My name is Frank van Meel, it’s obviously a Dutch name.
I'm Dutch and I always wanted to do something with cars, so after school I went to Berlin
to study automotive engineering My last job with Audi was Head of Quattro GmbH, the high-performance
brand with Audi.
Then I moved to BMW in 2014.
Well the M cars always were the icons.
There were so many movies with M cars and so many cool stories about M. M was always
about motor sports and it was the clean racing machine.
I think M always was an icon and always was a dream for me and now finally the dream came
true.
I think what makes M so special is that it comes from racing and that it really kept
this racing spirit.
It's all about dynamics.
It's about agility.
It's about precision.
It's about grip at the front axle.
It's about the feeling you have with the car that you really have the feeling you're in
control and the car does exactly what you want it to do.
The purpose of M performance is that if you look at the past it was always the base car
line up from BMW AGM, then there was a pure M with a huge gap between the pure M and the
base cars.
There were many people saying I don't want to jump that far.
If you look at the history of the M3 it all started out with the four-cylinder.
Then it went to a six-cylinder, naturally aspirated.
An eight-cylinder high-rev engine.
Then, now, we do have a six-cylinder, inline, turbocharged engine.
What you can see there is that there is no technological dogma.
It's more about the philosophy.
So that's what I really want to keep for M, a typical philosophy, what does M stand for
and a M has to drive like a M always has driven.
Well, currently, I think a four-cylinder, high-performance car is some kind of difficult
issue, because it’s also about drivability and with a four-cylinder engine you have a
problem with low-end torque.
For us it’s, for everyday drivability, a little bit difficult to use a four-cylinder
engine for that purpose.
However, I don't want to say it's not possible for the future, because with electrification
coming up in the future, as well, there might be some combinations that makes sense, indeed,
in the future.
I think at the end of the day also M will be electric.
However, that will take some time, because if we look at today’s status of electrification
it puts a lot of weight into a car.
Since M is coming from the track we're all… we’re keen about weight, and also about
power to weight ratio, and with electrification we don't get this right balance right now,
because we put too much weight into a car.
What's important is, even if you talk about all-wheel drive, the car has to drive like
today's rear wheel drive.
That's more or less the key issue.
As long as that is possible and all-wheel drive is not out of the question, but it's
not so easy to achieve this vehicle dynamics.
So there has be a lot of brainwork if you want to go that direction.
What I can say for M is that there are many employees within M that already have been
there for 10 years, 15 years.
What I do not see is that there has been a shift of personnel to Project I.
What I do see is that we talk to each other and that we use each other's technologies,
because Product I came to M in the early stages to look at the carbon fibre roof from M3,
M4, how that has been assembled and how the production processes were.
They enhanced the processes, they put it through the next steps, so now we're profiting again
as M from that what Project I has done to carbon fibre technology, the lessons learnt
they've had and the progress they've made towards carbon fibre.
Also, if you look at the M4 GTS, on the interior, in the door panels we used the material from
Project I, from the I3, the Navarro, because it's a lightweight material that’s also
suited for racing, as well.