BMW M2 CS review: beware, this is no ordinary road car

It’s angrily powerful and trigger-throttled, and runs on ‘fully slick’ tyres. BMW’s M2 CS is best approached with caution.

A piece of work: the BMW M2 CS

Usually, if you encounter an entity that gives off intense vibes of wanting to cause you bodily harm – a growling, slavering bouncer or a menacing, moody dog – you don’t tend to feel enriched by the experience. Which made my first few minutes in the BMW M2 CS a little unusual.

Perhaps it was upset with me as I cursed its slightly dated tech interface and wondered aloud how I was supposed to work in these conditions, having been cut off from my sanity-sustaining podcasts for almost a minute. But the very first time I took a bend in it, through a set of lights less than 100m after picking it up, the rear end attempted to leave both me and the rest of the car behind.

From the front

What this partly indicates is how angrily powerful, trigger-throttled and delightfully rear-wheel driven the M2 CS is, but as a passing enthusiast later pointed out to me, it does also have “fully slick tyres, mate”. That’s because the M2 CS is no ordinary road car; indeed, it’s barely a road car at all. The special Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres it wears are designed by the folks at Michelin with an 80 per cent focus on track use and 20 per cent for the street. In short, you’re only really supposed to drive this thing from your vast car collection to the race circuit and back (ideally, you’d have a track attached to your house, but life is not always fair).

Track tyres are as slick as possible, like rubberised toffee apples, with a barely legal amount of rain-removing grooves on them. They are fantastic, until it rains or you encounter some kind of slippery stuff that a previous car left behind at an intersection.

The thing about cars designed to be wonderful on a race track is that they can be savagely unsuited to life on bumpy and broken roads. There is a stretch of tarmac near my new house that is going to really test out some cars, and when my son and I drove the M2 CS (it stands for Coupe Sport) along it we had to stop talking and grit our teeth to avoid biting off our tongues.

It sure is stylish

In the real world, you would have to say this BMW’s ride is as firm as getting a massage from The Terminator (and that was in Comfort mode; the Sport and Sport Plus settings are not fit for public-road consumption), but I drove this car recently on the supreme surface of the Phillip Island race circuit, and there it felt like a little piece of perfection, intimately connected with the ground. It wasn’t just at home on a race track, it felt thrilled to be alive, and made its driver feel the same. Adding to my ecstasy on that particular occasion was the fact that I was allowed to drive the standard version, which has a slick-shifting manual gearbox.

My more recent encounter was in a car fitted with the optional M-DCT seven-speed dual-clutch transmission, which, if you don’t treat it politely, can kick like an ornery critter, and make you look like a kangaroo is your chauffeur. It’s also a $7500 option, and unless you’re actually attempting to set lap records it’s money you’re better off holding onto, possibly to spend on those Michelin tyres, which I’m guessing won’t last too long.

Without the flappy-paddle gearbox, the M2 CS will still cost you $139,900, which is quite a lot for a smallish car that rides like a bean bag filled with rocks and has the manners of a drunken rugby league professional. Personally, I can absolutely see why you would buy it, though. I have ranted in the past about how much I love BMW’s M3, and how it might just be the perfect family car. It’s a bigger, brassier and more practical sports car than its baby brother, the M2, but in a world in which I could be supremely selfish – and obviously one in which I could own multiple cars – I would have this M2 CS, and my own race track.

Inside the cabin

Even on a public road, the M2’s steering – accessed through a lovely, soft Alcantara-trimmed wheel – is not only instantaneous but alive; there’s a sense that the car knows you want to hurl it at that next bend even before you do, and now it just wants to find another one.

The throttle feels the same way, pre-empting the slightest tendency to accelerate and exaggerating even the most gentle prod with a rasping scream and a kick in the base of your spine. The M2 CS is properly exciting to drive, like playing with matches while you have a large bag of fireworks between your legs. That excitement comes from a 3.0-litre, twin-turbo six-cylinder engine that was designed to power larger cars (the M3 and M4) with its 331kW and 550Nm, and thus performs more than effectively here, hurling you to 100km/h in four seconds flat.

I also swooned over its Subaru WRX-like combination of rally-blue paint, gold alloys and bonnet vent, its sporty seats and the CS logo embroidered on the dash.

The BMW M2 CS is not practical, it’s probably not even wise, and it might occasionally feel like it intends to hurt you, but it does deliver the kind of fun that racing drivers normally, greedily, keep to themselves.

BMW M2 CS

ENGINE: 3.0-litre twin-turbocharged in-line six cylinder (331kW/550Nm). Average fuel 10.3 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic, rear-wheel drive

PRICE: $139,900

STARS:★★★★