With all the gossip about BMW making an all-wheel-drive M2, a couple of aftermarket shops decided to take matters into their own hands. The tuners at R44 Performance and Tom Wrigley Performance have been working on the G87’2 RWD to AWD conversion for about eight months. Now, the Papaya Orange project car is ready after using as many OEM parts as possible from the M3 and M4.
This M2 is a little over a year old and has 10,000 miles on the clock but now is living a second life as an xDrive machine. As you can imagine, it has an automatic transmission, much like all BMW M cars with all-wheel drive. It would’ve been even more impressive to have a six-speed manual but I guess we can’t have everything. The team behind the ambitious project essentially reverse-engineered the G80 and G82 to identify which parts could be carried over to the G87.
The back-to-back comparison between the RWD and AWD modes reveals predictable changes to the car’s behavior. It has more grip but you lose some of the tail-happy nature that BMWs are known for. Tested at the Rednal Karting track located in Oswestry, UK, the all-paw M2 was an absolute rocket off the line. It hit 60 mph in only 3.23 seconds. In rear-wheel-drive mode, it took 4.33 seconds to get the job done. In the full track test, having xDrive turned on shaved off five seconds from the lap time.
Following the xDrive conversion, this M2 will embark on a journey of becoming a dedicated drag car. It’s set to race in the United States next year. In the meantime, BMW is believed to be working on an all-wheel-drive G87 out of the box. It’s supposedly coming in 2026 when the RWD could be dropped from the lineup. That would imply the manual gearbox’s demise as well.
Before that happens, a lighter and stronger M2 will be released next year when the CS is scheduled to launch.
Source: R44 Performance / YouTube
