While the new rack feels improved, it’s still not up to BMW’s old standard. At least the M340i ditched the F30’s old steering rack, an electric unit that was slammed as lifeless and dreary. ![]() Too bad the steering doesn’t do the same. But rather than holding you back, the roll helps your brain sort out where the grip is and how much more you can ask of the car. The car’s body rolls, letting you feel that weight shift on the chassis. BMW claims it has maintained the 3-Series’ traditional 50/50 weight distribution, even as the M340i’s curb weight has ballooned to 3,827 lbs. ![]() At turn-in, there’s just a smidge of push, maybe a quarter of a second long, just as the front end hooks up. Each lap ends with a crescendo, a four-story drop also called “The Ridge.” Ridge Motorsports Park is 16 curves across 2.47 miles, a ribbon of undulating asphalt tied together by a half-mile straight. Morning photography finished, I set the M340i to work. I wondered if I’d ever seen a prettier racetrack scene. Golden Northwest light pulled shades of cotton candy and glimmering silver from the BMW’s paint, the blue popping against the hills, the whole scene a frame for Mount Rainier’s glacial peak 70 miles away. Sunrise seemed to stretch for hours that morning. The M340i is a pleasant thing to behold, especially in BMW’s Portimao Blue Metallic (a $550 option). Even as this 3-Series has grown in wheelbase, length, width, and height, the design looks compact and resolved. Thankfully, the M340i’s proportions preserve BMW sedan classicism: long hood, swooping beltline, Hofmeister kink, taut haunches. A portion of the grille now creeps onto the 3-Series’s hood, but allows no extra airflow, an ornament absent of function. BMW’s signature kidney grilles have grown wider and taller once more, a trend across BMW’s entire lineup. It’s fussier up front than the outgoing car, but more chiseled. The sixth-gen car’s swept front end has gone polygonal here, whittled down at the center and sides, made of sharpened teeth and acute angles. It’s a handsome thing, long and elegant in the best BMW-sedan tradition, broadcasting quiet menace with 19-inch wheels and a squat stance. The 2020 car is the first full redesign of the 3-Series since 2011, and BMW has nailed the look. We found Turn 12, a right-hander at the track’s highest point, then parked the Bimmer mid-corner for a chance to drink in the 3-Series’s new curves. ![]() The Ridge may only be separated from Seattle by a quick sprint, but it’s worlds away from the city’s thick corporate shellac. Candy-cane curbing and dayglow corporate advertising are absent. The Ridge feels one with the hills here, set at the foot of the Olympic National Forest’s rugged terrain. I met the 2020 BMW M340i early that first morning, rolling through The Ridge Motorsports Park’s front gate as purple darkness fled the horizon. This story originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of Road & Track. If we sussed out BMW’s newest 3-Series along the way, well, even better. The plan was simple: chase joyous sunshine along the Washington coast, pile oyster shells into mountains on our dinner plates, and find the northwest corner of the contiguous United States. The weather in Seattle was a sunlit diamond amid the months-long drizzle of a Northwest winter: fifty degrees, not a cloud in the cobalt sky.
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