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So, if you are like me – you don’t have the top up very often on your Z4. I am lucky enough to live in Southern California and as such, I am blessed with year-round beautiful weather.  Every once and awhile though, god punishes us with some rain or cold, or both. Now, I am typically pretty resilient to this sort of thing and only in rare cases do I put the top up, but when I did I noticed that there was a considerable amount of wind noise.

I had figured that this was the life of having a Z4 and I sort of just dealt with it.  It wasn’t until I was sitting in the passenger seat a few times that I realized that the wind noise was much much less. The difference in the wind noise was significant enough to indicate that there may be a way to eliminate the wind noise!

Searching and searching for the gap yielded nothing. I even took off the antenna (which it was on the driver side) to try to figure out where this noise was coming from. Looking at the seals around the window – everything looked fine.

I knew there was a difference between the driver side and passenger side but I couldn’t figure out where, I eventually became convinced that the issue was around the window. I took a piece of paper, and tried pulling it through the window glass and the rubber seal on the door. BINGO! there was a huge difference in effort to pull the paper through the seal between the driver and passenger side, with the driver side much ‘loser’.

Now, how the heck to close the gap? Well, this is actually done at the factory with an adjustment made to the D bolt that the door locks into. See the picture to the left. Moving this bolt around adjusts how tight the door closes against the car.

This bolt is attached with two, star-keyed screws that hold it to the body of the car. These screws into nuts that are located on the opposite side of the panel. By loosening the screws you will be able to adjust where the D bolt sits on the frame of the car, and hence how the door closes on the car.

Adjusting this is incredibly sensitive, a small change to the bolt makes a LOT of difference. As you can see in the photo to the right, I only had to adjust the bolt a few mm. This totally eliminated the wind noise that I had in the car. Be sure not to move the bolt in too far, you want to prevent flex in the window causing it to break when you close the door!

It should be noted that these bolts will walk over time, and they may need to be adjusted from time to time. Be sure to also tighten the screw that holds the bolt to the body very well, make sure it is at least as tight as when you loosened it. Unless you are a superhero, you should use a wrench instead of a a screwdriver to adjust this bolt in order to get this guy good and tight.

Hope this helps you, it sure helped me!