BMW M2 - long-term review

Filthy, isn’t it? Sorry about that, if you’re one of the People’s Republic of Car Detailing Army. Where I live in muddy England at this time of year, cleaning a car is about as worthwhile as shovelling snow during a blizzard. Or arguing with a Tesla fanatic on TwXtter.

Yes, the weather’s cruddy where I choose to live, boo-hoo. Actually, that brings me to what I wanted to talk about. The way the M2 behaves in sub-optimal conditions.

Or more accurately, the fact the M2 behaves at all when it’s grimy and slimy. See, that’s not a given in a modern car wearing modern tyres, fitted with clever modern traction control.

Exhibit A(aaargh): the old ‘F80’ M3. The first twin-turbo M3. Good looking car, that, in a purposeful, muscular way that no current BMW can match. But by heck was that car sketchy when the weather forecast was sad.

We had a long-termer in the Top Gear Garage. It was entrusted to Ollie Marriage, a man blessed with car control reflexes to make Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell look a bit sleepy.

I am not one of those ‘fighter pilot reaction times’ people. I’m one of those ‘normal’ people. So you can imagine my alarm when I borrowed the M3 for the weekend, and it responded with death threats.

Okay, slight exaggeration. It was a Friday afternoon and I just wanted to get around the hellscape that is the M25 and go home. It was spitting with rain and the traffic was flowing. And so, as a gap opened up just as my exit sliproad presented itself, I decided to give the M3 some berries. Heck, it’s an M car. Sue me.

Now, because I hadn’t bothered to tailor all its modes and settings for ‘normie’ skill level, I was in Mr Marriage’s M mode, with the fastest DCT gearchange. The old M3 used to perform a little ‘shunt’ when you pulled the paddleshifter. So as I demanded fourth, the car did its coded go-faster jerk, which dramatically unsettled the rear axle. Fevered corrections. Jabs of traction control. Full body clench. It lasted barely a second, but it didn’t half knock my confidence in the M3.

Later that weekend I was putting my supermarket bags in the boot when the heavens opened. I turned around and went back in the house. I’d sooner go hungry than drive one of those F80 M3s in the wet.

I remember at the time that M3 fans argued it demanded a different driving technique – basically always stay a gear higher than you reckon you should. See a second-gear corner approaching? Stay in third. The car developed such a mountain of torquey wallop you could just ride the freight train of boost and still demolish the sat-nav’s arrival time.

That was 2017. Here in 2024, the M2 has 26 more horsepower, a similar 406lb ft of torque and one more gear in its torque-converter auto. So with time to live with the car, experiment with its shift speeds and settings, I’ve finally overcome my fear of turbo M cars. If you’re brutish with the car, it’s an animal, but knock your ambition back just a touch (and stay in tall gears) and the pace it’s got in hand when the road is coated in moist crud is fairly spectacular. It’s confidence inspiring, instead of buttock-clenching.

Some of that is due to the less abrupt damping – the M2 has much more bandwith across its modes, though in truth I never bother with Sport Plus on the road. Obviously the tyre deserves praise – our M2 is wearing Michelin’s Pilot Sport 4S rubber. The Pilot Sport is already a ‘fast car tyre’ and I’d worried the ‘S’ (meaning a softer compound and revised tread pattern to enhance what Michelin deems ‘occasional track use’) would be a real handicap through winter. So far, so dependable. Even when it does break traction, it’s metered out in a friendly manner, rather than snatching and fighting at the surface.

But I’m also adamant BMW’s rowed back a little on those gimmicky gearchange ‘shunts’, which were always an affectation. After all, when M cars used a dual-clutch box, the whole point of a DCT was a seamless gearchange. Only a marketing moron would’ve demand the shift was interrupted with a binary burp.

Now it’s a regular auto that’s been sportified, the flat-chat upshifts are gloriously uninterrupted, but free of that nerve-shredding artificial jerk. It’s a tiny detail, but one that adds up to making a 454bhp rear-drive coupe a much more trustworthy winter warrior than I’d feared. And in a world where it sometimes seems that cars have plateaued, that there isn’t much meaningful ‘progress’ between generations any more, it’s a change I really appreciate.

Told you I’m warming to it. Okay, Yes. Fine. It probably deserves a wash.