M3 VS BIKE M3 faces off F800 ST

NEW VS OLD The new M3 more than holds its own against the old and enigmatic M5

By Leow Ju-Len

M3 vs 2

BELIEVE IT OR not, there is a way to access M3 levels of performance from a BMW by spending less than a tenth of the money. You just have to give up two wheels. One of BMW’s entry-level models, in fact, would keep up nicely with an M3.

Take the F800 ST sports tourer, for example. Yours for just 30 grand, its 798cc parallel-twin belts out a humble-sounding 85bhp, but that’s enough to blast it to 100km/h in just 3.7 seconds.

So we grabbed one and lined it up against the M3, with yours truly in the saddle and resident hotshoe Colin Yong behind the wheel of the car.

Now, I’m not exactly MotoGP material, and if I were riding a Suzuki Hayabusa I’d probably have trouble keeping up with Valentino Rossi on a bicycle, but I wanted to see how the average rider would fare against someone capable of pushing the M3’s performance envelope.

Bad move. We took off on a favourite winding road with the M3 in the lead, and when the first right-hander came up I almost crashed. That’s because I tried braking at the same spot as the car, which is a dumb thing to do when you only have half the wheels in contact with the road.

After that it was a game of catch-up, and while Colin was bombing along pretty swiftly, he wasn’t having to push to the max. I, on the other hand, was riding out of my skin just to keep the M3 in sight.

On the tightest corner, for instance, I cranked the bike over so far that my right foot’s toes scraped the tarmac, but Colin claims he “wasn’t going that hard”.

It’s only on the straightest sections that the bike’s explosive acceleration allows you to reel in the car, but then you have to brake so much earlier for corners that the advantage is more or less canceled out.

Conclusion: the bike will deliver bigger thrills, but covering ground swiftly is easier by far in the M3.

Next time we’ll try to pit a BMW HP2 Sport against it. It costs over 50 grand, but it’s got 130bhp, and since ‘HP2′ is the bike division’s equivalent of ‘M’, that should be a much fairer fight…

M3 vs E34 M5: Does the new beat the tried-and-true?

JUST FOR FUN, we dug out an earlier example of M magic in the form of an E34 M5, which lived from 1988 to 1995.

The specs on this early model seem relatively tame now – its 3.6-litre straight six produced 315bhp, and drove the rear wheels through a Getrag five-speed gearbox. That punted it to 100kmh/h in a little over six seconds, so even a relatively humble 135i would murder one today.

But in the earlier days of M, things were done very differently. While the latest M3 comes right off the main BMW production line, each E34 M5 was hand-assembled by the M division’s master workers over two weeks.

Its S38B36 powerplant traces its design to the M88/1 engine used in the glorious, gorgeous BMW M1 of 1978, meaning the E34 M5 can boast a direct link to the car that kicked off all this M goodness to begin with.

By that measure, it’s easy to consider it more ’special’ than the current generation of M cars.

But what’s it like to drive? In a word, difficult. The throttle is racing car sharp, while the He-Man clutch makes it almost impossible to drive smoothly in town. As for the gearchange, a left arm like Schwarzenegger is what it takes to muscle your way up and down the ‘box.

That’s when you’re going slowly, though. Drive it hard, and suddenly things come alive. While the 3.6-litre doesn’t have any real low-end punch, once revved past 4,200rpm it really starts to kick, and as with all the M cars, there’s a soundtrack that makes the human soul tingle.

So is it special? ‘Very’, is the answer. Yet, I think if forced to choose, I’d pick the similarly-sized M3 sedan. It’s less engaging to drive for sure, and the M5 had more heritage going for it, but as a car to be driven day in, day out, it’s as user-friendly as a Honda Civic.

More importantly, the times have moved on and made the old M5 obsolete. The M3 is properly, violently swift, and no 135i driver in his right mind would.