A few weeks back we hosted our first BMW meet since completing our rather drastic renovations here at the shop. We know we have a huge BMW following here in SoCal, so if we were to invite everyone down all at once, there’s no way our lot could manage – cos we top out somewhere around 160-180 cars as we discovered last August on “86 Day” when we filled literally every occupy-able space in our entire business park complex. It was both challenging to manage and hugely satisfying. Having learned a lot from the few smaller meets we’ve been doing lately, we were ready to go all out for the SoCal BMW community.
Since the E9X is one of our best-supported platforms here with tons of parts on hand and in stock, what better group of BMWs to start with than the 2007-13 BMW E90 / E91 / E92 / E93? So we had what we wanted to do figured out, but that still left the question of how we were going to do it, what day of the week, what time.
Some of you might’ve heard of a thing called “Cars and Coffee”. The one we had here in SoCal until very recently was probably the best in the nation, manufacturers would bring out special one offs, concept cars and prototypes – rare glimpses of cars you only see in magazines as they are in real life, on real asphalt away from the show lights early on Saturday mornings, a way to show off the rarest and coolest cars to be found anywhere. Since that shut down, there was suddenly this void – we’d gotten used to enjoying our dawn cruises in our cars – and so as we were dreaming up how we could do something for the SoCal BMW community, food and coffee over BMWs on a Saturday morning made perfect sense – and being the weekend before Bimmerfest 2015, it was the perfect opportunity for anybody who needed something to pick up that “one last Mod” before the show.
Just like the now-gone Cars and Coffee Irvine meetup, the first attendees were set up before the event started.
We said hi to old friends and got to talk without the need to hustle and get stuff done- it was a really nice way to catch up.
Our April Car Of The Month, Nelson Rios’ E92 BMW 335i was one of the first to arrive, giving us the opportunity to snap some photos of the car before the lot filled up.
Nelson’s E92 335i is one of only a handful of cars to sport a EA-Style front bumper in SoCal that we’ve seen.
Filling up the lot didn’t take nearly as long as we thought it would. Our target was to have 60 cars in attendance, and very early on it looked like hitting that number was a certainty.
As it hit 7:00am, the E9xs began to trickle in and fill in the parking lot. We see so many E9x’s here each week that it’s hard to keep them all straight, but seeing all these modded BMWs together really made the differences between each build stand out that much more.
We really liked the look of the Roof Rack on this BMW E92 335i – and the Remus Quad Exhaust for BMW E92 335i looked especially sharp.
The range and level of mods ranged from subtle to super-aggressive.
A few other BMWs crashed the party as well…
This neat pair of BMW E90s were almost like a before and after photo, the car on the right is stock, the one on the left slightly modified.
One of our regulars Wendell rolled up in his heavily modified BMW E90 335i sedan, rolling on a set of very rare, now-discontinued VMR Wheels V714’s.
Wendell’s very passionate about modifying his BMWs and his E90 sports a wealth of upgrades from the likes of Cobb, Evolution Racewerks and more that makes his E90 a lot more muscular than stock.
It was nice to really spend some time getting up close and personal with everyone’s car before things got too hectic.
The donuts and coffee we’d picked up for everyone were a huge hit, as everyone really seemed to appreciate the caffeine and sugar this early in the morning.
Even though we were hosting a meet, the shop still was open as usual at 8:00am, this BMW E90 335i sedan was the first install of the day at the ModAuto install shop.
This super-aggressive Track-Ready BMW E46 M3 also joined the festivities.
There was no shortage of familiar faces, like Miguel’s wild BMW E90 M3 with those insane Work Equip deep dish wheels, which we featured recently.
Things were pretty mellow, until all of a sudden, like a tsunami rushing in, a flood of E9Xs poured into the lot.
By now the lineup of BMW E9Xs stretched across the entire front row of parking spaces in our business park.
A few classic BMW E30’s rolled up to join the party as well.
As time passed, a few of the guys popped their trunks and busted out a small fleet of R/C cars and started drifting.
Joining the F82 BMW M4 that was already here were our friends from Impressive Wrap, who rolled up in their F22 BMW M235i and a wild chrome wrapped F82 BMW M4 wearing a wild LTMW Widebody kit. Our friends at Impressive Wrap donated a free roof wrap to our raffle for the E9X guys.
Though we did have a gathering of E9Xs together, let’s be real, we know you wanna see these too.
Our 100-octane-in-the-daily-driver friend Rodger even showed up with that beastly E90 of his, which we’ve also featured before – don’t let the exterior fool you, under the hood that car’s heavily modded enough that it’s now fast enough to actually scare our Mechanic. Though the car’s an automatic, the addition of a Sprint Booster makes response so fast that it damn near hits 60mph in the 100 ft between the shop bay door and the driveway to the street. While I may use words like beastly for a particularly powerful car, make no mistake, that thing is a damn monster.
As it got later in the morning, even more old friends rolled up – like Alec’s BMW F30 328i – one of the earliest features we did when I started here – looked as fresh on the Forgestar CF10 Wheels and KW V1 Coilovers for F30 as it did when we saw it a year ago. 
The BMW F30 MSport style front bumper has held up well.
As have the F30 Performance Style Diffuser and F30 Performance Style Spoiler.
When 11am hit, it was time for the raffle – and since we’d hit 63 cars in attendance, we were thrilled to give away a slew of prizes to the E90 community.
ModBargains co-founder Mike Brown had megaphone duty as we began to raffle off the prizes, including several gift cards for merchandise and gift certificates good for installs at the shop. Several of our friends also contributed to the raffle as well – Impressive Wrap as we mentioned donated a FREE roof wrap as a prize, and our friends over at Cobb Tuning donated a Cobb AccessPORT for BMW to raffle off – IF 60 cars showed up.With some pretty sweet prizes being given away, everyone was staring hard at their tickets as Mike read off each winning ticket number.
“Did you think we’re gonna win man?”
One by one, we handed out prize after prize to some very happy BMW E9X owners.
Finally, it was time to raffle off the grand prize – the Cobb Tuning AccessPORT for BMW – which retails for a pretty penny at $895, but given the ridiculous horsepower and torque gains, an AccessPORT offers the most impressive HP-per-Dollar of any SINGLE mod for any BMW N54 or N55 twin turbo six.
Thing young man was our lucky winner – at 16 years old, he just started modding his first car- a N54-powered BMW 335i, who was all smiles having scored the mod he’d been ogling online by chance in a raffle.
With the raffle over and lunch time approaching, everyone began to roll out.
That’s it for now for the photos from our first E9X meet at ModAuto, a big thank you to our partners Cobb Tuning and Impressive Wrap for being a part of this meet, thank you for reading and most importantly, thank you to each and every one of you who came out to make it such a great meet. We look forward to throwing our next one for the 1-series guys in June!
Interested in modding your BMW E9X? Ask the Mod Experts what exterior upgrades are available for your car to change the style of your ride. Call us at 714-582-3330 for expert car mod advice and schedule your installation at the Mod Auto shop today.
Story & Photos Nick Gregson