2025 BMW M2 CS vs. 1M Coupe | PH origin story

The 1M’s clever remastering of the E30 M3 silhouette debuted in late 2010 with a 340-horsepower 3.0-liter straight-six pressed tightly under the hood, fed by custom ventilation. It caused a stir in its time as the first M car without a turbocharged SUV – not to mention that the N54 engine was not an M-division thoroughbred. It’s safe to say it’s beaten most cynics into submission with its riotous driving and rogue attitude, and exceeded BMW’s sales forecasts in the process. It launched for a now barely believable £40,020, never really lost a penny and has gained several since.

A detailed examination of the chassis included wider tracks, front and rear, with bespoke new bodywork to cover them appropriately. “The wheel arches bulge out particularly voluminously,” quoted BMW’s press release from December 2010. How cute. Most exciting of all was the sole offering of a six-speed manual transmission, while everything around it was DCT level.

Where the 1M squeezed contemporary M3 parts under a shorter, stubby body, the M2 CS borrows a lot of thinking from its M4 namesake. It has no live front axle, to reflect the purity of its rear-wheel drive forebear, although it also forgoes a manual option in favor of BMW’s eight-speed automatic du jour. The performance is truly fantastic, even if it lags slightly behind the M4 CS. A peak of 530 hp is good for 0-100 km/h in a slightly ridiculous 3.8 seconds. This is the baby M car, for crying out loud…

It’s the new car, so of course it’s where I start. Just as a barely predicted blizzard wipes out a worrying amount of snow in southern England and I trickle out of BMW’s headquarters, grateful that it’s on a set of Michelin Pilot Sport 4Ss rather than full Cup 2Rs. can to have. We probably did a pirouette at the first roundabout and fell back with a red face.

There’s a lot of fiddling to do once you get over the solid edges of the standard M carbon buckets and get settled. By placing the head-up display in your eyeline, finding the submenu that lets you raise the heated seat and steering wheel (critical in this weather), and choosing how to set the steering, throttle, braking, damping and gearbox response. Fortunately, this is – just like the M4 – a car with precision and enthusiasm, even if you just drive it away with everything in Comfort. A simpler process reminiscent of Matt Bird’s escape in the 1M Coupe behind me; there’s just the clunky ‘push key into dash’ boot method to contend with.

Dozens of other modes in the CS, however, hint at its much larger remit. First impressions are of a car that Certainly There’s a lot of power on one axle, but one that’s very friendly when you accelerate gently and can pedal around as easily as a 220i – albeit without a cup holder to hold a warming, festive Costa Express. We use the 1M for coffee runs, but the icon status isn’t enough to take it out of the photo shoot.

The M2 has a few niggling oversights like this – a single USB-A port feels emblematic of an engineering team with priorities well beyond the superficial – and are the first signs of an M car that’s made right for people like us, and damn what’s fashionable. The same path that 1M took over ten years ago.

Although grip is hard to find and temperatures never rise above 3 degrees Celsius, this is a wonderful car to push harder incrementally as your confidence grows. It’s all the best facets of an M2, just hyper-focused – as you’d expect from its CS billing – and while its hunt for traction is often in vain, assessing the surface beneath and identifying moments to spool up the twin turbos is a routine I can’t get enough of. Cup 2Rs and a hot track would undoubtedly be sparkling, but the bond we’re forging in this bizarre cold spell feels even more exciting. And upset is much easier to initiate…

Praise also for the cushioning. My forays into the Sport and Sport Plus settings aren’t met with any immediate backlash and it’s an extremely well-driving car with everything taken to the next level, with the 1.7-tonne curb weight seeming like an afterthought that’s not worth hanging on to. That is of course a figure that the CS makes mincemeat of in a straight line. It’s also relatively easy to drive through narrow alleys, even if the hunched shoulders in the side mirrors cause some visual thought.

The 1M feels impossibly graceful afterward, mind you, and it’s immediately more agile and easier to put on the road. Less special, no matter how flashy the interior of the M2 looks next to it. This is a simple car inside, the M button lacks color or spotlight and the dashboard and door cards are heavily ‘gen1 1-Series’ in terms of aesthetics. The driving force behind it – true to contemporary criticism – is also quite clear for this company; the CS’s hulking S58 is a much louder, more intuitive way to propel a car forward. But whether it’s Litchfield, Milltek or Hartge, there are plenty of people ready to bridge the gap.

Time has undoubtedly dulled the impact of the 1M, but that doesn’t stop it from being a real riot with the right mentality. While the CS will play the villain with a tug of the left paddle shifter and a slight flick of the right shoe, the 1M needs more stimulation and provocation – even in conditions like these. Catch it on boost, mind, and it’s happy to be a good handful, even in a straight line. Still, the rest of the time it will hang around quite quietly, its manual gearbox light and airy to operate and its damping smooth considering the way the performance car world has evolved in the years since its concept.

Where you can generate moments of fun quite easily in the CS, its numerous modes and settings acting like driving simulator difficulty modes (the ten-speed traction control literally replicates them), the 1M represents a more binary leap of faith. It’s the less crazy car of this duo (until it isn’t), with the progress of time shaving off some edges of the launch shock value. Amazing, considering how cartoonish it looked and felt at the time.

But it ran so the CS could sprint, this steroid G87 was the latest in a line of M2s that you can trace straight back to its unveiling in December 2010. The 1M is a bona fide classic, there’s no doubt about that. I have some vivid memories of driving the old Valencia Orange press cars, with an Autobahn ride indelibly etched in my memory. Revisiting the 1M brings all those stories back to life – and driving the M2 alongside it makes me want to relive them all in BMW’s latest crazy coupe. Will the newer car hold on to its value so voraciously? I’m not so sure. But if in another fifteen years the CS looks as subtle as the 1M, I’ll eat my hat.

Engine: 2,993cc six-cylinder twin-turbo engine
Transfer: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive
Current: 530 hp at 6,250 rpm
Couple: 479 Nm at 2,750-5,730 rpm
0-100 km/h: 3.8 sec
Top speed: 300 km/h
Weight: 1,700 kg
MPG: 28.2 (WLTP)
CO2: 226 g/km
Price: from £86,800

Engine: 2,979 cc, six-cylinder turbo engine
Transfer: 6-speed automatic transmission, rear-wheel drive
Current: 340 hp
Couple: 332lb ft (369lb ft at overboost)
0-100 km/h: 4.9 sec
Top speed: 255 km/h
Weight: 1,495 kg
MPG: 29.4 (NEDC)
CO2: 224G/km
Price: £40,020 (new), £40,000-65,000 (now)