It was a little over a year ago that I stepped out to do something around cars, little did any of us expect what was impeding. The morning out with our very own Porsche guru, Ashwin, and his 911 Carrera S accompanied by the new 911 Carrera S was the last time I was in and out of cars with a purpose. Fast forward a year, through a global pandemic and a bunch of lockdowns. I’ve found myself in the very familiar by-lanes of the tony Sadashivnagar, this time around, with another very purposeful six-cylinder car. Funnily enough, Karnataka is again under lockdown as this piece goes live.

Since the launch, the BMW M2 Competition has ticked all the right boxes. Short, well-balanced chassis, taut steering, and a zippy gearbox, all of this rolled up in a package tinkered by the nuts at BMW M. It was a winning recipe on paper, but after a good first-hand experience of this car, it is so much and more! This particular car is owned by a friend of mine. For the sake of anonymity, let's call him A. A and I went to college together and I vividly remember him drooling over the then just launched Ford Mustang GT. Like any other car guy, most of our class sessions were punctuated by intense car discussions and a good part of it consisted of A wanting to buy a Mustang and me telling him why it is a bad idea. While the Mustang is a great car, okay who are we kidding, it is a terrible car to drive. It never made any sense to me at that price point. It looks great, maybe, but close to a crore for something that handles like a boat floating in a sea of glue, it made little sense to me. While our man was hell-bent on a Mustang and even put in a deposit on one, I always asked him to look away and get a 718 instead and eventually the M2 when it was launched in India. Through time, life happened, we got done with college and the whole talk died and we shifted focus on our work and careers. In the mean, while I juggled work and academics, A had managed to set up his own company and vanished into thin air.

Fast forward to late 2020, I received a call while at work, it was A. He’d called to say thank you. Why, you ask? Our man’s company had just turned three, he’d reaped returns and managed to save enough to buy his dream car. Only, he went and bought an M2 Competition instead of a Mustang! “I drove the ‘stang for an hour and got bored”, in his own words. That call soon turned into a car discussion before work came calling. The introduction to the new car was long overdue but when it finally happened, I was smitten. The proportions, especially in that shade of Hockenheim Silver, the stance and the lines and creases, it has a sublime visual impact! As timing would have it, it was only then when the super-talented 5anket reached out expressing his interest in wielding his magic lens for the car.

We decided we’d meet at the petrolhead’s hour on a Sunday, go for a sprint, and get some images for your viewing pleasure. Now, BMWs have been the quintessential driver’s car. From the advent of the very first M car, it has always been less is more here. The E30 BMW M3 has been a personal hero and like anyone who knows a thing or two about cars, the E30 M3 has been a prominent feature on the future garage list. Most have lauded the M2 Competition to be the spiritual successor of the fabled E46 M3, I’d stick my head out and say that this is the successor to the E30 M3 that it never had! Let me explain.

Back when BMW built the E30 M3, it was built with the sole aim of acing the German DTM Gruppe A. The car came from the golden era of homologation specials, which meant it was light and was blessed by the handling gods. BMW built the E30 M3 in record time, the car used a revised motor, same chassis, revised panels for better aerodynamics. In fact, BMW was so time-tied that they yanked off the rear windshield, raked it steeper, and added a new quarter panel for better airflow. They didn’t bother designing a new rear end, a  little adjustment to the panels on the stock car, and “Fertig!” yelled a German engineer before presenting the car at the Frankfurt Motorshow in 1985. The E30 had a small body and a punchy engine, making it a visceral go-kart of sorts. Here’s where I began to draw parallels with the M2 Competition.

The BMW M2 Competition is something we don’t see often from car makers these days. In the pursuit of versatility and pleasing everybody out there, we purists have somehow dropped ranks in the manufacturer’s books. The M2 Competition comes as a breath of fresh air. The M2 by itself has been fairly acclaimed by critics, with the Competition pack, M has only dialed up the madness. They essentially shoehorned the bigger S55 motor from the M3/M4 duo into the petite M2 body. Bigger engine, small body, almost a square footprint, sounds like Gordon Ramsay’s recipe for big car-guy smiles! What is particularly interesting is how the car delivers in the flesh, it only surpasses the expectations it sets from what is on paper. This particular car is a DCT. While a DCT might make a purist wince a little as they sell this pocket rocket with a 6-sp manual gearbox too, the DCT makes perfect sense if this is your only car. The car is versatile enough to be daily driven and thrashed on the track over the weekend. In fact, it reveals a whole different personality when pushed the limit.

Between 1985 and now, the performance car sector has seen a paradigm shift. There was a time when they built machines purely to go racing and they sold them to the public only because they had norms to comply with. In today’s day and age, that era is akin to the car guy’s renaissance period, where everything was flourishing. The M2C is more like a hark back at those times. It isn’t built to go racing but the essence of the car is just that. It has one purpose, that is to be driven hard, and it reeks it from every inch. The sports seats hug you tight, the console has old-school buttons and the small screen in the middle shows only what you need to know. No nonsense, it all screams shut up and drive. And this is exactly where the parallels with the E30 M3 come to life. Both these share the same sense of purpose. Small. Light. Agile. Quick. Purposeful.

And the best bit, BMW won’t ask you to sell off an island and rob a bank to purchase one of these. At a shade under a crore in India, the bang for the buck that this offers is pretty much peerless. I’ve said this before, and I shall say this again- If you have a crore lying around, go buy one of these. Liquidate those investments, offload that property, go get yourself one of these. We do not know if BMW will make something like this again, especially with the whole EV wave being accelerated, thanks to that child whose name rhymes with Creta, it is unlikely that we see something this honest from BMW again.
Leaving you with a bunch of detailed images from 5anket’s lens for you to drool at. Something very artsy and timeless, properly encapsulating the modern classic that the M2C is bound to be.