The BMW M3 has a tough job; it always has. That little badge comprising of one letter and one number have more responsibilities than any other single badge fitted to the back of any car. The M3 is BMW’s state of the union – if the M3 is good, then BMW is good.
For a car with such responsibilities, BMW doesn’t ever seem to give the M3 an easy ride. The last three generations of the M3 have not only been lumped with the responsibility of being faster and more engaging than their direct rivals and a million other responsibilities, but also to be the test-bed for BMW’s new ideas. The E90 M3 had to get used to a V8, the F80 M3 introduced turbo-charging, the G80 M3 brought xDrive and those grilles.
Since the E90, the M3 has always taken a slightly wobbly first step, before those well-honed calves and thighs get comfortable with that weight of expectation, and the M3 cracks on with being excellent. Sometimes this takes a while, and the F80 M3 is no different. When it was first released, the F80 M3 quickly became infamous for being a snappy handful. Nascent twin-turbocharging gave the M3 more torque than ever, but this made the car feel a bit like a dull instrument; a point and shoot hot rod.
BMW quickly addressed this with the Competition Package that came about during the F80 M3’s midlife-update. The Comp package brought more horsepower, revised springs and dampers, improved suspension geometry and recalibrated chassis electronics. This is where the F80 M3 began to shine – gone was the snappiness and here was a more capable and confident car, a car that was sure of itself.
Unfortunately, all the Competition Package goodness brought additional costs to the F80 M3 but this was not to be an issue in Australia, where BMW launched the F80 M3 Pure as part of the expanded midlife-update model range.
Sometimes strange counterintuitive things happen that are seemingly so opposed to what we’ve come to expect that it really makes you wonder if they are true. The M3 Pure is one of those cases. The M3 Pure is an M3 with fewer bells and whistles and that costs less than the M3 Comp. You might be thinking: “that’s because BMW have just made an M3 without the Comp bits that they can sell onto less switched-on buyers whilst saving themselves some cash at the production stage”, but that’s not it.
Listen, the M3 Pure is mechanically identical to the M3 Competition. No costs have been cut, or features missed out in terms of dynamics. The M3 Pure has all 444 horsepower, the revised springs and dampers, new exhaust system and chassis electronics that the M3 Comp has, but when new, was A$11,000 cheaper. The reduced price was due to a less luxurious interior and a few other downgrades. The Pure’s headlights are standard LED non-adaptive units, and the interior is cloth, and the stereo is only the basic 9-speaker setup – which is a small price to pay if you ask me.
To me, that’s a real ‘what in the heck?’ kind of situation. A car that is mechanically identical to the range topper but with less, arguably superfluous, features for less money. In what kind of world does that make sense? It’s like Porsche putting the engine from the 911 Turbo S into the basic 911 and charging £70,000 less.
For some reason, the stars aligned over Australia when the M3 Pure was conceived, and I think it’d be the version to have. All the stuff that makes the M3 the M3 are here and accounted for just minus the guff, and this is something journos have been whinging on about for the past decade, yet it happened in front of our eyes and it passed us right by.
Perhaps the UK’s gluttony for top-of-the-line cars (the UK only gets G80 M3 Comps) is why we don’t get cool stuff like this, but on this occasion, the Aussies got the best deal.
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