When folks first happen upon BMW’s peculiarly proportioned X6, they can’t get over its skyscraper butt. Many can’t get around it, either. Were you to walk into the X6’s liftgate at midnight outside the Sidetrack Tap, the thing would nail you not in the gut but in the Adam’s apple. But we’re not here to dissect styling. The proposition before us is power. One would have thought that the 400 horses under the hood of the X6 xDrive50i might have been sufficient. BMW’s M division didn’t think so. And thus we have the X6 M depicted here, which is to the evolution of SUVs sort of what the appendix is to the evolution of Homo sapiens.
To the 4.4-liter V-8, the ever-tinkering Bavarians have added new pistons, cylinder heads formed of the same material used in their diesel engine, a new intake manifold, a crossover exhaust manifold that connects both cylinder banks, a finned aluminum oil pan, altered cam timing, and two new twin-scroll turbos that provide max boost of 17.4 psi, which ought to Chernobyl just about anything made of aluminum. And there are even larger intercoolers in the grille, which look like the air inlets for the Pentagon’s backup generator. This particular recipe yields 555 horsepower and 500 pound-feet of torque rolling out as early as 1500 rpm. Which should be fun. On the other hand, Frisbee golf is fun. But does anyone take it seriously?
What, exactly, do you do with a vaguely nonsensical 555-horse SUV? Our answer: Subject it to a nonsensical vehicular triathlon.
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Triathlon Event No. 1: Drag Racing
BMW swore that our X6 M was a burgundy cannonball in a straight line, so our first competition was run-whatcha-brung night at nearby Milan Dragway. This event held great appeal, inasmuch as almost nothing is required of the driver, apart from those long, hot waits in the staging lanes, where most racers place bags of ice on their intake manifolds and fiddle with hot Holleys and push their cars by hand so that the engines remain cool. Not us. We idled for 20 minutes at a crack, with the A/C blasting, seat fans at max blow, seat massagers silently unkinking thigh muscles, and Steve Tormé—Velvet Fog fils—singing “Straighten Up and Fly Right” out of 11 speakers surrounded by “Merino” leather, which perhaps comes from Miami dolphins.
Our X6 M was a prototype and wasn’t equipped with launch control, which will be standard on production models and will likely improve acceleration times by a couple 10ths. So, before each run, it was necessary to program the X6 M for take-no-prisoners mode. I first had to press the minuscule “M” button on the steering wheel that was programmed to disable most of the stability control, then up popped a menu on the nav screen on which I had to toggle through “Settings,” “M Drive,” “Power Sport,” and “Power Sport” again (because the only alternative is “Efficient,” which is not a term anyone would ever use to describe my driving). After all that, of course, I’d worked up quite a sweat, so I had a sip of cool iced tea stored in the center console and calmed my nerves by eating three tasty digestive biscuits.
But, suddenly, as I was still munching, it was my turn at the Christmas tree, where I repeatedly staged too deep and had to back up a couple inches. In the X6 M, this is difficult, especially when a red-faced man in the starting booth is screaming and the competitor in the far lane is overheating the 500-cubic-inch Hemi in his Ford Anglia, an engine he built at the expense of multiple mortgage payments and his wife. To obtain reverse, you have to push a button on the side of this BMW’s bizarre shifter (do not even think of touching the top button, which engages park), then make sure the shifter is in the right-side gate, then push forward and release, hoping against hope that these calisthenics will illuminate the orange “R” between the tach and the speedo. This took forever, inciting the red-faced person to utter a very bad word, although I had said the same word a moment prior.
Even without launch control, it was easy to catapult this thing out of the hole: left foot on the brake, right foot flat on the throttle until the final yellow Christmas-tree light glows, then left foot at ease. At which point, oddly, nothing much happens. I mean, there’s no explosion, there’s no wheelspin, and the turbos take a second or two to spool up completely, after which they pretty much mute the V-8. Plus, my reaction times were legally drunk—like 0.333 to the Anglia guy’s 0.163—but it didn’t seem to matter because the first run was 13 seconds flat, at 106 mph, with seat massager and Tormé at full tilt. I should have folded the big side-view mirrors to reduce drag, but it seemed like a lot of work at the time. I might have gone quicker but, just before the tree went green, Tormé coincidentally lit into “More Than Gone,” a song that describes both my mind and the X6 M, and I was understandably distracted.
No matter. We’d already obtained the official acceleration figures the night before at the Chrysler proving ground. Here’s all you need to know. If the X6 M were pitted against a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, it would humble big bad Mr. Zuffenhausen by 0.1 second to 60 mph and by a like amount through the quarter-mile. Which makes this the quickest production SUV we’ve ever tested, a somewhat strange boast, like claiming to be the best poetry-writing drywaller in Alabama. Also, damned if the launch didn’t spill my iced tea.
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