1-series M.Zip Files: Road Trip!!

Our compressed-time test continues as we take the long way round from Inverness to Skye

As ambitions go, the desire to drive around the perimeter of the northern Highlands of Scotland is undoubtedly an odd one, but it's one I've held pretty much ever since my provisional driving licence dropped through the letter box.

So when the chance to do so in the new 1-series M presented itself, courtesy of BMW holding its UK press launch in Inverness, it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Basically, as a neat way of getting the cars in which it had been allowing us scruffy hacks to bomb around Scotland back to the south east if England, the last group of journalists were greeted at the airport, given the keys and told 'see you back in England'.

Not the best hotel in Scotland

And of course when you're so close to some of the emptiest, most appealing roads in the entire United Kingdom, the first thing you do not do is head straight towards Edinburgh, the A1 and throughly dull motorway motoring.

So we set out from Inverness in the east for the Isle of Skye in the west, but not via the obvious and rather more direct route following the line of of Thomas Telford's Caledonian Canal and the Great Glen. Instead we would get to grips with the 1-series M on a 500-mile hike around the very crest of Great Britain.

If you live, as I do, in somewhere as thoroughly clogged up as Surrey, the stunning, near-carless A- and B-roads that snake up, through and around the northern Highlands are an incredible tonic. If you live within striking distance of these roads, or ones like them, you are deeply lucky and I am very jealous.

You should also move heaven and earth to get your hands on a cross-country motor car as effective in this environment as a 1-series M - though you may struggle to actually get your hands on a 1M itself, as the majority of the UK allocation of cars has already been sold - because it is simply fantastic on fast, empty, open roads like these.

As we discussed in a previous report on the fastest 1-series, the new M car isn't quite the perfect track tool, but as a device for putting a smile on your face over a flowing road it surely has few peers. And even fewer cars that could keep up with it.

Those fat tyres ensure masses of grip, while the comparitively stumpy wheelbase endows it with an impressive eagerness to change direction. And the turbocharged straight-six seems to offer up sufficient oomph for overtaking no matter what gear you're in or at what revs. Oh, and the diff from the M3 offers welcome traction out of slow corners.

Typically packed Highland A-road...

There are a couple of tiny flies in the ointment (in deference to the location of our test route let's call them midges) in that the traction control is sometimes over-eager to cut in, and the steering isn't quite as talkative as you'd hope. But these are relatively small issues. The traction control in particular seems not to be a major problem as it only intervenes gently and without too much 'ado'. And besides, you can always switch it off - an action that does not turn the car into an undriveable monster, by the way.

The long-ish but satisfying gearbox action, the positioning of the pedals (absolutely perfect for heel-and-toe shifting) and the spacing of the ratios are also spot-on. There is, in short, very little stopping you from getting the best out of these sorts of roads. Okay, so there's a bit of a boom from the exhaust at low revs, and the fuel consumption will jump sharply should you decide to press on but, like the steering and traction control, these are insignificant niggles.

The 1-series M is quite simply a fantastic car for getting the best out of a spirited cross-country blast. And cross-country blasts don't get more spirited (or indeed blasty when the wind gets up) than on the undulating, epic roads of the very north and west of Scotland.