Author: Nathan Chadwick
Photography: BMW
Seven years ago, I faced a dilemma. While I loved looking at my Mercedes-Benz W123 coupe, actually driving it was distinctly less fun.
W123s are noble cars, stylish and beautifully engineered. But an early carb-fed four-cylinder model has all the go of an asthmatic slug. I wanted something bombastic to inspire dawn blasts – and I’d settled on two choices. The BMW M3 E46 and the Alfa Romeo 147 GTA.
This decision was a battle between my rational and irrational brain. I’d had two Alfa 156s by this point and neither ownership experience had gone that well, but I loved hot hatchbacks, loved Alfa Romeo and the idea of a whopping big V6 in a small car is an endearing one = irrational.
However, at this point I’d been a motoring journalist for six years. The fundamental guiding principle from my Very Serious Road Testing Journalist Colleagues was that rear-wheel drive was ‘correct-wheel drive’, the finest naturally aspirated six-cylinder engine that wasn’t in the back of a 911 was a BMW one, and for what would have been £10k at the time, the E46 M3 was the car to have.
It won so many group tests, was beloved by the motoring press and, even then, had the kind of online following that religious deities can only dream of. It’s also highly thought of in these parts – a certain Mr Mills has eulogised about his own E46 M3 regularly.
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I’d even had a taste of the E46 lifestyle with a 318i. I respected the way it drove – the engine was hardly exciting, but I could tell the deep reserves of talent that lay in the chassis, even with a fun-blunting slushbox auto.
I was leaning very heavily to the M3, largely because of the M3’s engine. I’m very much an engine-over-chassis kinda guy, and the S54B32 is an absolute peach. It revs to 7900rpm, punches out 338bhp, unloads a chunky 269lb ft of torque from 4900rpm, and sounds like a howling mechanised Robo-Wolf getting jiggy in the kennels.
The only problem, and this is a very first-world-journalist problem, I’ll be the first to admit, is that the only BMW M3 E46 I’d driven up to this point was a CSL.
It may have its flaws, but the CSL is one of the finest cars I’ve ever driven on the limit – poised, balanced and, thanks to a carbon inbox, it sounds like that very same Robo-Wolf has just mainlined some tequila. Surely if the bog-standard E46 M3 got anywhere near that level of excitement, all thoughts of a ‘wrong-wheel-drive’ Alfa that was deemed a joke by my Serious Road Testing Journalist Colleagues would be but a memory?
So, knowing a friendly owner who was happy to lend me the keys to his mint, 50k-mile manual M3, I set off into the British countryside to begin what I thought would be my indoctrination in the cult of M.
There was plenty of M alright. But more along the lines of ‘Mmmmm, why am I not having as much fun as I was promised by my Very Serious Road Testing Journalist Colleagues?’
In truth, the first ten minutes went well. I loved the looks of it – I still do – and the seats were fantastic. And the engine? It was marvellous, my ears tingling to the S54’s scream as the rev lights lit up like a Christmas tree.
The problems came when I got off the dual carriageway and on to some modest A-roads and B-roads. Corners, thought I, this should be awesome… but it wasn’t. The steering was lifeless and artificial-feeling to the point where shepherding the E46 into and out of corners became somewhat of a chore. It just did it, with little in the way of fuss. Where was the drama? The excitement?
By the time I’d got the engine to around 5000rpm and its fun section, I was at a corner again, turning a wheel with all the feedback and engagement of sticking your finger in a bowl of Angel Delight and swishing it about. Here’s some heresy – it felt almost as remote as my old 1977 W123.
The problem was the CSL had a different steering rack, as did the E46 CS – faster, more feelsome, it really does make all the difference. It is known as the hallowed Purple Tag, and a choice modification for E30s and E28s.
Sadly however, even an SMG CS was twice the price and thus out of my budget. Nowadays, even an SMG E46 CS is touching £40k for a minter. My maximum budget was £10k, which didn’t leave me room for Purple Tag surgery for a boggo E46 M3. Perhaps I was expecting too much of the E46 M3.
It was, after all, a car designed for the everyday, an executive express. A hyperactive steering rack on a semi-asleep commute down a monotonous grey motorway on a wet day is probably not a great idea.
There is, of course, another way. The E46 330ci uses the Purple Tag steering rack, and at the time was priced at around the same as a 147 GTA. However, the engine didn’t have the same raw appeal of either the M3 or the Alfa, even though revving it out to get over the car’s porky kerbweight was real-world exciting in a way the M3 struggled with.
In the end, I plumped for the 147 GTA for significantly less than the budget-straining E46 M3, and spent the difference sorting out the suspension to get it performing in the way Alfa’s engineers intended before a beancounter at Fiat HQ intervened. It was, and remains, viscerally exciting in all the ways the standard E46 M3 wasn’t.
However, there is one Purple Tagged, E46 M3-adjacent car that might tempt me towards M. It’s much like my Alfa: it rides terribly, was reviewed indifferently by the press and it benefits from aftermarket fettling. Similarly, it’s also a bit of a handful on the limit and has an interior that rattles like Robo-Wolf’s kennel headboard, yet I forget all this because it’s engaging, enthralling and utterly addictive – the Z4 M.
My Very Serious Road Testing Journalist Colleagues probably wouldn’t understand that either.
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