to the amount of crazy builds getting showcased on the internet, often piecing together stuff from multiple vehicles that one would never think would work together. Here at BangShift, you know that we love this stuff! We’ve all seen things like Chevy 3rd gen small blocks getting swapped into basically anything you can imagine, diesel truck engines getting swapped into old musclecars, and more. We are weird like that, and the weirder, the better. So when I was perusing one of my internet haunts from way back, a website that caters mainly to Subaru enthusiasts of all places, my eyes almost bugged out of my head and hit the monitor when I saw a late 70’s X-Body Olds Omega with a BMW Inline Six under the hood sporting a gigantic turbo!  A guy named Kyle Abela, who lives just outside of Toronto, Ontario is in the process of turning one of these mundane coupes into a budget friendly German-American street bruiser! This is the stuff we live for, folks.

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You all remember the Oldsmobile Omega, right? It was the Olds version of the multi-platform GM X-Body, shared with the Chevy Nova, Pontiac Ventura/Phoenix, and Buick Apollo/Skylark. These have long been platforms for modding into street machines and drag racers, as they were usually pretty cheap to find used and accepted lots of different GM engines through their production run. They also shared some components with the F-Body Camaro and Firebird in the chassis department, so the sky’s the limit mod-wise.

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This is Kyle’s Omega. It’s your basic, run-of-the-mill late 70’s car, and his came to him with a ratty and tired small block Chevy under the hood. These cars came with an anemic 305 depending on where the car was sold, so it’s no loss that it was tossed in favor of something else. And about that something else…

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After riding around in a friend’s turbocharged BMW, Kyle decided to pick up this 1987 BMW 535i ex-rally car as a drivetrain donor. It was equipped with the silky smooth and powerful (for the time) M30B34. In European and other non-US markets, this inline 6 produced 210hp, which is not bad at all for a mid-80’s sedan. The best part about these engines is that they absolutely love boost. A boosted M30 is a common occurrence in the world of modded BMW’s, and after taking some measurements, Kyle determined that the engine would fit in his Omega. And if there are any BMW purists reading this, Kyle says the 535i was rotted severely, so there’s no shame in plucking it’s drivetrain for the Olds.

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There’s so much room for boosted activities! Seriously though, the M30 is a big I6. These cars could be had until 1975 with the similarly large Chevy 250 I6, so tossing the BMW mill in there was not too much of a stretch. People stick big block engines in here all the time, so why not?

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Here’s the M30, freshly harvested from it’s former Bavarian shell. Again, these are great engines to build and modify, and they actually sound pretty cool, thanks to their split exhaust manifold and OHC design. Also harvested along with the engine was the BMW’s Getrag 5-speed manual transmission. Kyle likes to row his own.

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After some test fitting, the stock oil pan was hitting the subframe, so a different oil pan out of another BMW was installed on the M30. That allowed for the engine to fit nicely. The only caveat is that the intake manifold sticks up enough to require a mild cowl hood, but that’s fine.

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Kyle decided to install a GM 6-cylinder’s wasted spark ignition setup to work with his Megasquirt setup. Not only is this is a good upgrade, parts for this setup can be found at just about any auto parts store or junkyard in North America, making future replacement cheap and affordable.

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And then there’s the turbo setup. Kyle’s weapon of choice is a Garrett GT4294R which is a large ball bearing unit that can be capable of supporting up to 1000hp in some applications. The goal for this build is somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500whp. To get this beast to play nice with the M30, some fabrication had to be done. Here’s the rough mock-up of the downpipe, which consists of a gutted high-flow catalytic converter his friend had kicking around and some exhaust pipe.

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Here’s the turbo manifold Kyle and his friend built in it’s mock-up stage. The stock 2×3 manifolds were used along with some fabricated pipes to create the turbo manifold. Nothing too exotic here, and it fits the junkyard build theme and budget perfectly.

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Yeah, that’s a big snail. And there’s plenty of room for it!

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Here it is, mounted on the manifold with the makeshift downpipe installed. It fits neatly right on the passenger side with room to spare.

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Mounted covertly behind the stock grille is the intercooler. It’s a 4″ thick core unit, and unless you are looking for it, you aren’t seeing it. Very sleepy, and we like that!

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The turbo inlet sits right behind the passenger side turn signal. With the turn signal removed, the slot in the grille turns into an air intake!

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Recently, Kyle has gotten the car together enough to make it streetable. He reports that the car is a lot of fun to drive, but is still needing some rust repair in the floorpans before he calls it done. With a full tank of gas, the car weighs just 2760lbs without the driver.

For me, this car is a lot cooler than your typical backyard belly button small block Chevy swap, and even though it may seem exotic, it really isn’t. BMW tossed this engine in tons of cars, and they can be found in junkyards all over the place for cheap. Megasquirt engine management and Tuner Studio, which Kyle is running to manage and tune the M30, is one of the most DIY-friendly engine management setups out there, and it’s pretty affordable to boot. And the M30 engine’s Bosch Motronic setup is even supported by DIY AutoTune (the makers of Megasquirt) with a plug-and-play setup for the factory harness, so extensive wiring doesn’t need to happen. And as a streetable car, a boosted Inline Six can deliver silky smooth power and gobs of torque all over the power band. This Olds is all sorts of awesome, and is definitely BangShift Approved!

Some general build specs from the man himself:

1978 Olds Omega coupe
1987 BMW 535I M30B34 engine
Getrag 265 5spd manual trans
GM 10-bolt 2.41 Posi rear end
Garrett GT4294r 1.32AR turbo
Tial 60mm external wastegate @15psi (for now)
Siemens Deka 80lb/hr injectors
Twin walbro 255lph pump fuel system
Running Megasquirt Standalone ECU
Weight 2760lbs with full tank of gas and no driver

Kyle has yet to get this thing on the rollers, but is hoping for around 500hp at the wheels with this setup. In the end when it’s done, it will see daily driver duty on nice days and weekends. Keep up the good work, and long live the weird!

Here’s Kyle’s build thread over on MyE28.com!

 


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5 thoughts on “How’s This For Different: A Malaise Era Olds Omega With A Turbocharged BMW Engine Under The Hood!

  1. Kyle

    Good news fellas’s, the floor repair is now done and i am moving on to a new trans tunnel.

    The car is scary fun once boost comes on. We have only hit 5psi and she got sideways. Hoping to hit the wastegates 15psi target soon.

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