Most carmakers would have cancelled the whole thing and run screaming back to their 5-star hotel bars begging for mercy and saying something like, “I’m melting! Melting! What a world! What a world!” But not BMW. The Bavarians aren’t afraid of nothin’. They have complete confidence in their cars, too. And, for some reason, in us.
Yes, it was raining at The Thermal Club, the high-priced private motorsports racetrack and multistory luxury villa home development way out in the desert east of Palm Springs. And not just drizzling, not the kind of wet that would call for intermediates. No. According the National Weather Service, a fully independent organization not prone to exaggeration, the rain that was falling out in the desert that day was arriving from the heavens in record amounts. I wouldn’t say bucketsful because that would be a cliché. I’d say God was backing up dumptrucks at Heaven’s Gate and pouring the stuff onto the desert in non-stop deluges. The NWS said that over the course of the 24 hours during the middle of which I was lapping Thermal’s ten-turn, 1.8-mile paperclip-shaped South Palm Circuit, the area received a Noahic 3.69 inches of rain, the third greatest rainfall on record and the wettest day in 76 years. That’s the NWS talking, not frail, water-soluble me. There were little streams – no, make that rivers – roaring across the front straight in three separate locations. Ask anyone who was there. They were deep enough you could go fly-fishing for desert trout, if there was such a thing. At Turn 7 there was something like a swimming pool. You didn’t so much drive through it as dove off the deep end and swam. We didn’t need rain tires, we needed paddles.
But none of this fazed BMW, which had brought something like 90 cars here for its massive annual press-test drive.
“It’ll be fun,” said the BMW spokesguy, speaking about driving in the rain.
“It’s never fun,” said Le Mans/Daytona/Sebring sports car driver the great Bill Adam, speaking to me later and drawing on his decades of racing experience in all forms wet and dry.
I had sort of attached myself to the clique of Bill Adam and motorcycle writer Jeff Buchanan. What Buchanan was doing here I didn’t know, except that BMW makes motorcycles, too, though we couldn’t ride any of them that day.
The three of us started out driving John Cooper Works Minis on an autocross course attached to the BMW Performance Center. BMW operates this facility year-round at Thermal for its customers. Lucky customers.
Inexplicably, moto dude Buchanan was a half-second faster than me on the autocross course. Adam was a second and a half quicker. The latter point wasn’t inexplicable, but nonetheless I blame… uh, tire pressures and, uh, ABS settings and… conditions for the former. Yeah, that’s it. I hung out with these two because they were the fastest there that day and you always learn more following fast guys than slow (which is probably why no one hangs out with me).
At $32,895, the John Cooper Works Mini Cooper is an extra ten grand over the price of the entry-level Mini, but you could make a really good argument that the commensurate increase in quality of driving life is worth the expenditure. Not only do you get 17-inch wheels, a rear spoiler, aero kit, sport seats, summer tires (in this rain?) and a bunch of trim items, but ours came with the Sport Automatic transmission with paddle shifters. The JCW Mini makes 228 hp from a turbocharged inline four-cylinder mated to that six-speed automatic. Minis are fun.
Adam lined up first, Buchanan the moto dude second and I was third. The rain was oppressive, requiring wipers at full speed and stability control full on to have any hope of staying in line. At least of me staying in line.
When my turn came up – Wham! – off I went, nailing the throttle, which took a second to hook up and then suddenly… I was sideways and the stability control was cranking down the car and slowing me to a near-halt. What to do in this situation? Nail the throttle again and let the electronics take care of everything. Sure enough, the JCW Mini launched out of oppo and back in line. Down a short little straight, where I upshifted to third using the paddle shifter, then squashed the brakes, turned and started sliding around again. The JCW Mini seemed to let you slide around a fair amount. It felt like more than the 30 degrees of oversteer that most sport settings allow, but maybe the wetness was adding to it. The idea, I told myself, was to drive just below the threshold of the electronic control intervention, which I then tried to do, with only a modicum of success. Either way, this was incredibly fun, even though it was as much about boating as autocrossing. I got into the 28-second range for the course while my fellow drivers each dipped into the 27s. There was rain galore, both falling from the skies and puddling up on the track. The front-drive Mini blasted through it all, over and over again. I never got into the 27s.
Then we headed to Thermal’s South Palm Circuit, a 1.8-mile paperclip with plenty of high-speed straights. Here we had the guidance of BMW driver Bill Auberlin, fresh from his GTLM win at Daytona in the new M8 race car. You could tell Auberlin was an experienced rain driver because he was standing around in the pits with an umbrella.
“Try this one,” Auberlin said, pointing to a M340i xDrive. “It’s stable as anything in the rain.”
The $57,990 2020 340i xDrive sends 382 hp and 369 lb ft of torque to all four wheels to move its 3,960 pounds of curb weight to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds and to a top speed of 155 mph. And it’s very good in the rain.
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