Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
+1 on this comment. Where did this notion come from that the M3 will make a poor sports car, when it outlaps its 911 competion, and its predecessor by a notable margin, suffers from less body roll, and revs higher? People are confusing the issue here.. the tepid reviews we've seen so far don't criticize the M3's tracking ability, instead they laud the new M3 as a superb all around car, just not one that decimates its competition the way it used to....
.... but isn't that to be expected as the segment becomes increasingly saturated??? 20-30 years ago this segment was basically pioneered by BMW. Audi, and Mercedes followed suit, and Lexus is soon to follow. This increased competition translates to a smaller margin separating the competitors. The future will bring with it increased performance gains for all of these cars, but only incremental differences between each model. Maybe the days of the M3's segment dominance is over..... or maybe, M-DCT will re-assert the M's dominance as pervasively as ever.
- esquire
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I pretty much agree with you here and the more I look at the competition and especially the bang for the buck we do have a real winner here. I think as far as track ability I am fairly sure the M3 will out perform 911, Vantage, RS4, C63 AMG, IS-F and probably the 911S and RS5 as well. Sure quite a bit of hunch/speculation there but that is MHO.
However, isn't there something really satisfying when one car in a segment does really blow everything else out of the water? This is clearly the elusive dream/lust many of us have. I'm on the fence if BMW could have got the M3 much closer to this lofty goal or not. I for one absolutely do want a daily driver and don't want to sacrifice much on comfort. Perhaps the balance of performance+comfort to cost really is quite close to ideal. It will be very interesting to see the weight savings and power gains in the CSL and even more interesting where they got those things from. Then in bitter retrospect (sarcasm) we can opine that all those enhancements should have been on the base M3!