BMW M3 Competition review and buyer's guide: Ultimate Sedan Supercar
There are faster, more expensive and certainly more overtly ridiculous performance cars. But every time I drive an M3, I fall madly in love with it. It is my kryptonite. This ultimate sedan supercar renders me powerless…
What’s it actually like, living with a BMW M3 Competition?
Frankly, it’s a paradox - it’s like owning an Extra 300L - the world’s top unlimited aerobatic aircraft, and only ever flying it straight and level. Takeoff, four right turns - not to exceed 20 degrees angle of bank - and land. Repeat. That’s driving to the office in your M3.
No loops, no snap rolls, no stall turns. Ever. Ultimately that’s probably a good thing. Because very few M3 owners would be capable of driving a car like this near the limit of its performance.
The ride is fine, and you can put your family in it and they’d never know what all the fuss is about. It even has a proper boot.
This is, in my view, BMW’s best work - the small sedan with the huge grip and the even huger brakes, and the most carnally attractive inline six imaginable.
A fundamental paradox here is: Its capability versus yours. Frankly, if your driving ability is here, and the car’s limits are here, or even if you’ve got approximate parity, that’s one kind of relationship.
But with a car like this, unless you’ve got that spooky ‘race champion’ software loaded, the balance is tipped the other way. When I tip this car in, hard and fast; it looks back at me and says ‘Is that all you got?’
M-POWERMENT
Cars start feeling half engaging at a power to weight ratio of about 100 watts per kilo. Kilowatts per tonne - same difference. An i30 N is at 136, and that car feels properly fun. Notably because of the role of Albert Biermann, the former head of the BMW M Division, in its design.
It’s like ‘M3 Light’ (philosophically) - more financially accessible, less predatory and a bit more fun. This car offers 216 W/kg, which is 60% more awesome in a straight line. 0-100 in 3.9 seconds #respect. And that’s not even what this car does best.
But 375kW and 650 Nm, from an awesome twin-turbo straight six… I mean, V8s are awesome, but give me a straight six any day - perfect balance and awesome rev characteristics beats that scavenging-inspired burble. Like, if you actually want to go fast. And BMW is the world champion of building the hottest straight sixes ever. So there’s that…
...But an M340i xDrive is $50,000 cheaper and more refined, and few people could drive an M3 quicker from A to B in the real world. Like I said, it’s a paradox. You can probably only make an M3 go as fast as you can make it go, and you probably can’t make it go appreciably faster than an M340i xDrive. And, tantalisingly, M xDrive is coming to this car in the last quarter of the year. So there’s that, if you want to split the tractive effort front to rear, in extremis.
Also, on the cost-for-performance aspect consider the BMW M3 Comp offers 375kW for $150k, while a Ferrari 812 GTS can only offer 588kW for $675k. That’s two-thirds of the power for less than a quarter the price, in favour of the M3. Where do I sign?
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MAD. MAXXED.
Four quite-real, fully-functioning quad exhaust tips.
George Harrison wrote the immortal words: ‘Something in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover,’ in 1969 - it kinda sums up how I feel about every M3 I have ever driven (even ‘incredible hulk’ green ones with orange interiors).
Usher and Will.i.am said it too, more recently with ‘Honey got a booty like pow, pow, pow’. Same kinda sentiment. Different words, but yeah. Sadly, not everyone agrees.
I’m not motivated to run this experiment. ‘Chopstick test!’ - I don’t think so. But Craig is emphatically full of shit on fun factor.
Gotta love people who sit on a couch, in their underwear, in the basement, and make ad hoc determinations about cars they’ve never driven and can’t afford, and will never drive.
19-inch front, 20-inch rear wheels.
For the record, in ‘M’ mode, this car is the full-on performance dominatrix.
The transmission is awesome. Shifting with the paddles is like driving a sequential gearbox, for all practical intents and purposes.
Is it a race car? No. But it’s not designed to be a race car. Pro Tip: Race cars are awful to drive. Awful.
I’m pretty sure, however, that ‘fun’ is entirely the wrong filtration for some sort of diligent assessment of a car of this nature.
That’s because these cars are terrifying, or at least intimidatory. If you step into the ring with this car and drop your guard, they will not hesitate to clock you. It’s an unforgiving environment in which to dance.
Therefore, I think the ownership proposition is either about bragging to the boys (‘cuz most chicks don’t care - like, my wife and daughter both hate this car). Or it’s about bragging to yourself, about owning the ultimate engineering execution of a particular kind of car. This is certainly that.
It’s also as close to perfect as a practical supercar could ever be. Is it comfortable? Yeah. Kinda. But not in the context of a car designed to offer the ultimate in luxuriousness. It’s more comfortable than a car that performs like this has any right to be.
It’s comfortable enough to live with. But that’s definitely not why I would want one. I want it because it’s the best. But also because it will be completely indifferent to killing you if you turn off the electronic oversight and take it to the edge. It’s very hard to exist at the edge, with a car like this.
Digital display is honed for optimal focus.
Many paddles to learn.
It’s really difficult to explain what makes that attractive, to people who don’t get it.
The best explanation of this aspect of cars like the M3 is the legendary Hunter S Thompson, Midnight on the Coast Highway, San Francisco, 1969. After he had embedded himself in the Hells Angels and developed a pathological obsession with scary-fast motorcycles.
He called it ‘The Edge’:
“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to, when it came time to chose between Now or Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In.”
If you really want to know what makes cars like the M3 Competition so compelling, that’s the closest thing to a cogent explanation that I have ever heard.
If you still don’t get it, you probably can’t get it. But that’s how this kinda car rolls.
The Edge is just one press of a button away, every day. And for that, I fuckin’ love it.
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