The beauty of the BMW 1 Series M Coupe isn’t that the bean-counters let their best performance engineers have at the smallest car in the range. The real beauty is that the car goes back to the very roots of the M division, before the M3 went all V8 on us and took a hefty weight penalty in the process.
To illustrate the point, BMW took the new coupe out to the track, and brought along its spiritual predecessor, the original E30 M3. Fortunately for us, they filmed the encounter – all 11 and a half minutes of it. And while half of it is stock promotional footage, there’s a good few minutes of on-track action spliced in for good measure. Check it out in the video after the jump.