First chance to put the rebuilt M through it's paces on a long roundtrip of about 250 miles today over a wide variety of roads surfaces, motorway/dual carriage way and the best and worst A/B roads on offer in Niall's stomping grounds. Had a full Hunter geometry earlier this week, which got all the wheels pointing in (mostly) the correct direction (need new track rods up front now!). I'll do a post at some stage about that whole thing, because there were some issues with the tech who carried it out.
Negatives first. A tiny bit of a squeak from the brakes at low speed up to about 25mph. I'll go back in there with some copper grease at some stage.
The positives are literally everything about how it drives/handles. It's so composed over all surfaces including some of the wash board / potholed sections, nothing phased it. It's firmer for sure as there is no slop/give from the failing bushes but I guess this is as close to how it came out the factory, since it left the factory. That firmness doesn't translate at all in to harshness in any form. On the motorway on cruise control it just sits quite happily plodding along.
Before we started this my biggest issue with the car was accelerating from a junction (for example) would trigger the traction control and it would then drain all the power till it sorted itself out. Now this is entirely as per design and how TC works, but it was happening a lot and was really causing more issues being overly intrusive. The difference now under the same conditions is that the TC light flickers (as a warning) but it doesn't back the power off as aggressively. This means that when I'm pulling out at a junction "under load" I don't end up in a TC induced mess with traffic bearing down on me. This coupled with the clutch delay valve (now removed) causing it to kangaroo was just getting me very nervous at junctions. Now it just hooks up the power and away I go, no drama or panic - pretty much like how BMW designed it I reckon.
Maybe if we'd have carried all this out on my previous 3.0si I'd have been more in love with it, but honestly it just wasn't the car to invest this kind of time, effort and money on - so I wouldn't have. The moral of this tale I guess is find the right car, then you'll likely want to keep it and lavish attention on it.
