1989 BMW M3 Roberto Ravaglia - It’s Not about The Looks (Part 1)

Passersby may think it’s a relic of the red-brace era. But boxy proportions hide a race bred soul the like of which can’t be bought new today. This is the legend of BMW’s E30 M3

There was a time when I thought the original BMW M3 to be the best high-performance car in the world. Not the fastest, the grippiest, the most glamorous or the most challenging, nor the most sonically pleasing or dramatic-looking. Lust, simply, the best. As a package of usability and bringer on of intense desire, the E30 M3 was the one.

BMW M3 Roberto Ravaglia Edition

March 1987 was when this Damascene moment took place. Estoril circuit in Portugal was where. It was not long after the M3's international launch on another circuit, Mugello in Italy, in August 1986 almost a year after the M3 had been revealed to the public at the 1985 Frankfurt show. From a report in Motor magazine of this launch by my then colleague David Vivian I shall now extract a fragment. DV is being driven by ace BMW racer Dieter Quester, and an enjoyably long-drawn-out drift has just been enacted.

Here's what David wrote. 'The feel is different/ said BMW's articulate racer. 'More safe/ More safe for Quester was Tumingin early and pressing the lightweight trainer on his right foot so hard it left the imprint of its sole there in a regular 325i we would have been pointing in the opposite direction long before the end of the bend. Probably upside down.

This was remarkable. People today might have forgotten just how remarkable. The regular E30 generation of the BMW 3-series, made from 1982 to 1991, was a good car in many ways but had a deserved reputation for sudden-death over steer if a powerful version was driven with excess machismo (although its E21 predecessor was even more wayward). Some pundits blamed the camber changes of the semi trailing arm rear suspension, but strong initial under steer and slightly slow-witted steering made matters worse after their large-holed safety net had lost its hold. Back off to quell that under steer or, more bravely, add traction-threatening power, and suddenly you were over the knife-edge and fighting to tame the tail.

Not in the M3, though. Here we found quick consistently meaty steering, a properly planted front end a deliciously long phase of handling neutrality as front and rear axles shared the pre-over steer cornering loads, and ultimately a perfectly predictable, benign build-up into the sort of over steer anyone could control with confidence. A friendlier car you could not hope to meet.

How could this be? How could the M3 feel so dramatically different from other E30s while still having the same rear suspension? Development over design, or did Porsche own that particular escape route? Perhaps just designing the M3 properly in the first place, then, and crediting drivers with skill and instinct that BMW couldn't afford to take for granted among those driving lesser E30s, even though they turned out to be harder to control in a crisis. The quickest, hardcorest, raciest E30 turns out to be dynamically the safest and easiest to handle. Why couldn't all E30s be that way?

BMW eschewed the overtly aerodynamic styling of the rival Mercedes 190 Cosworth, yet the M3’smore steeply raked rear screen and raised bootlid, though a little crude-looking, gave it a still-creditable 0.33 drag factor.

That they weren't just added to the aura of miraculousness that surrounded this M3. Yet there was nothing 'trick' about the transformation. Before I go into the details, come back with me to that day at Estoril. It was a test day organized by tire company Continental to try out the then new Sport Contacts, and the M3 was by a big margin the best car of a group that included Porsche 944, Toyota MR2, Audi 80 Quattro and crucially, a Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16.

There was no Ford Sierra RS Cosworth, but that would have been similarly annihilated for the lack of finesse in its turbocharged power delivery. It was a shame in a way, because to have gathered together the Sierra, the 190E and the M3 would have given us the three most-talked-about homologation specials of the time, three arch rivals designed to bring honor and fame to their makers in the world's Group A saloon car races. Of the three, the BMW did the job the best and the most often on the racetracks, and it even had a brief but successful foray into rallying, although that was more the Ford's domain.

As a road car, the M3 had the highest state of innate tune because it produced its 200bhp without a turbocharger. The Sierra managed 201 bhp from a smaller capacity (2.0 instead of 2.3 liter) but needed a turbo to do it, while the Benz's 2.3 liter generated just 185bhp. Yet that didn't make the M3's engine a highly strung piece of peaky truculence, even if power did pour forth with un-abating vigor right up to the 700Qrpm limit. There was substance here, as befits an engine effectively two-thirds of the unit used in the M5, the M635CSi and originally the mid-engined Ml.

On the sweeps and straights of Estoril the M3 was magical. I did many laps and wanted it never to stop. I was still new to motoring journalism and this day remains one of the most intense bursts of skill improvement I have ever experienced because the M3 just let me explore everything a car can do.

Brake late and pitch the car into the comer?

The M3 is neat if unexciting inside, but it’s a long time since the Ultimate Driving Machine had such a fiercely driver-orientated dashboard. Front aspect is assertive rather than menacing.

Brake earlier, be smoother? Floor the throttle at the apex? Get on the power more gently and exit more tidily? The M3 lets you do what you want, and doesn't admonish you if you make a hash of it. Confidence in your car, and your ability to control it, is vital if you're to go properly fast. Seldom does a car flatter its driver more than this one. And not a single electronic aid in sight as the engine howls its crisp-edged, fizzing, mechanical howl that's so far removed from a straight-six's silkiness, promising 0-62mph in 6.7sec and 147mph all-out. No wonder I wanted one so much.

The car you see here is not quite the same as that first Estoril car. Nor indeed as the next M3 I drove, possibly the first to be imported to the UK - it beat BMW GB's cars here - and the property of Peter Thorp, owner of Safir Engineering, which built continuation Ford GT40s using original tooling. This re-acquaintance with the M3, on roads I knew well, made me love it all the more.

A car brilliant on a track often is much less so on the road, but the M3 excels at both. It rides properly, with a suppleness seldom found in today's fast cars, and its power steering has a subtlety of feel and progression too easily blustered past on a track where grip, balance and predictability are the main requirements. On the road, this steering helps you feel exactly what is happening and lets you alter it instantly and precisely, the ingredients missing from lesser E30s. That's where the confidence comes from. And even as M3s evolved, that trait never changed.

Our Nogaro Silver car is one such evolution, broadly a so-called Evolution II but bearing an interior color scheme and numbered plaque that declare it to be number 65 of 505 Roberto Ravaglia special editions. Ravaglia was one of the most successful M3 pilots, along with Johnny Cecotto who also put his name on a similar special edition. Just 25 Ravaglias officially came to the UK, but as all M3s are left hand drive it matters little now whether the import is grey or factory sanctioned.