BLACK OPS

THE STEALTHY EXTERIOR HIDES A THUMPING 285kW TURBO STRAIGHT SIX, BUT HAS ALL-WHEEL DRIVE NEUTRALISED THE APPEAL OF BMW'S BABY M3?

- LOUIS CORDONY

OUR DRIFTBOX TIMING equipment is broken. Or at least I think it must be. If it’s right, this BMW M340i xDrive has just ripped down the quarter mile and obliterated its claimed 0-100km/h acceleration time. Four. Point. One? That’s three-tenths quicker than what BMW says it will do. That’s even quicker than a current BMW M3.

And it’s not even an M car. Well, not a real one anyway. It’s the latest job from BMW’s M Performance arm that aims to inject some hot-blooded engineering from the M division into regular cars. This gives us a stepping stone between each range on price and performance. And we're discovering that you're getting a lot of the latter.

So we line up again on Heathcote Raceway’s drag strip to try and repeat the magic. I run my left finger up the drive-mode pad, pressing Sport along the way to turning DSC off. I yank the fancy crystal gear lever sideways to engage its Sport shift program and pin the brake pedal hard.

Revs build and hold between 2500 and 3000rpm. I clear the brake and the M340i bursts forward like a cornered cheetah that’s spotted its escape. The first couple of upshifts come and go before that number appears again. Four point one. I keep my eyes locked on the horizon. The quarter-mile time repeats the previous run. It has clocked 12.3sec at 183.1km/h.

When we last tested a BMW 340i it accelerated to 100km/h from rest in 5.51sec and crossed the quarter mile in 13.57sec. That’s over a second slower than the xDrive on both counts. And that was after a morning spent trying to extract its best times.