I have been fortunate enough to have owned many performance cars over the last eighteen years or so, but I've always harboured a strange antipathy towards BMWs. Maybe I'm still stuck in the 80's, but the two marques I have always associated with arrogant (but usually not car-savvy) owners have been Porsche and BMW.

However my decision to change career from financial consultant to lowly-paid motoring journalist prompted me to sell my Ferrari F355 Spider and my Caterham race car and left me with just my spirited, but ultimately still puny, Digi-Tec Smart Roadster Coupe. That car was bought purely as an entertaining central London runabout and impressive as its remapped 107bhp was in that environment, my motoring ego did not sit well with it being my only car, particularly as I was relocating to the Home Counties.

As the purchase of my new country "mansion" (ironically complete with triple garage at the point in my life when I was down to just one car) was rapidly depleting my dwindling resources, I was on a new and different mission; namely to find a bargain, semi-practical performance car. Seeing as just a year before, I was the proud owner of no less than four two-seater convertibles, this was a sea change indeed.

Although I was sorely tempted to go back to my beloved Skyline GT-Rs, The Brunette threatened divorce if I even considered another one (for the few of you who don't know, I spent rather a lot of money a few years ago running, tuning and repairing a couple of GT-Rs including the infamous Midnight Purple R33 V-spec known as Godzilla).

What I needed was inexpensive and reliable speed with more than a nod to practicality and I was horrified when it became clear that the car that ticked the most boxes was the much-maligned E36 version of the BMW M3.

Further reading of my extensive collection of car mags revealed that it was mainly the first iteration of the E36 M3, the 3.0 litre, 286bhp version produced between '92-'95, that disappointed contemporary hacks. By most accounts the later M3 Evolution produced between '95 and '98 was actually very well received with a new 3.2 litre 321bhp engine, 6 speed box and revised steering and suspension.
So the decision was made, aided by the pleasing integer quality of replacing the 107bhp Smart Roadster Coupe with a car of exactly three times the power.

The first one I test drove was uninspiring with barely adequate performance but I put that down to over-familiarisation with supercars and reassured myself that it was at least substantially quicker than the Smart it was replacing.

Undeterred, I set about finding one in Techno Violet, as a tribute to Godzilla it was the only colour I considered, and kept an eye on a couple on Auto Trader's website. The one I settled on appealed as it had a terracotta red leather Recaro interior as part of its AC Schnitzer options along with the 18" ACS Type II alloys, sports suspension, subtle roof spoiler, carbon dash and quick-shift kit.

A brief test drive with the owner up in Norfolk surprised me as it felt substantially perkier than the first car I drove and it was in tidy condition for a 70k miler with a full service history and loads of receipts.
This car had cost its original owner approaching £60k with all the options but less than seven years later, I managed to haggle the price down to £11k (with the help of an envelope of readies) and was grinning all the way back down south.

I have never bought such a high mileage car before, but this 1998 model year Evo was in excellent original condition with only patina'd leather, stone chipped nose and scratched windscreen betraying its age. Certainly the 3.2 litre, double VANOS variable valve timing straight six pulled strongly from its 700rpm idle and revved in a linear fashion to its 7600rpm red line. The car did seem to sit very low on its ACS springs and the ride was pretty hard with the suspension frequently finding the bump stops, but I just assumed this was a characteristic of non-humorous German lowered suspension kits.

The first longish journey I had to do in it after bringing it home was to Bruntingthorpe proving ground to do a story on tuned Smart Roadsters for evo magazine. Jethro Bovingdon and I had loads of fun slinging the lightweight cars around trying to get them to play for the camera for the article (that eventually came out in issue no.78, April 2005) and of course I couldn't waste the opportunity to have a lap or two in the M3.

The handling was secure, if not exciting, with more understeer than I expected and a surplus of grip at the rear. And it didn't seem to like bumps at all with horrible noises coming from the front suspension towers on sharp compressions.

However, (predictably, being a Yu-mobile) plans were already well advanced towards improving power and handling; this should prove one of my most interesting projects yet…