Dirk Werner, the up-and-coming DTM star said that, “This car is amazing, it’s so much better than the old car.” Speculations are being made that the Coupe will be called M4, but the M3 nameplate lives on with the saloon. In this car model, carbon fibre has been used in several places including the propshaft in order to limit the weight of the vehicle below 1,500kg. The rear axle sub-frame has been mounted directly to the chassis without any rubber mounts. This car has been recently tested in Germany and during the testing phase, the testers have encountered several issues.
The first one is that the M4 is quite noisy. The noise can not only be listened from the outside, but can be quite disturbing for the passengers as well. From the outside, when the prototype was run around the airfield, it sounded really very boring. Apart from that, there was a flat blare from the exhausts. There were no actual mechanical overtones from the engine, but the overall sound was like a turbocharged Renault hot hatch. Well, this is not at all a good thing for reputation and brand image of M Series.
On the contrary, if we have a look at the interior, it has been seen that the inner section of the car is far better than the outside. But, if ‘sonic augmentation’ is actually being there in the prototype, then it really needs to be turned up a little bit for production. In this car, the S55 engine sounds similar to the S54 unit from E46 M3 many a times. If you are actually sitting in the passenger seat with a DTM driver at the steering wheel, then you would expect the car to give you the feel of a rocket. But, in actual, it never does so. No doubt the power delivery is linear, but it is dull at the same time. And, with that average soundtrack, M4 feels far better and refined as compared to the mental old V8.
Moreover, from the passenger seat, you can actually feel the control over the car’s rigid body. This feel is itself the proof of the ability of the M4 to maintain balance and control even if the driver changes the direction of the vehicle at a very fast speed. On the contrary, it is quite hard to comment anything about things like transmission and steering feel. A good thing is that a manual gearbox option is present in the car. The electric steering will be optimized for feedback later on. From the passenger seat, the brakes seemed OK. There will be an option of six-pot calipers and gigantic 400mm front discs equipped carbon stoppers (on specification basis).
In order to conclude, it can be said that the witnessed are so far not too much carried away by the M4. However, there is enough time to make the necessary adjustments. Once these are done and tested, the car will be finally put on sale.
