Coming of age in the early 2000s, I’ll never forget stepping out of the theater after The Fast and the Furious let out. Even the minivans were banging against redline.
Nor will I forget the many issues of Super Street magazine that packed my bookshelf. So often, Super Street’s pages filled with the 2JZ builds of this man: Steph Papadakis, the patron saint of high-horse inline-sixes.
While best known in the early days for his gnarly Supra engine builds, Papadakis has become a fixture in both the pro drifting scene and the BMW tuning scene, turning his considerable talents to the B58 turbocharged inline-six which is shared by the Toyota Supra and a vast array of modern BMWs.
Papadakis’s calling card has always been his attention to detail, professionalism, and a philosophy rooted in solid engineering. There’s no forum bro science rationalizing Papadakis’s B58 builds, just a wealth of earned knowledge that this video illuminates perfectly.
That’s a huge chunk of what makes this build overview from the Motoiq Youtube channel so dang delightful. It’s just two hugely nerdy and intelligent engine-building experts talking shop. Stick around for the whole video if you’re at all curious about building reliable turbo engines, and especially if you’re a fan of the B58 inline-six (like the staff here at Motor1). Papadakis drops knowledge bombs every other minute, dissecting exactly why this turbo’d six has become a modern classic, arguably the best BMW engine built in the past 20 years.
And if you dig this video, stick around these virtual pages in the coming weeks. Our very own Chris Perkins has an interview with Papadakis that’s sitting on my (metaphorical) edit desk, which’ll be published shortly. I’ll link that here when it’s available, but it’s certain to be another illuminating column from Perkins, packed with more of Papadakis’s vast expertise.
More on the B58
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