BMW E30 M3: Mercedes Accidentally Created the BMW M3

In 1983, Mercedes built a car that BMW couldn’t answer.The 190E 2.3-16 had a Cosworth-developed cylinder head, sixteen valves, and a set of world endurance records before customers had even taken delivery.BMW’s chairman walked into Motorsport, turned to engineer Paul Rosche, and gave him one instruction: build a sporting engine for the 3-Series.Fourteen days later, the first prototype was running.What followed was not simply a faster E30. BMW cut apart an M1 cylinder head, bolted it to a four-cylinder block descended from an ordinary family saloon, redesigned almost every exterior panel on the car, and built thousands of road cars purely because the racing regulations demanded it.The result was the E30 M3 — a car designed backwards from the racetrack, and one that would go on to become arguably the most successful touring car ever built.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📚 ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now!The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury.👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🏁 IN THIS EPISODEWe uncover why the Mercedes 190E forced BMW to respond, how Paul Rosche created the S14 engine in just fourteen days, why BMW chose four cylinders instead of six, and how Group A regulations shaped almost every major part of the car.We also look at how little bodywork the M3 actually shared with a standard E30, how it took on the Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth, the controversy surrounding its first WTCC race, Roberto Ravaglia’s championship win, its success in rallying, and the Evolution models that pushed the homologation rules even further.Plus, the strange stories of the 320is, the M3 Convertible, BMW Motorsport’s one-off M3 pickup, and how Audi and Mercedes eventually brought the E30 M3 era to an end.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT📚 The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH📺 Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett🔔 Subscribe for weekly post-mortems on the cars, companies and engineering decisions that shaped modern motoring.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#BMWM3 #E30M3 #BMWMotorsport #PaulRosche #Mercedes190E #TouringCars #DTM #GroupA #CarHistory #HomologationSpecial #ClassicBMW #TheCarNerd