For a couple of months I couldn't get to X5. Porsche work, other jobs, and the horse just stood there and hauled. Then all the parts turned up in one place at once, and it was clear there was no putting it off any longer.

The task was simple on paper: first twin turbo X5 on B58, aiming for 800hp. 800 is a stretch, of course. More likely 700 and change, with some luck all 800. New X5M lands in 2027, so chasing F95 LCI makes no sense, and we went the simplest way. All X5M LCI hardware, structural plastic included, because the bumpers hang differently there than on G05. Rear bumper hasn't changed in that time, so it stayed, and that's money saved.

Two crews went to their corners. First one sat down on the engine. Stock manifold came off, and fabrication for two turbos began. Surprisingly, it took less time than expected. The one catch was the transmission. 8HP76X, but in a 2WD case. Not a trivial thing, but we'd seen guys pull it off on built 340i cars, and we followed their pipeline to the letter.

Then we switched to the bumper. Tore the old one off, and it turned out that two months is enough to forget a lot, and a couple of bolts took real fiddling. Plus one of the wheels found a hole on track, and the links on the front left got ripped out. Ordered new ones, swapped them, rebalanced, because the hit had knocked the settings off.

Hung the whole bumper. Stepped back, looked. And realized we couldn't wrap it now. Well, we could, but the front bumper with all its gloss plastic would eat half a day, maybe a full one, and that was never in the plan. So all the plastic came back off, the bare bumper went back on the car, we wrapped it in the same Cheetah Matte Charcoal Metallic in about 20 minutes and started hanging the plastic back. It took a while, but far less than if the gloss had stayed on. While we were at it we redid the mirrors, they'd faded, and there's always black vinyl on the shelf.

Then the taillights/headlights. Without them this conversion doesn't work at all.

And the final act, which turned out to be the longest. The hood. Over a few years the vinyl on it had faded and gone speckled white. You don't see it unless you look closely, but next to a fresh piece it's obvious right away. And here's the lesson we paid two weekends for.

In hot states, vinyl has to come off the roof and hood once a year. Not because it looks bad, but because after that it won't come off at all. We peeled the hood for two days, three grown men (Alex, Felix and I). By the end of day two patience ran out, we were tearing it off with no care left, and the paint underneath suffered.

Installers often say removing vinyl can cost as much as laying it. It's true, and here's why: two weekends, two people, damaged paint. When the hood finally got wrapped in a fresh roll of the same color, it looks great. But the price of that "great" came out higher than the price of the roll.

Then a small photo session and the dyno. 800 didn't happen. 752 in the pocket. And that's fine. The number is honest, the engine is alive, and the gap between 752 and 800 on track is smaller than the gap between what's on paper and what made it to the rollers.

Small stuff: interior redone in Ferrari Cinnamon. Not about the brand, just a good color. White interior went black, the seats went cinnamon. Wheel replaced, the old one was peeling, leather coming apart. The new carbon one is noticeably lighter than stock, and that's a pleasure, especially against the leather: smooth in places, not in others. Center stripe isn't mine, but let it be.

Work isn't done. Two more weeks of picking at it: chrome inside goes to gloss black, wood panels go to carbon. That closes the project for this year, and the horse is left with the one thing we're finishing it for: getting to Bimmer Invasion, towing our E46 widebody behind it and the F10, if Ashley gets hers done before the show.

That's how it is.

Couple days of searching and we found one 70 miles out, picked it straight from a dealer. Stock. Owned by an older lady. Perfect. Not a church-only car, but the seats weren't sunk in, so she drove it easy.

The dealer tried to hide some wear on the right hub. Small thing. We'd get it to the shop and swap it ourselves. That's the dealer game, they'll try to slip something past you. Cheaper and cleaner to just fix it than to turn it into a fight. But it happens.

Got it to the shop. Ordered the body kit. Ordered custom wheels. Ordered a big brake kit. Left the engine alone for now. Then the wait.

Kit landed and it was install time. Took half a day, because a body kit is a hundred little things, a lot of small plastic clips you do not want to snap and then sit around waiting on replacements. So you go slow and careful. Half a day later the kit sits together on new wheels over new brakes. Good.

We could paint it ourselves, but prep eats time, so it was easier to send it to Maaco. Couple days later it came back. Not a perfect job, we'd have done it cleaner, but it'll do. Shook it down, drove fine, drove normal. But it was time to get ready for the show.

We decided to wrap it in matte grey metallic.

There's a reason. The X5 has beautiful body lines, and unfortunately every color BMW offers buries them. To read a silhouette you need hyper contrast, and hyper contrast in factory paint is exclusive and expensive. Our version is simpler. Grey. Mid grey, the color sculptors work in so they can actually see the form. And because ours reads almost like matte chrome, every change in the surface throws an instant contrast. Look at the photos and the side line jumps out, every shape sharpens, and the gloss black trim pushes the matte forms even harder.

Skirts are the interesting part on an X5. Everything in the aftermarket today is a fat beam with little wings, fins, on the ends. Honestly it works badly, because it turns the X5 into a stagecoach. To make it look sporty the skirts have to be a cove, concave. Then they read fast, especially with the car dropped to the ground, which is a requirement. We took it on air, corrected the sensors, and put it practically on its belly.

The rear arches matter just as much. They draw the dynamic line from the skirts back into the diffuser. Always a must do.

A wing on the rear glass, mid-car, is madness. It fights its own aerodynamics. Visually fun, but too much. A wing up top, on the roof, is real work and actually dams the air. So that's the one worth upgrading, and we upgraded it.

I thought about swapping the front headlights from LED to laser, then didn't. In more aggressive tuning the LED lights, especially in that lemon yellow, look far meaner than laser. The triangular signature you see on the X5M is more of the moment, and more temporary. Complex shapes always age fastest. That's turned out true, since BMW is walking its front lights back toward simpler lines as we speak.

That part of the project is done. We took it to the show, had a great time.

And we've already ordered the next kit, from the last generation before the new 2027 X5. Which, jokes online aside, is genuinely a bold piece of design research from BMW. Standing ovation. The potential in that generation is excellent, especially for tuning and white body work, which is the next iteration of this car anyway.

Kit's ordered. Elements are getting refreshed. Interior goes cinnamon and black. New wheel. Every wood insert gets wrapped in vinyl. Should come out cool, and then we'll see.

Three weeks to wait, and we start the rebuild. Whether it keeps this color is an open question. Open to suggestions.

Kit's on the way. Couple weeks and it goes on. That's the next episode.

There's a moment in almost every man's life, and for the ones deep in tuning it's a hard one. You cross into a different category. You become a dad.

For a while you tell yourself the sports coupe still makes sense. Then one day you go looking for the excuse and you can't find it. Not for yourself, and definitely not for your better half. A two-door and a squad of kids do not sign the same contract.

So what does a guy do when he's spent his whole life modifying cars and now the car has to hold car seats?

If you run a custom car company you can always keep the fun ones as business cars. But playing the fool with strangers isn't the same as playing the fool with your wife. So, like it or not, a decision had to be made.

The options line up quick. Some go Rolls Royce. Some go Bentley. Some go Lamborghini. Wonderful machines, every one. And each of them built an SUV for a similar reason, to reach a part of the market the brand couldn't reach before, because competition climbs every year. Nothing wrong with that. It's smart. But it does mean these trucks were born to fill a role, not to be the purest expression of the badge. A different kind of car for a different kind of buyer.

Porsche makes brilliant machines. Cayenne, Macan, genuinely good, genuinely fast. And still, whichever one I looked at, I kept feeling the same thing. Not that it was a lesser car. Just that it wasn't the uncompromised one. It wasn't the 911 of the lineup. Great cars, built to widen the door. That's a different job than the job the icons do.

But there was one truck. Two, actually, that were ultimately, culturally, the real thing.

First, the G500. The classic, not the modern one. Mercedes does a lot today to keep the brutality alive while folding in the innovation, and credit to them. But the whole power of the G500 was that it was a tractor. A V8 tractor that drank fuel like it had something to prove and looked like it just rolled off the set of a movie about a war in the desert.

There's a real reason for that look. The G was born because the Shah of Iran, a Mercedes shareholder at the time, wanted a military off-roader. Development started in the early 70s. Then the Shah fell in 79, the order evaporated, and the truck went to production anyway. It built an aura around itself that has kept it in production for over 40 years. If I ever took a G, I'd never take a new one. I'd take a late 90s or early 2000s, strip it, rebuild it, tune the whole thing. Unkillable, endless potential, and the shapes in those years were the hardest, the straightest, the most ready for the knife.

I sold you on it, didn't I.

It isn't the one I bought.

Because there was a second legend, and it came from the start of the 2000s. The X5.

Today the X5 is a soccer mom car. But the ones who caught the late 90s and early 2000s remember a word. Parachutist. Back then the X5 was so wanted, so premium, and so hard to steal any other way, that thieves would take them straight off a red light. Remember GTA? That's the soil that game grew from. The carjack at the light. That was the X5.

Here's the beauty of BMW. Whatever the car is, it's built for the driver. Not the passenger. The driver sits in the center of every BMW. You catch the same theme in a few other places, the MK4 Supra, the 911, a handful of others. But BMW, no matter the model, was always about the person holding the wheel. At least back when I was a little younger.

One observation while I'm here. There was a time when you heard an M5 on the road and you knew a professional was driving it. A racer. You weren't afraid. Today money and an M5 have nothing to do with each other. It might be some guy who made it on an app. Owning the M5 says nothing about whether you can drive it. The X5 was born in the years when the people bringing in BMWs, especially the M cars, actually knew how to drive them. Just an observation.

The G500 stays on my list forever, that late 90s brick especially. But this time I chose the X5.

New body. It didn't have to be the X5M. The M badge was never the point for me. We do modding and tuning. Taking a 4.4 to a thousand horsepower isn't a mountain. Swapping the engine for something else, maybe something meaner, also isn't a mountain. So the brief was simple. Get an X5 in the new body. Whatever trim. We'll build the custom kit anyway, close to the M look or off in our own direction. Air suspension or coilovers, no question. And that becomes the base.

So that's what we did.