I’ve owned enough BMW M cars over the years to have a reasonable idea of what they’re capable of. An E90 M3, F80 M3 and F10 M5 have all spent time in my garage, while an E30 M3 remains there today, and I’ve done my share of track days in everything from BMWs to my old Porsche 911 GT3. So when the opportunity came up to join BMW’s Snow & Ice Experience in Queenstown, I arrived with plenty of enthusiasm, but also a fairly established view of what makes a good performance-driving program.
What I didn’t have was any meaningful experience driving on ice, which turned out to make almost everything I’d learned on a racetrack feel considerably less useful.
The program takes place at the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground, a winter testing facility high above Queenstown that is used by manufacturers to develop cars in extreme low-grip conditions. We were based at Millbrook Resort before heading into the mountains, where the manicured roads and postcard scenery eventually give way to a landscape of snow, ice and purpose-built testing surfaces. For anyone interested in cars, there is something inherently fascinating about being inside a facility normally used by engineers rather than customers, particularly when BMW’s approach is essentially to hand you the keys and demonstrate exactly why the place exists.
The first and most obvious lesson is how dramatically a lack of grip changes the way you drive. Modern performance cars have become so capable on dry tarmac that it’s easy to take their enormous reserves of traction for granted. You can carry considerable speed into a corner, lean heavily on the brakes and get back onto the throttle with an aggression that would have been unthinkable in performance cars from a few decades ago. On ice, those reserves disappear, and suddenly relatively small decisions - a little too much throttle, an unnecessarily abrupt steering input or a fraction too much entry speed - have an outsized effect on what happens next.
BMW starts with the fundamentals, working through braking, understeer, oversteer and weight transfer before gradually introducing more complicated exercises. None of it sounds particularly difficult in theory, especially if you’ve spent time on a racetrack, but the ice has a useful way of dismantling any confidence you might have brought with you. Turn into a corner too quickly and the front simply continues straight ahead; get greedy with the throttle and the rear begins to rotate; overcorrect that rotation and you can find yourself facing the direction you’ve just come from. There were plenty of spins throughout the day, although failure here is less an embarrassment than part of the learning process.
As the exercises progress, you begin to understand just how little input is actually required. Rather than forcing the car to do something, the trick is to anticipate the movement of its weight and work with it, which is where the M3 became particularly impressive. Drifting it across the ice was always going to be one of the headline attractions, but what surprised me was how natural the car felt once you stopped trying to manhandle it. With the rear out of line, the chassis remained composed and predictable, allowing the slide to be managed with relatively small steering corrections and careful adjustments of the throttle.
It’s an unusual way to understand a performance car because, rather than revealing its abilities by increasing speed, you’re effectively doing the opposite. Strip away the available grip and the underlying balance of the chassis becomes much easier to feel. The speeds are lower, but the relationship between steering, throttle and weight transfer is considerably more obvious than it can be on a dry circuit, where huge tyres and sophisticated electronics are constantly working to keep everything tidy.
The most entertaining demonstration of this was the motorkhana, which took the principles we’d been learning and added the one ingredient guaranteed to make sensible adults abandon restraint: another car alongside you.
Two drivers raced simultaneously through a compact course, and the presence of someone doing exactly the same thing a few metres away immediately changed the mood. Managing wheelspin off the line, carrying momentum through each direction change and keeping the car balanced suddenly mattered a great deal more when there was somebody beside you trying to do it faster. What initially looked like a fairly simple exercise became a surprisingly effective lesson in restraint, because the quickest runs were rarely the most dramatic. Too much throttle cost momentum, excessive steering produced understeer, and trying to bully the car generally made you slower.
That was perhaps the most useful distinction between the Snow & Ice Experience and a conventional track day. On a dry circuit, much of the challenge involves learning how to exploit the available grip: finding the latest braking point, carrying more speed into a corner and getting back onto the throttle as early as possible. On ice, there is so little grip available that the exercise becomes less about exploiting it and more about preserving what little you have.
Because everything happens at lower speeds, the fundamental movements of the car also become easier to recognise. You can feel the weight shifting forward under braking and moving across the chassis as you change direction, and you quickly learn how one poorly timed input can unsettle the car several moments later. Rather than reacting to what the car has already done, you gradually begin anticipating what it is about to do, which is arguably the most valuable lesson the program offers.
It also provides an interesting perspective on just how sophisticated modern performance cars have become. On the road, systems such as stability control, electronically managed differentials and all-wheel-drive hardware tend to operate somewhere in the background, quietly correcting mistakes before the driver has much reason to think about them. On ice, where traction is constantly being gained and lost, their influence becomes far more apparent, as do the limits of what even the cleverest electronics can overcome.
The instructors deserve much of the credit for making that progression feel natural. There is enough technical explanation to understand why the car is behaving a certain way, but the program never becomes a classroom exercise dressed up as a driving experience. You’re given the theory, sent out to put it into practice and, quite often, given enough freedom to get it wrong before working out how to do it better the next time around.
That balance also means the experience isn’t particularly dependent on how much performance driving you’ve done previously. Someone with limited experience can learn the fundamentals of car control in an unusually forgiving environment, while a driver who has spent plenty of time on circuits will find that the absence of grip demands an entirely different approach. I certainly came away feeling that my track experience had helped, but not nearly as much as I had expected it to.
I went to Queenstown expecting the obvious pleasures of the experience - powerful BMWs, frozen circuits and a couple of days behaving like an idiot in the mountains - and all of those expectations were comfortably met. What I hadn’t anticipated was how useful the lack of grip would be as a teaching tool, or how much more clearly you can understand a car when the speeds come down and the safety net of abundant traction disappears.
There aren’t many places where you can repeatedly lose control of an M3, work out exactly why it happened and then have another go until you can hold the same slide with something approaching competence. That you can do all of this in the mountains above Queenstown before returning to Millbrook for dinner and a bottle of wine is perhaps the less technical, but equally compelling, argument for BMW’s Snow & Ice Experience.