The original BMW M3 was built to go racing. That’s always been BMW Motorsport’s secret sauce—the ability to take a chassis that was really well set up in the first place, turning it up to be a brilliant race car, and then turning it back down just a little bit to still be a competent road car. Lately, BMW’s Motorsport division has been putting out a limited run of vehicles to showcase just how far they can go with the whole street-legal race car idea. This year’s entry is the 2025 BMW M4 CS.
Limited to just 2,000 cars worldwide and with only 75 earmarked for Canada, the M4 CS represents the peak of what BMW’s M division can do right now. The result is overwhelming in every regard. It’s not quite all-out mad like the M4 CSL, but instead more in-line with the M3 CS. It sheds 70 pounds off a base M4, but still has all-wheel-drive and back seats, unlike the CSL.
All of its lightweighting and performance tweaks are also quite performative. Approximately nothing about the M4 CS is subtle. All of the added aero in the form of a big diffuser, spoiler, and front air dam with winglets, are exposed carbon fibre. The roof is carbon fibre. The hood is carbon fibre, and has two “stripes” where the Frozen Isle of Mann Green paint has been deleted to expose the carbon fiber. Even the enormous brakes are carbon, too. The grille loses its mesh and gains a red outline to draw attention to its angrier look, courtesy of its missing mesh. This was done to trim weight and improve airflow to the engine.
It needs it. This version of BMW’s turbocharged 3.0-litre straight-six—codenamed the S58R—pushes over 30 pounds of boost to make an alleged 543 horsepower. BMW’s developed a reputation for underrating their engines, but the M4 CS feels like a joke. It’s every bit as ferocious in its forward thrust as the Huracan Tecnica, and that car is a fair bit lighter. This M4 CS almost feels quicker, more urgent than the Lambo in some ways, in that its turbocharging system is so finely honed that it delivers its alleged 479 pound-feet of torque with the immediacy of a huge V8 all the time.
This car is in such a hurry it’s almost comical. A slight prod of the throttle spools the turbine instantly and whisks you away of a tidal wave of torque. The CS alarmingly quick even when it’s trying to pretend to be subtle. Prod it enough for a kickdown (or three) and it’s downright violent, with the impeccable, ZF-built eight-speed automatic shifting where it needs to be and bwarrr-ing into the sunset in the blink of an eye. The M4 CS so much quicker than its numbers convey, it makes a joke out of them.
Its performance is no joke, though. Not only is the M4 CS brutally fast, it carries that speed through corners like damn near nothing else with a valid factory warranty. In a feat of engineering that I’m still struggling to wrap my head around, the front end of this M4 is just as urgent as the power delivery, if not more so. It’s so pin-sharp, so tenacious and eager to respond to your turn of the steering wheel, and just as eager to eerily snap back to a straight line. The steering gear almost feels like it’s on a heart-shaped cam like Citroens of old. The M4 CS naturally wants to track straight as an arrow, with tight response in either direction that opens up as you dive into its limits further.
These cars come standard with Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires—275s in the front, 285s in the rear—and much like the M3 CS, they’re absolutely relentless on warm, dry pavement. This time around, I sampled the M4 CS in late fall, where the tarmac is too cold for semi-slick track tires to operate as effectively as they would in summer. It’s almost a blessing, because you can actually get a sense of how the CS feels at the limit; the M3 felt superhuman, seeming absolutely impervious to the laws of physics. There’s only a little voice gnawing at the back of your mind, reminding you “that is not possible” to keep you in check as you send it around an on-ramp simply because you can.
On colder pavement, I can appreciate the transient handling characteristics and communication built into the M4 CS’ chassis. I couldn’t feel it last year because I didn’t have the testicular fortitude to drive it fast enough, but this time around, I noticed that it communicates surprisingly well. I know what the M4 CS is doing, what it wants to do, and what it has left in its reserves.
It’s only really spooky with everything set to full-kill and in two-wheel-drive mode. The very urgent engine will very urgently roast the back tires through first, second, and even third if it’s light-jacket weather. Leave the AWD system in its M Dynamic Mode and the M4 CS is still a little sketchy, but a fun sketchy. No car should be able to do what the M4 CS does—and do it so ridiculously well.
Perhaps most impressive of all is that the M4 CS is such an angry, urgent, eager, demon of a car, but it’s still a BMW. It’s a 4 Series, an ostensibly normal car you live with every day. Granted the M4 CS certainly doesn’t feel normal; the interior is just as performative of its performance capabilities as its exterior. Just as with the carbon fibre bits on the outside, the M4 CS wears a carbon centre console, and swathes of carbon trim on the dash and steering wheel. The M4 CS doesn’t have cupholders or a centre armrest, and the ultra-aggro bucket seats—with carbon fibre seat backs, of course—are the same ultra-aggro buckets as the M5 CS. It all feels properly special.
But behind all that, it’s a 4. It’s ergonomically sound. There’s a decent amount of room, front and rear. The infotainment is the best in the business, and the Harman Kardon sound system is pretty good. The very functional and honest-to-God necessarily aggressive seats are heated, as is the steering wheel, and they both turn on automatically if its chilly out. Some sound deadening was stripped out, so you can hear stones pelting the floor, but the M4 CS is otherwise quiet on the highway and it even rides pretty well. Decidedly firm, but it makes ugly expansion joints go away, like you’d expect a BMW to do. It even has a huge trunk.
The 2025 BMW M4 CS is hard to wrap your head around because it does so many things as good or better than a lot of purpose-built supercars that are more than double its $165,900 as-tested sticker price. It’s so urgent in all of its actions that it’s hard to comprehend, and so well-sorted in its execution that it’s impossible to not be impressed. It perfectly apes exactly what you’d expect of a race car and still acts like a good street car, pushing the envelope of how far you can go without compromising either.
