The phone rings. It's BMW.
"The M division is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and it has booked the Nürburgring exclusively for a couple of days and is bringing some of its old road cars for you to drive. There'll be a Batmobile, an M1 . . ."
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I'll be there. The lady from BMW didn't get any farther down her list of iconic machinery. (Check them out in the massive photo gallery.) I didn't stop to check the diary or ask the wife. I'm no M-car fanboy, but under what circumstances do you decline the opportunity to drive some of the most influential road cars ever made, and at their spiritual home? Batmobiles and M1s aren't exactly thick on the ground, and the M division's own examples will be the best you'll ever drive.
And—here I'm attempting to add some thin veneer of professional justification to this trip—M has seen some radical changes of late. In 2009, it abandoned its 30-year devotion to rear-drive, naturally aspirated road cars with a pair of monstrously over-exaggerated turbocharged SUVs in the X5 M and the X6 M. Since then it has adopted turbocharging for all its new models and even offered M diesels in Europe, making some of those fanboys apoplectic. The chance to drive all of M's back catalog back-to-back has never before been presented, nor ever been as instructive. They might have evolved faster of late, but surely M cars have always been changing.
Source: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/bmw-m-at-40-driving-history-at-the-nurburgring-feature
Old is Gold.............
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