Remember how punchy and pugnacious the BMW 1 Series M Coupe looked at launch? Fifteen years later, painted bridal white, it’s tricky to imagine being intimidated by the pert – almost pretty – two-door here. Perhaps the context of the gnarly black device parked alongside can take much of the blame. The M2 CS is back, primed to land another sledgehammer blow on the sports car sector. And boy, does its design betray a vehicle spoiling for a fight. It vividly tells the story of 190hp separating these cars.
The 1M’s clever remastering of the E30 M3 silhouette debuted in late 2010 with a 340hp tune of 3.0-litre straight-six squished tight beneath its bonnet, fed by tweaked ventilation. It caused consternation in its day as the first, non-SUV M car with turbocharging – not to mention the fact that its N54 engine wasn’t an M Division thoroughbred. Safe to say it bludgeoned most cynics into submission with its riotous driving experience and rapscallion attitude, outstripping BMW’s sales projections in the process. It launched at a now scarcely believable £40,020, never really lost a penny, and has gained several since.
A detailed going over of the chassis included wider tracks, front and rear, with a bespoke new body to properly clothe them. “The wheel arches bulge out especially voluminously,” quoted BMW’s December 2010 press release. How cute. Most exciting of all was its sole offer of a six-speed manual gearbox when everything around it was going DCT doolally.
Where the 1M squeezed contemporary M3 bits beneath a shorter, squatter body, the M2 CS borrows plenty of thinking from its M4 namesake. It goes without a driven front axle to echo the rear-driven purity of its ancestor, though it also forgoes a manual option in favour of BMW’s eight-speed auto du jour. Performance is almighty, really, even if it slightly lags the M4 CS. A 530hp peak is good for 0-62mph in a faintly ridiculous 3.8 seconds. This is the baby M car, for crying out loud…
It's the new car, so it’s naturally where I start. Right as a barely forecast blizzard empties a worrisome amount of snow on southern England and I trickle out of BMW HQ, thankful it’s on a set of Michelin Pilot Sport 4Ss rather than the full Cup 2Rs you can have. We’d have likely pirouetted at the first roundabout and slumped back red-faced on those.
There’s a lot of fiddling to do once you’ve hurdled the fixed ridges of its standard M carbon buckets and got settled. Adjusting the head-up display into your eyeline, finding the sub-menu that cranks up the heated seat and wheel (vital in this weather), and choosing how to set your steering, throttle, braking, damping and gearbox response. Thankfully – like the M4 – this is a car of precision and alacrity even if you just hoof it away with everything in Comfort. An easier process that echoes Matt Bird’s getaway in the 1M Coupe behind me; there's only its fiddly ‘push key into dash’ start-up method for him to contend with.
Dozens more modes in the CS hint at its far greater remit, though. First impressions are of a car that definitely has a lot of power being slung at one axle, but one which is quite friendly with prudent throttle and just as easy to punt around as a 220i – albeit without a cupholder to slot a warming, festive Costa Express in. We use the 1M for coffee runs, its icon status not enough to talk it out of photoshoot chores.
The M2 possesses a few niggling oversights like this – a single USB-A port feels emblematic of an engineering team with priorities far beyond the superficial – and the early signs are of an M car done properly for folks like us, and to hell with what’s fashionable. The same path trodden by the 1M over a decade ago.
While grip is difficult to find, temperatures never lifting above 3degC, this is a wonderful car to push incrementally harder as your confidence grows. It’s all the best facets of an M2, just hyper-focused – as you’d hope from the CS billing – and while its hunt for traction is often in vain, judging the surface beneath and identifying moments to spool up its twin turbos is a routine I can’t get enough of. Cup 2Rs and a hot track would no doubt be scintillating – but the bond we’re forging in this freak cold snap feels even more thrilling. And oversteer is much simpler to initiate…
Praise for the damping, too. My forays into its Sport and Sport Plus settings aren’t met with an instant recoil and it’s an extremely well-controlled car with everything ramped up, its 1.7-tonne kerbweight seeming like an incidental fact not worth getting hung up on. Naturally, that’s a figure the CS makes mincemeat of in a straight line. It’s relatively easy to thread along narrow lanes, too, even if its hench shoulders visually provide some pause for thought in the side mirrors.
The 1M feels impossibly dainty afterwards, mind, and it’s immediately nimbler and easier to place on a road. Less special, too, however gaudy the M2’s interior seems beside it. This is a plain car inside, its M button lacking colour or spotlight and the dashboard and door cards vehemently ‘gen1 1-Series’ in their aesthetic. The engine located ahead of it – true to contemporary criticism – is rather plain in this company too, the CS’s hulking S58 a much louder, more visceral way to propel a car forward. But whether it’s Litchfield, Milltek or Hartge, there are plenty of folk out there ready to close the gulf.
Time has diluted the 1M’s impact, no doubt - but that doesn’t stop it from being a proper riot with the right mentality. While the CS will play the scoundrel with a pull of its left paddleshifter and a mild twitch of right shoe, the 1M needs more goading and provocation – even in conditions like this. Catch it on boost, mind, and it’s happy to be a proper handful, even in a straight line. Yet it’ll mooch around quite calmly the rest of the time, its manual ‘box light and breezy to operate and its damping supple in light of how the performance car world has evolved in the years since its conception.
Where you can spark up moments of fun in the CS quite easily, its numerous modes and settings operate like driving sim difficulty modes (the ten-stage traction control quite literally replicating them), the 1M represents a more binary leap of faith. It's the less frenzied car of this pairing (until it isn’t), the advancement of time chamfering some of the edges of its launch shock value. Amazing, when you consider how cartoonish it looked and felt back then.
But it walked so the CS could sprint, this steroidal G87 the latest in a line of M2s you can trace directly from that December 2010 unveiling. The 1M is a bona fide classic, be in no doubt. I have some vivid memories of driving the old Valencia Orange press cars, with one Autobahn run imprinted indelibly upon my mind. Revisiting the 1M sparks all those stories back into life – and driving the M2 alongside it makes me want to go and relive ‘em all in BMW’s latest crackpot coupe. Will the newer car cling onto its value so voraciously? I’m not so sure. But if the CS looks as subtle as the 1M in another 15 years’ time, I’ll eat my woolly hat.
Specification | 2025 BMW M2 CS (G87)
Engine: 2,993cc, twin-turbo straight-six
Transmission: 8-speed auto, rear-wheel drive
Power: 530hp @ 6,250rpm
Torque: 479lb ft @ 2,750-5,730rpm
0-62mph: 3.8sec
Top speed: 177mph
Weight: 1,700kg
MPG: 28.2 (WLTP)
CO2: 226g/km
Price: from £86,800
Specification | 2011 BMW 1-Series M Coupe (E82)
Engine: 2,979cc, turbo straight-six
Transmission: 6-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive
Power: 340hp
Torque: 332lb ft (369lb ft on overboost)
0-62mph: 4.9sec
Top speed: 155mph
Weight: 1,495kg
MPG: 29.4 (NEDC)
CO2: 224g/km
Price: £40,020 (new), £40,000-65,000 (now)
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