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E90 M3 is a terrific car. Handles great, excellent road feel, quite practical especially with 4 doors and fold down rear seats, and an engine that will sing to 8400 (8600 with tune). I modified mine with catless x pipe, intake, tune, and water/meth injection plus suspension parts like wider wheels, bigger brakes, shocks, springs, front swaybar, etc. It was probably making 400 rwhp and should have run 115+ in the quarter.
A few people supercharge them, but I never got around to that. Rods are weak so you can go past about 400 lbs rwtq, but with the short 3.85 diff (manual trans), gearing is multiplied pretty well to make even stock torque seem greater. A few build bigger displacement but you can’t add more than about 10% and it is very costly. The DCT is probably the better choice for transmission, though mine was 6MT.
Much more special, interesting and connected car than the F90 M5, but nowhere near as smooth, fast, practical, and comfortable. I am sure the M5 would smoke it around most tracks as well, but that is not all there is to driving — most people would choose an E9x M3 over an M5 for a track car.
I had the M3 for 10 of its 13 years and 80k of its 110k miles. Both the car and I got older and I was ready to trade the great feel and connectedness of the M3 for a fast, comfortable cruiser like the M5 with auto trans and AWD to put the power down and go through the snow.
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