BMW 1 Series M 2010 Review

BMW 1 Series M

The gathering for the 25th anniversary of the original M3 (check out our back-to-back drives of all the M3s at Carsales Network soon!) wasn't exactly shocked when BMW's hotshop rolled out a thinly disguised prototype of its newest, cheapest rocket.

The much-rumoured, much-photographed 1 Series M (as it will be clumsily called) hasn't exactly been shrouded in secrecy. Instead, BMW has taken every opportunity to talk about it (going as far back as two years ago) and has gone out of its way to have it scooped by spy snappers.

They've been thin on the details, though, preferring to let the rumour mill sort out the specifications for them. And they're still doing it, even when they wheeled it out in front of a group of journalists.

Even so, when Frank Isenberg, the Project Director of the 1 Series M, picked out yours truly from the assembled throng and beckoned me to sit alongside him at the Ascari private race track in Spain, turning him down in a fit of pique didn't even enter my head.

>> M from the inside
Firstly, it looks a lot like a 135i coupe, but it's definitely fatter. The tyres and wheels are larger, hiding monster front brakes, and the guards are flared deeply to accommodate it all. And it rides a bit lower, though it's hard to tell with all the swirly black-and-white camouflage surrounding its bottom half.

The seats have enormous side bolstering and that's reflected on the thigh supports, too. The cabin is more production car than mule, but there are still some test hangovers, including cables for data gathering poking out of the dashboard and mismatched trim here and there.

The fat steering wheel is fixed, though, and so is the six-speed manual gearbox. And then mein host kicked it in the starter motor and the twin-turbo, straight six fired up snappily and cleanly. And, disturbingly, quietly.

Where the E46 M3 -- the last straight-six M car -- crackled and fizzed with unapologetically metallic brutality, the 1 Series M is much, much softer.

"It's not finalised yet," Isenberg apologised. "I doubt that the exhaust will be this quiet. We're just fiddling with noise regulations and this is the conservative option for testing right now."

Thank goodness for that.

>> No weakling
It might be quiet, but you wouldn't call it weak. As soon as our man eased out the clutch and rolled off down the pitlane, you could pick the strength beneath his foot.

The 1 M's six feels like a torquey engine and it's definitely a strong one. There's an utter sweetness to the way it spins smoothly up to 7000rpm that reminds me of the E36's 3.2-litre straight six -- except that this one is a 3.0-litre straight six with a pair of turbos bolted to it.

M has been chosen as the last refuge for this wonderful engine that started life as a lightly-turboed powerhouse for the 335i. The trouble for it in production BMWs is that the brand has moved to the cheaper TwinPower system, which combines a single, twin-scroll turbocharger with direct fuel-injection and variable valve timing. So, rather than waste the twin-turbo six, BMW gave it to M, where it helps with boosting low-range torque, reducing emissions and putting M on the path to responsible downsizing.

In this guise, though, M gives it more boost and more revs and then stuffs it, as per the best of traditions, into the smallest bodyshell it can find in the BMW line-up. The rumour mill has it producing somewhere around 250kW and, if it's any less than that, I'm no judge. That's around the same sort of numbers the E46 M3 produced and it's in a smaller car.

Where it will trounce the older Ms, though, is in its torque delivery. It must have at least 500Nm lurking in there (the 335i had 400) and it just didn't seem possible to catch it in the wrong cog.

Isenberg exploded the thing out of the pitlane and it hurled us back into our seats in a completely different way to the current V8 M3, but almost as hard.

Where the M3 builds its pace from a rolling start in a wonderfully elastic, linear surge, the little fella started harder, earlier, but didn't quite have the bigger car's punch at the top of its rev range.

That's a feeling enhanced by it not having the same sort of rev range (the M3 spins to 8250, but the 1 Series M only stretched to 7000), but they're very different characters.

That doesn't mean the newcomer struggles to deliver. It doesn't. It has a wonderful punch from low revs that it maintains, rather than increases, as it climbs.

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