Why the BMW M3 deserves its brutal reputation

THE original BMW M3 is a sort of automotive Al Pacino. Despite having a sophisticated side, you can’t help looking at it and concluding it’s hard as nails.

There have been other go-faster saloons since – in the same way there have been plenty of American gangster films before and since Scarface – but this is the one everyone always remembers. It’s always been held up as being not just one of the greatest BMWs ever made, but one of the best cars, period.

Yet in the same way that I remember feeling weirdly underwhelmed when I watched Scarface for the first time, I initially got behind the wheel of this German performance motoring icon last week, taking it for a brief run and concluded it wasn’t much cop.

Why, I wondered, did people in the distant past of the late 1980s get so fizzed up about an expensive, two-door saloon which was only available in left-hand-drive? Didn’t the descendents of today’s modern man find the dog-leg racing gearbox, where you shift the gearlever backwards to get first, utterly infuriating to use? And why were they going for something which was only so-so to drive in the real world when you could have a TVR S2 or a Ford Sierra Cosworth for less?

It was only as I was pondering these questions – and why the original M3, codenamed the E30, attracts such a whopping premium over its faster successors – that the motorhome in front finally turned off and the road opened up, finally giving me the chance to actually see what one of the most sought after BMWs ever can really do.

It took about 20 seconds for Al Pacino’s automotive equivalent to pummel my scepticism into submission. Only when you take the M3 by the scruff of its neck do you really appreciate that it really is as good as everybody says it is.

You can tell from the howl of its four-cylinder, BMW Motorsport-developed engine above 4000rpm and the sensational handling that this car was developed with one thing in mind; winning races. The M3 Evolution version I drove might only develop 212bhp, which is less than half of what today’s M3 churns out, but because it’s so much smaller and lighter it still feels ruthlessly frantic.

Which is really frustrating thing about driving an E30 M3 – the magic moment when you get its steering and suspension to sing is also the moment you have to back off, because you just know you’ll lose your licence if you carry on.

The BMW E30 M3 not only lives up to every bit of its hard-earned reputation as a roadgoing streetfighter, but it’s a bit too brilliant for British roads. Mess with one at your peril!

Why now is the time to have your say on MoT testing

THERE is less than a week left to have your say about proposed laws which could spell the end of the MoT if - like me - you've got a car made before 1988.

Over a pint last night I spent a good twenty minutes trying to explain the implications of the European Roadworthiness Directive to my tame mechanics, who for the crime of being classic car specialists get the dubious honour of rescuing both my MGB and my MX-5 from their various mechanical maladies. It left me a bit worried - if two classic car mechanics aren't quite up to scratch with what the British Government are currently consulting over, what chance do the rest of us petrolheads have?

Unpeel the proposals from the EU bumph however, and it's fairly simple; in the plainest Northern English possible, the British Government has agreed to implement some form of MoT exemption for cars over 30 years old, as long as - and here's the tricky bit - they haven't had "substantial changes".

As it's a directive from Brussells rather than a fully-fledged law, however, it's entirely up to the boffins at Whitehall to work out exactly what substantial change is, which is why the Department for Transport is currently carrying out a consultation on the issue (albeit one that's not exactly been massively publicised).

It is a hugely divisive issue in the classic car world. I've always been of the opinion that ALL cars should have to go through an MOT (and I was definitely against pre-1960 cars being given MoT exemption) but I know plenty of people who reckon it's a good idea to exempt 30-year-old cars too, plenty of people who'd like classic cars to be tested every two years instead, and plenty of people who just want the European Union to get off our back and let us deal with our own motoring matters ourselves.

Whatever happens though, the important thing is to go on the consultation and get your thoughts across sooner rather than later - the consultation ends next Friday (24 October), so time's of the essence.

Hopefully, someone in Westminster or Whitehall will take note.

We must stop a new scrappage scheme consigning classic cars to the crusher

THERE'S a scary statistic I came up with last week to illustrate the scale of the biggest culling of cars the nation’s ever seen. 

If you took all the vehicles sent to the knacker’s yard five years ago as part of the then government’s efforts to boost new car sales and put them bumper to bumper, the line would stretch from Land’s End to John ‘o’ Groats AND back down as far as Edinburgh. A third of a million cars – most of which had nothing much wrong with them – went to the great garage in the sky.

Chances are if you’ve been reading the motoring publications (including the one I write for) you’ll already know about the metal that met its maker as a result of 2009’s Scrappage Scheme, but if you haven’t it’s worth reading on, because it’s one of the great automotive atrocities of our times. Largely because thousands of perfectly good, and very significant, cars went to the crusher just so someone could have a £2000 discount on a brand new hatchback.

There are thousands upon thousands of entries on the list of cars scrapped in 2009 as a result of the scheme, and it makes for very depressing reading when you see what headed into scrapyards across the country.  52 Porsche 944s, for instance. 45 Jaguar XJ-Ss. Four Riley Elfs. Even a Lancia Delta Integrale, mystifyingly, got chopped because someone somewhere wanted a discounted car instead of Italy’s Escort Cosworth in their garage.

Admittedly, some fairly terrible cars were also consigned to the scrapheap – several hundred Proton Personas, for example – and it goes without saying that some of the cars in the list probably would have been in such poor condition that the best thing for them was to recycle them to make something else. Scrapping a car under those circumstances is fine; I was hugely fond of my old Renault 5 and know they’ve got a cult following, but no amount of fondness was ever going to repair its body rot economically.

Yes, I know the Scrappage Scheme did act as a sort of defibrillator for the UK car market, giving it the jolt it needed at a desperate time, but any price that involves sacrificing a Jaguar XJ-S 45 times over is too high.

Hopefully we’ll never need the scheme again, but if we do I’d implore the powers-that-be to make sure perfectly good and very lovely old cars aren’t sent straight to the crusher. 

It’s too late to save the motoring heritage we lost five years ago, but we can stop it happening again.

The Mazda MX-5 has lost weight. I have not

A BIT like those village fete competitions where you have to guess how many pickles really are in the jar, every petrolhead and his dog are trying to work out how many ounces Mazda really has shaved off the new MX-5.

It’s an important question, largely because the prize, rather unlike a village fete, isn’t a bottle of wine or a weekend for two in Cleethorpes. It’s the promise of what could be the most exciting new car you’ll drive next year. 

Mazda itself is being coy for now as to just how much of a Gillian McKeith regime its two-seater roadster has been through. It won’t say exactly how much weight the new fourth-generation car has lost over its predecessor, only that it’s ‘more than 100kg’ lighter than the car that went before it.

When you do the maths that means the latest car will weigh at tops 1,053kg – or 2,321 pounds to you, Mr Farage – but probably less. All of which means it’ll be tantalisingly close to what the original weighed in at when it was launched 25 years ago – and the new car will have more power to play with too!

Why, you might be wondering, do a few pounds and ounces matter here and there, particularly when you’ll freely admit you can’t fit into the skinny jeans you wore a quarter of a century ago? It’s important because I’ve held my ground in pub debates for the last three years that the MX-5 is the best small sports car ever made.

The reason why it is the best-selling roadster the world’s ever seen is largely because it offers up the previously unthinkable combination of Triumph Spitfire fun with Toyota Yaris reliability. It is the darling of motoring journalists everywhere largely because it is beltingly good fun – and it’s why I’m on my second, having very reluctantly sold the first one.

It’s also important for the wider car industry as a whole because – as any eco-friendly car company exec will tell you – weight is the enemy, blunting performance and meaning you have to kill more polar bears with exhaust fumes to make up the shortfall. Making the new MX-5 lighter at a time when the trend is making cars ever heavier is an important example to the car world of less being more.

In fact, the MX-5 brings with it only one real problem. Being so light means any excess weight you’re carrying will only undermine its own brilliance – what’s the point of shaving the equivalent of a fat mate off the car’s weight when taking a fat mate along for the ride will cancel all Mazda’s hard work out?

It’s a good thing it’ll be long after Christmas before the new MX-5 lands here. The post-festive diet will have kicked in by then!

The tax disc dies today. How will you fill the void it leaves?

WHAT do a sticker with Southport’s coat of arms, a curious period reproduction of some 1970s paperwork and a Volkswagen Owners Club badge – even though I’ve never owned a VW – have in common?

Nope, they’re not prizes from the worst ever round of The Generation Game. They are, in fact, just three of the automotive ornaments competing for windscreen space in my small fleet of cheap used cars. As of today, you no longer need to display a tax disc in your car – and literally and metaphorically, the demise of this bit of DVLA bureaucracy is going to leave a big gap.

In case you hadn’t already heard, the DVLA has decided to do away with the little perforated discs. It means that for the first time since 1921, motorists won’t end up accidentally ripping them as they carefully try to free them from the bit of Swansea paperwork they’re posted out with, and the end of nosey neighbours trying to get one up on you when they point out your disc is a day out of date.

Naturally, there are downsides too, particularly if – like me – you love idly flicking through The Champion’s classifieds, hoping to find a rubber-bumper MG Midget for next to nothing. Thanks to some complicated and frankly rather boring changes to the law, you can no longer buy a car with six months’ tax thrown in as part of the deal – you have to pay for yours from scratch, and the seller has to ask for a refund for theirs. I’m keeping my fingers crossed the changes don’t spark another Passport Office-esque nightmare IT meltdown, but hopefully the new system should be second nature in six months’ time.

Nope, the real change for me is having a circular sea of emptiness in the bottom-left corner of my windscreen which no longer has to be filled with a redundant bit of paperwork. In my instance, I’ve already opted to fill the space left in my MX-5’s windscreen with a sticker celebrating Southport – a nice reminder of home when I spend most of my working week in deepest Cambridgeshire – while the MGB’s being treated to one of those period recreation tax discs that’s all the rage with classic car fans right now.

The possibilities are endless for that little circular wallet which will otherwise sit unloved and empty – you could replace your tax disc with a Liverpool FC badge, a photograph of Keira Knightley, whatever you choose.

In fact, my favourite suggestion was a colleague’s – just the words TAX IN PAST, scrawled on a circular bit of paper. 

I can just picture it now, plastered on the windscreen of a yellow Reliant Regal. Cushty, Rodders!