We've all seen that awe-inspiring commercial about the BMW M3 V8 and its incredibly 8,400 revolutions per minute. Now lets get down to the nitty-gritty  Can we get a car that is old and also a V8 that is easy to modify and has a lot of aftermarket following as well? Well there would be the 350 small blocks, and them 5.0s that are in so many conversion vans of late.  
      My conundrum would be lets say we get either model whichever it don't matter and made it to be a BMW M3 V8...could it be done? My hypothesis and deliveration is this.  We'd have to get a fuel injected engine of course cuz EFI works with the powerband and since we need to raise the RPM levels carburation would not do for its deficiencies and its allowance of knock; Two a wet manifold such as a carbureted or TBI creates fuel condensation on the manifold walls causing enrichement in some areas and leanment in others.  Getting back to the engine side of things now; We get a billet crankshaft with the same stock stroke (about 4 in.) for the main reason that the one in there could be as much as 5-14 grams off balance and cause damage. H beam Conecting rods of the same stroke as well. (same reason as avove too.) The fundamental reason for this is turning the engine into a comparable BMW one not creating a new one of different dispalcement and configuration. The only modification would be compression ratio where domed pistons would drive the compression ratio from 9.0:1 to 10.0:1.
      On the top end we'd to port and polish the original heads and do a four angle valve job with a 1mm larger Intake valve. An aftermarket Intake manifold and a larger throttle body of which I'd suppose 3-5mm bigger would do. On the fuel side we'd replace the stock "pintle" type injectors with either Disc type or Ball type injectoers. Now to change the syze of the injectors is up for debate. The reason for this is that Pintle type injectors cannot keep up with a high reving engine as much and would instead cause detonation on the account that they'd spray a stream of fuel into the cylinder wall and cause fatal detonation with the setup that is proposed.
      The only thing theoretically left to do is calibrate the ECU to go up to or close to 8,400RPM and do I guess Hundreds of "Theoretical" fuel mapping equations. Now there are some speculations that some of these engine's deck plate tend to flex under extreme load. To combat this I suggest just cryotreating the bloody thing and that should be that. I'm not saying a bluepring just buying parts, cryotreating the block and watch it all go boom...Thats all. I still have debates with this old guy if it can be done and a couple of my wannabe "Hey look at this nifty calculator I found" engineers friends.

Just a theory that's all.  

Well you are thinking well, and have knowledge of the idea but I'm not getting into the whole theory of it. Tuning is nice, but a shorter stroke is arguably the main factor in determining RPM availability, due to the fact that piston speed is more important than RPM (that's the speed the piston is travelling midstroke in the cycle). The engine has to be built for high RPM operation, it's not just the tuning of it.

Secondly, don;t write off carbs just yet. MANY crotch rockets even made today are capable of 13K to 16K RPM's and are also carbed. (PS, if it were mine though I would use EFI, obviously.).

Third, ANYTHING can be done with the right connections and cashflow. The question is why?

Nice to see a mind thinking though. If I were you (and I was) I would invest some hard cash in good engine theory and tuning books, dedicated to the subject. They WILL be worth their weight.  

I got some books they don't get into complete detail, but I'll buy more... I've always wanted to make a Champcar engine out of a miata engine and try to pass it as a P1 Le Mans race car (theoretically)


"If knowledge was free we'd all have houses in mars by now.... or the Hamptons!"  

My uncle used to have a Kawasaki Ninja 1000cc and it had 4 carbs or throtlle body cab on it. So I understand.