Yahoo Autos The 1M Remains Peak BMW
Don Quixote had a dream. In Cervantes’s still-amazing 17th-century novel, the hero imagines Dulcinea del Toboso as the perfect woman. Virtuous and beautiful in every way, she inspires the delusions that drive Quixote through his adventure. She isn’t real, but the dream of her is powerful.
This story originally appeared in Volume 22 of Road & Track.
Imagine your IPO hits big and then you fill a block-long barn in Montecito, California, with Ferraris, Lambos, and a few glorious race cars. Exotics and legends. All constant inspiration. That dream may be enough to drive someone to toil and work their entire life to make it real. And even if that person doesn’t get that Barn of Awesome, great things may be achieved along the way. Motivation matters. The car-guy’s Dulcinea.
The BMW 1M isn’t a car that belongs in that barn. It’s the car one gets after achieving reasonable goals. There’s no IPO, but you’re the top systems analyst at a company that pays well. Or you’re the best-paid associate at the law firm. It’s the car that’s wholly satisfying on a track day, or when commuting between your condo in Manhattan Beach and the clinic in Torrance where you perform assembly-line LASIK surgery. It’s achievable, ordinary stuff.
“BMW has given M purists plenty of reasons to dislike the BMW 1-series M. It is not much quicker than the 135i, and— gasp!—is not powered by a high-revving, small-displacement, naturally aspirated engine,” explained Dan Pund back in 2011 when he was working for Car and Driver. “Indeed, it is powered by exactly the same 335-hp twin-turbo engine that powers the Z4 sDrive35is, which not only carries one of the industry’s dumbest names but isn’t even an M car. The truth is that the 1-series M is a parts-bin car.” The quality of the car comes from the excellence of the parts bin BMW’s Motorsport division was raiding. A great parts bin.
And a great history.
Road & Track is built on sports cars and exotics. All that stringback-driving-glove stuff right after World War II eventually morphed into the geosynchronous insanity of Lamborghini Miuras, Ferrari F40s, and McLarens. Great fantasy stuff (and great cars) and impractical for how most of us live. But around 1968, BMW invented the “sport sedan” as we have known it by shoving a 2.0-liter four into its 1600-2 compact two-door to create the 2002.
R&T first wrote about the 2002 in the May 1968 issue. “At about $3000 it is fully comparable in performance, handling, ride and finish with sports cars costing as much as $2000 more—although it has an unpretentious sedan body,” wrote our ancestors 56 years ago.
What R&T didn’t see back then is the revolution the 2002 represented. Here was a daily-usable 2210-pound car—four seats, a trunk, not fragile—delivering the driving sensations that made sports cars, well, sensational. Sports cars were a fantasy, but the sport sedan is an attainable dream.
The 2002 gave way to the first 3-Series in the mid-Seventies, and over time, the 3 grew larger. So, BMW conjured up the 1-Series to backfill the compact slot starting overseas in 2004 and finally reaching North America for the 2008 model year. The 2011 1M was the twerp-series M3 and a purer distillation of the M3 spirit than any M3 since then.
