{"id":121070,"date":"2026-08-27T02:38:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T02:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/121070\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T02:38:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T02:38:20","slug":"adventure-magazine-bmw-high-performance-driving-in-queenstown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/121070\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventure Magazine – BMW: High-Performance Driving in Queenstown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Words by Joel Dickinson
There are assignments that sound suspiciously unlike work, and being handed the keys to a high-performance BMW, driven into the mountains above Queenstown and encouraged to throw the car sideways across snow and ice sits fairly high on that list.<\/p>\n

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The BMW M Snow & Ice Experience is based out of Millbrook Resort, just outside Arrowtown, but the real action takes place high in the mountains at the Southern Hemisphere Proving Grounds. This is normally serious winter testing territory, where manufacturers and tyre companies come to find out what works and what doesn\u2019t.
Our job was considerably simpler. Get up there, listen to the instructors and see what happened when a group of relatively \u201ceveryday day Joe\u201d drivers were given some very abnormal cars and a lot of snow to play with.
The day started at Millbrook before we climbed aboard the 4WD snow bus for the trip into the mountains. As you gain altitude the landscape changes quickly, eventually opening into a huge white testing ground surrounded by Southern Alps. Waiting for us was a line-up of BMW M cars and, looking at them, I had my first slight concern about the day.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really a car guy. I like cars, but I don\u2019t spend my evenings comparing horsepower figures or discussing engine specifications. Put me in front of a line of high-performance BMWs on a frozen mountain and there is definitely a moment when you wonder whether everyone else knows considerably more about what they are doing than you do.<\/p>\n

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Starting one didn\u2019t exactly calm the nerves. These cars sound angry, and once you get behind the wheel there is no disguising the amount of power sitting under your right foot.
Fortunately, the instructors weren\u2019t particularly interested in how much we knew about cars. We started with relatively simple exercises and worked our way towards the stuff most of us secretly wanted to do: get the cars properly sideways.<\/p>\n

The first exercise was the drag sprint. Accelerate hard across the snow, get the car moving and then brake heavily and slide to a stop. It sounded straightforward enough until I actually put my foot down.
Even on snow, the acceleration is impressive. The car takes off, everything starts happening very quickly and then you reach the braking marker and have to remind yourself that the surface underneath you isn\u2019t a road. You hit the brakes, the tyres hunt for grip and the car does things that initially feel slightly unnatural. After a couple of runs, though, the nerves started disappearing and the fun took over.<\/p>\n

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Next came the slalom and barrel race, which required a little more finesse. We were driving through tighter turns, changing direction and finding out what happened when you asked too much of the tyres.
It doesn\u2019t take long to discover that snow punishes enthusiasm. Turn too hard, use too much throttle or get your timing wrong and the car lets you know immediately. I wasn\u2019t suddenly becoming a great winter driver, but I was starting to feel what the car was doing rather than simply reacting when something went wrong.
Then we got to drifting.<\/p>\n

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This was what I\u2019d been waiting for, although deliberately breaking traction in a very expensive BMW initially feels completely wrong. Everything you\u2019ve been taught about driving tells you to avoid a slide, while the instructor beside you is effectively saying the opposite: get some power on, get the back out and keep it there.
We drove both rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive cars, and the rear-wheel-drive BMW quickly showed me that enthusiasm and ability are two different things.<\/p>\n

The idea is to get the rear moving, counter-steer and use the throttle to hold the car in the slide. My first attempts were probably more enthusiasm than elegance. Too much throttle and you\u2019ve lost it, not enough and the slide disappears. Eventually it began to make sense and I managed to hold one for about two and a half complete circles.<\/p>\n

I was ridiculously pleased with myself. The instructors probably weren\u2019t quite as impressed, but there is something addictive about the moment it finally comes together. Instead of fighting the car, you\u2019re working with the slide and trying to keep it going for another few metres, then another corner, then another lap.
The all-wheel-drive BMW suited me considerably better. There was more grip and I felt more confident almost immediately, but there was still more than enough power to get the car sideways and throw a serious amount of snow into the air.<\/p>\n

This was also about the point where any remaining restraint disappeared. The instructors weren\u2019t sitting beside us nervously asking everyone to slow down. They wanted us to use the cars, and their advice became increasingly entertaining: more throttle, get the back out, keep going.
It is difficult not to enjoy yourself when a professional driving instructor is actively encouraging behaviour that would normally result in a very uncomfortable conversation with the police.<\/p>\n

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The instructors were actually one of the best parts of the day. There was no sense that they were simply protecting a fleet of expensive cars from a bunch of amateurs. They were relaxed, knowledgeable and clearly enjoyed seeing people improve. When you got something wrong, they explained why. When you got it right, the next instruction was generally to try it again with a little more commitment.<\/p>\n

That made a big difference because you could push without worrying about what was coming around the next corner. The course was controlled, there was nothing coming the other way and making mistakes was part of the point. You could lose traction, get the car out of shape and work out how to recover it without the consequences you\u2019d face doing the same thing on a public road.<\/p>\n

By late afternoon we\u2019d spent hours accelerating, braking, sliding and throwing snow around, and I thought the day was pretty much done. BMW, however, had one more surprise waiting for us.
Rather than climbing back into the snow bus for the drive down, there was a helicopter sitting on the mountain.
The helicopter transfer is weather dependent, and we\u2019d scored the conditions for it. We lifted away from the proving grounds and headed back towards Millbrook as the light was beginning to drop across the Southern Alps.
After spending the day down amongst the snow, seeing the same country from the air was a hell of a way to finish. The mountains stretched away beneath us, late light was hitting the tops and eventually the white alpine landscape gave way to the greener country around Arrowtown and Millbrook.<\/p>\n

There is no getting around the fact that the BMW M Snow & Ice Experience is a luxury product. The Luxury Experience we attended is valued at AUD$7,600 per person and includes two nights at Millbrook Resort, the driving programme, transfers, dining and the helicopter flight when conditions allow.
But the luxury wasn\u2019t really the part I came away talking about.<\/p>\n

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I arrived wondering whether a non-car guy was really going to get that much out of spending a day with a fleet of BMW M cars. Several hours later I\u2019d discovered that you don\u2019t need to know much about engines to enjoy having several hundred horsepower underneath you, a mountain covered in snow in front of you and an instructor telling you that, actually, you could probably give it a bit more.<\/p>\n

I still wouldn\u2019t call myself a car guy, and I\u2019m definitely not about to start quoting engine specifications. But I now understand why people become obsessed with driving these things, particularly when you remove the traffic, take away the dry road and put them somewhere they can actually be played with.
Two and a half circles of a snow-covered skid pad probably isn\u2019t enough to launch a new career in drifting, but it was enough to convince me of one thing: I\u2019ve never had so much fun driving sideways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Words by Joel DickinsonThere are assignments that sound suspiciously unlike work, and being handed the keys to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-121070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alps","tag-alps"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117165156540086562","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}