A little about Haylie & Maintenance

So, whilst we look for that piggy bank, I would like to tell you a little more about Haylie, ML Performance’s first project car.

Haylie is a 2009 BMW 3 Series LCI M-sport 335i Estate (E91) with the twin turbo N54 engine, which is very tunable. It has a manual transmission which is rare on an E91 estate here in the UK, as most are spec with an auto transmission. She has covered over 160,000 miles, mainly on the motorway as a company car and have been maintained very well by the previous owners consider its high mileage. Ideally you want a low mileage N54 if you want to modify it, as it gives you the best base to start with, we went with Haylie as it was a rare example, very well maintained and extremely well-priced at the time. It also had the water pump replaced not too long ago, which is a common and expensive failure on the N54s.

Haylie also had a lot of optional extra added when she was born, such as M sports Package, Xenon headlights, adaptive headlights, comfort access, Alpine TV, Satellite navigation (CIC), heated & electric seats, Headlight cleaning system, Parking sensors all round, Rain sensor, Hifi Professional System, auto mirror tilt on reverse and DVDs. A fairly well spec BMW, but strangely it didn't come with auto folding mirror, which we may retrofit later on.

If you have read our previous post, Haylie, Our First Project Car, you may remember that we were going to tackle the maintenance first, which is one of the most important thing to do before modifying your car for more power. Therefore, we booked Haylie in with TWG Automotive, a very reputable BMW specialist garage based in Camberley, Surrey, that offers dealer service but at an affordable price. What’s more, they are mostly BMW trained technicians and Will, the owner, has even won the Apprentice of the year when he first joined BMW. A very knowledgeable bunch indeed and we knew Haylie was in safe hands!

On first inspection, there were a few things that required some work, Haylie had mixed index injectors which is never ideal and can cause problem further down the line when running more power, so we replaced all six injectors with genuine BMW injectors, a costly replacement indeed but would save us lots of headache down the road. We then replaced all the spark plugs, coils, gear box oil, engine oil, oil filter, engine anti-freeze, bleed the coolant system, and lastly a full health check.

Haylie also received the walnut blasting treatment whilst she was there to clean up the carbon build-up that had accumulated over 160,000 miles. After all the work was done, Haylie drove much smoother and there was a significant improvement in power delivery.

During the health check, Will and the team noticed some minor oil leak in the engine bay, which we will tackle when we upgrade the stock turbo to the TheTurboEngineers TTE600, the front shocks were also leaking, another excuse to upgrade to the Bilstein B14 Kit. The exhaust valve in the exhaust is rattling so we will replace the stock exhaust with the Genuine BMW Performance Exhaust, on the estate it also comes with the centre pipe upgrade.

Now with the basics sorted, we can begin modifying her for more power! I'll write about our future plans in our next blog post, stay tuned!