2,200-Horsepower German Lux Drag Race Battle: Evotech X5M vs Renntech E63 vs Weistec C63

By Bradley Brownell - September 29, 2016

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When you get a group of wealthy Russians with powerfully-tuned German luxury cars together, the inevitable drag race is bound to happen. In this case, it’s a seemingly out-of-the-ordinary sanctioned event. Line them up and let them rip, just to see how much speed money can buy. The event seems to be held over half-a-mile of standard paved highway with guardrails and forest lining both sides. It’s certainly not a spectator event, but fortunately we have the video below.

In the initial race, you’ve got a pair of all-wheel drive cars: a BMW X5M with an “Evotech Stage 2 tune” and a Renntech fettled “Stage 2” Mercedes-Benz E63 4Matic. The result may surprise you, as the Bimmer comes out on top. It certainly surprised me, since the taller truck is more aerodynamically inefficient and certainly weighs more. As it were, it looks like both vehicles were pretty evenly matched, but the Merc driver had a slightly longer reaction time by one-tenth of a second. That disadvantage went pretty much unchanged through the quarter mile. By the end of the half mile, the BMW had stretched out another tenth, and finished with a 3 kph speed advantage at the line. In any case, a 17.9 second half-mile time is plenty quick, by any standard.

Next up, the X5 takes on another challenger, this time another Mercedes, but a smaller C-klasse AMG. From the start it looks like a similar result will befall the Weistec-tuned Merc, as it has a better reaction time, but falters at the 60 foot mark, and is behind by nearly half-a-second at the quarter mile. That’s when the car starts to really come into its own, though, as it drags back everything it lost and beats the BMW to the line. The timing equipment shows both cars with an identical half-mile, but that’s clearly not the case, so I’m not sure what the true numbers are; it would appear to be somewhere in the high 17s or low 18s.

The X5M driver, in a show of superiority, then goes out to set an even faster time, ultimately running a 17.8 second half-mile time. That’s incredibly quick for such a big vehicle, and fast too, at just over 150 MPH.