M engineers say the sedan and coupe were
engineered to feel identical. Throwing the M4 around Portimão circuit in
Portugal and the M3 around the outlying mountain roads, that’s how they felt.
Both get a one-piece carbon driveshaft, lightweight forged-alloy suspension
bits, and fixed four-pot front brakes, the latter replacing BMW’s oft-maligned
sliding-caliper setup. Both get the first decent-looking seats since the E36
M3’s “Darth Vader” buckets, and both get a carbon-fiber roof skin (with more
insulation for the M3) on non-sunroof cars. Unlike the sedan, the coupe has a
composite trunklid shaped to offset the two-door’s aerodynamic inferiority.
A scant 10 pounds separates the coupe from
the sedan, but shockingly, and rare among performance cars these days, the
two-door is 176 pounds lighter than its predecessor. Maybe it’s imagination,
but you can almost feel it as you swing the new electrically assisted steering
rack around at speed. Steering has often been an M3 selling point, and enough
communication remains to reveal virtually no understeer from the Michelin Pilot
Super Sport tires. The change in gearing across the rack’s travel isn’t as
distracting as it is with the ordinary Three’s optional sport steering. The
ride, at least on the optional adaptive dampers of our test cars, is superb.
The
M4's cabin offers superb driving ergonomics
As with the M3, you can tweak your
steering, throttle, shift, stability-control, and damper settings via buttons
on the console and save your favourite settings to two buttons on the steering
wheel. If that sounds bewildering, midrange Sport is a good starting point,
saving Sport Plus for red-mist work. So as not to scare defectors from the
Quattro camp, the stability control’s default mode is safer than a broom-closet
fumble at the family-planning clinic’s Christmas bash. But the
stability-control system’s M Dynamic mode allows an unexpected amount of slip,
cutting in so deftly that you hardly notice it sparing your blushes. Switch
everything off and . . . well, hope there’s a tire store nearby.
The
new BMW M3 uses turbo power in place of a naturally aspirated engine
The engine, surprisingly, is the only
caveat to the jollity. It produces plenty of noise and volume, though some of
it is generated by a computer and is funneled through the stereo, as on the
current M5. The six is very much a case of quantity over quality, and power
delivery feels disappointingly linear. It’s as if someone fitted the engine
from a Dodge Viper under that hood and recalibrated the tach to make it seem as
if the car were revving higher. It sounds alarmingly dead. When I jumped into
an M235i after the M3/M4 drive, the former’s sweet single-turbo six sounded
much more authentic and felt less turbocharged, giving real reason to wind it
out.
Powering
the M4 is a new turbocharged 3.0-litre in-line six-cylinder engine
On every other level, though, the M3 is as
good as we’d hoped. The absurdly high spec of BMW’s press cars did leave a few
questions unanswered— the $8,150 ceramic brakes are awesome, but what are the
steel rotors like, since they’re the ones everyone is actually going to buy?
And just how pathetic does the car look on the stock 18-inch wheels?
Which to buy? It’s hard not to be suckered
in by the M4’s sexy shape, but the sedan is ultimately more appealing. For one
thing, it undercuts the $65,125 M4 by $2,200. But just as important, its sleeper
looks mean more opportunities to creep up on real supercars and give them a
proper fright.
