Alpina B4 S Edition 99 2019 first drive

Our time with the car was short, and we were limited to the bumpy confines of the Salzburgring race track. As the Edition 99 is still very much a road-biased machine (ours even has a sunroof), this isn’t by any means a conclusive test, but it does at least give us the opportunity to unleash the car’s rampant performance and experience the chassis alterations.

And that performance, for the avoidance of all doubt, remains a real highlight of the B4 S package. Alpina seems to have creamed off the benefits of forced induction – chiefly an elemental hit of torque through the mid-range – and disguised the drawbacks. The power delivery escalates beautifully and there's very little turbo lag. It's a nicely vocal engine, too, spinning with an increasingly frenzied mechanical rasp that's somehow as civilised as it is hard-edged. In Sport mode, you're also unlikely to miss having a dual-clutch gearbox, because this auto is more than quick enough and almost seemlessly smooth at higher engine speeds.  

As for the dynamics, as ever with Alpina, the devil is in the detail, and this applies as much to the driving as it does to the specification. The spring and damper rates are up a touch, but peel open the boot floor and you’ll find an X-shaped brace bolted into the floorpan to reduce flex, and at the front the connecting links for the anti-roll bar are now made of steel, rather than plastic. The combined effect is to make the 99 Edition usefully stiffer than the standard B4 S, and you feel this most through the steering, which also benefits from increased camber. Those first few degrees of travel are reassuringly firm but also wonderfully alive in terms of response. In fact, your connection with the front axle is quite a bit more intimate than the best electrically assisted efforts from rival manufacturers with development budgets several times the size of Alpina's annual turnover. Bravo Buchloe.

Of course, with only subtle modifications to the B4 S chassis, this is still a softer device than an M4 CS certainly, and softer also than the garden M4 Competition. Through the tight opening chicance of the Salzburgring, we're sure those models would pull a car length or so ahead and then again through the third-gear esses that bring each lap to a close. However, the difference would be less clear-cut through the faster corners, because the Alpina's front axle is a model of stability and the overall balance so effortlessly neutral. In fact, the confidence the Edition 99 gives its driver seems never-ending, and no matter how much power you throw at the rear wheels, the car never relinquishes its composure, always adopting tiny slip angles with ease. It's a terrifically easy thing to drive hard, which is a good attribute for any road car.