The biggest-hearted version of this brand’s smallest car is keen to serve up a rewarding experience.

Price: $100,600 as tested.

Powertrain: 2.0-litre turbocharged four cylinder petrol, 221kW/400Nm; seven speed automated manual, all wheel drive.

How big: 4361mm long, 1800mm wide, 1459mm tall.

For: Fancy tech put to impressive use; despite firmness, feels reassuring and planted on the road when driven fast; passable practicality for its kind.

Not so much: Doesn’t sound angry enough; $100k is a big chunk of change.

FAST, furious and fun: If a hot hatch ticks those boxes, it’s likely set for riotous reception.

The BMW M135i xDrive in its latest an newly-arrived evolution - the one that reshapes, has an engine retune and loses the ‘i’ suffix - fulfils just this remit, but without losing complete sight of reality.

It is seriously snappy and has capability to scoot nimbly around corners at the kind of speeds that will have your passengers wishing they’d either stayed at home, or at least brought a sick bag.

You might wish for more snarl, but that aside, it’s a car that adheres to a classic and well-respected formula.

Using a well-sorted donor as the start point, BMW magicians have created a small car that punches above its weight. As with the previous M135i, the 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine up front, driving all four wheels via a seven-speed automatic gearbox, will get the car from 0-100kmh in under five seconds, and on to the obligatory limited top speed of 250kmh.

The clever all-wheel-drive system and dynamic improvement from introducing more specialist springs and dampers and brakes inspire confidence about driving the car quickly.

Selectable driving modes so that suspension, engine and gearbox can be set up to match the conditions at hand also enhance the experience. Beyond that, they’ve done it proud by treating exterior and interior to some sporty touches, including excellent sports seats.

All in all, you can feel the burn. And, yet, as hot-tempered as the M135 is …. it’s also tempered by where it sits within the blitzer BMW structure, which in case you need reminding continues to define at two levels: M Performance and full M.

The M135 being a step below the fully fledged M cars, like the M3 and M4, means it is more of a top-spec, highly-tweaked 1-Series hatch than a modern day equivalent of the last fully M-fettled ‘One’.

That being the famous, fabulous and fondly missed 1M that was designed to provide maximum driver thrills for less than the price of an M3.

Is this because times have changed? Well, yes, that and the fact that so too have tastes … and, of course, so has this car.

When the 1M came out in 2011, it was a year-long production that based on a rear-drive platform. Same went for the M140i that followed.

But then big change. A new underpinning primarily delivering front-drive. When the performance team got back together again, they realised anything with serious sizzle required all-wheel-drive. Which is where the M135 went and remains now.

Output-wise this product isn’t as grunty as its immediate predecessor, let alone that legend of a decade and a half ago. It also isn’t the most powerful of the German four-pot, all-paw pocket rocket genre: That’s still the Mercedes-AMG A45.

But it runs close enough to satisfy.

Comparing past and present data, for instance, shows the M135 unit produces just 29kW and 50Nm less than the 1 M’s 3.0-litre turbo six used to feed out to its rear wheels.

Yes, it’s a heavier car now. Also, the cited maximum power and torque make it more a foil for the 244kW/400Nm Audi S3 than the 294kW/500Nm RS3 and the 228kW/400Nm Mercedes-AMG A35 than the 309kW/500Nm A45.

Yet I’d challenge anyone who takes on M135 onto a challenging road and gives it big beans to tell me the oomph it so readily unloads isn’t still impressive for a car of this size.

From everything I did with it, nothing undermined impression of this being any less than an undeniably fast and unmistakably muscular car.

Anything that can rocket to 100kmh from a standstill in under five seconds is seriously fast, and though BMW’s stopwatch shows its car to be one/two-tenths off the pace respectively suggested by Audi and AMG for their own equivalent offers (and one tenth slower than the M135i), the M135 is still no slouch.

It also dumps in its grunt so massively that you’ll be very pleased all-paw is part of the equation. If not for that, the the torque steer and wheelspin would be beyond fun.

But as lairy as it can be …. yes, there’s sense it also holds itself slightly in check. You can smoke the tyres and make it scream, but it doesn’t ever bitch-slap you in the back of the head or yell so loudly in your ear you’ll run risk of a hearing impairment.

Which means neither does it have propensity to claw you to bits every time you want to just want to drive it at normal pace, in normal driving situations. But the point is that performance is more than adequate.

Of course, the real proof of this car’s mettle comes from how well it acquits when driven hard. The big news upgrades for all latest 1 Series models was going to new shock absorber technology and a stiffer body, but the M135 goes further still.

A couple of years back, BMW recalibrated the suspension and swapped to different tyres. They also effected software tweaks to the xDrive. These improved the driving experience, but now the facelift has delivered more chance to finesse a bit further still.

An 8mm reduction in ride height might sound almost negligible, but you can pick up straight away that it has a more hunkered stance than the standard car.

Also delivered here is adaptive suspension. On top of that, it has the usual enhancements of sport steering, beefed up brakes, better aero and light-alloy wheels with fatter (235/35) rubber. Where it is also really set apart is at the rear, where you can spot a set of four 90mm exhaust tips.

For all that it is more overt, it doesn’t present loutishly. Nor, even with the enhanced exhaust system, unduly loudly.

I’m no fan of cars that seek to rile to point of abject rudeness every time they so much as start up, but it does seem a shame that it nonetheless doesn’t have much of a rumble at idle nor, even though there is some snarl, it doesn’t it sound as fully fiery as the cited rivals when opened up. Ever absent is the snap-crackle-pop on over-run that Audi and AMG serve up in abundance.

BMW blames legislation for the lack of character, but as those others also have to meet the same requirements, yet can still deliver more aural entertainment, that excuse seems thin. That’s not to say this car is a completely silent treatment. you do get a load of engine notes coming through the sound system and this is noise captured in the exhaust system and accentuated. But, as is always the case, this is something you hear far more easily from within the cabin than from the outside.

Even so, ultimately it has to score more for how it drives than how loudly it roars, right? In this regard, the car brings itself back up to pace.

As good as the entry One Series is, the M135 is just as you’d hope; a more fulfilling product still, tangibly more agile and more stable than the standard car. That lends ability to scamper just that bit faster through corners, with less lean in corners and more sharpness. Which means it becomes even more engaging and dynamic, more fun.

It asks the same one acceptance that is common to virtually every performance-themed car of this ilk from Europe. Whenever the ‘M’ letter involves, the reduction in ride compliance tends to be marked.

Here the ride is stiff in the conventional drive modes and rather more so in Sport, so you have to expect to be jostled around a bit when pushing it on any kind of imperfect surface. At least even when the bumps are doing their worst, the car itself is rarely unsettled, which speaks to the quality of its development.

The 120 M Sport recently tested had some sporty elements, but the M135 is far more embedded into the motorsport thematic, with sports seats wrapped in microsuede material and a chunky steering wheel with a red straight-ahead marker on the rim. The lightweight gear shift paddles are taken from the BMW M3 Competition. The test car came with some special M options, including the sports seats with illuminated M badging in the backrests, which you’ll likely show off to mates, and a contrasting colour highlight that one supposes is described a a ‘red’ but comes out more like a Donald Trump tribute hue.

That all adds special feel to a cabin which already looks pretty upmarket, due to the types wholesale incorporation of a widescreen infotainment system, coupled with a digital instrument cluster. This, the use of mainly premium materials and some snazzy ambient lighting, means the interior is one of this car’s standout elements.

For all the performance accoutrements, the car still has the same bank of screens as the standard 1 Series, complete with BMW’s latest Operating System 9 infotainment technology. That means the screens are all sharp and neatly presented, with relatively logical menus and some customisation options, allowing you to put information exactly where you want it. But there are a lot of apps to sort through.

Driving modes being also controlled via the touchscreen doesn’t seem as intuitive and the old way of just using a selector. Agreed, the drive mode menu is reached via a button on the centre console, but when you’re driving hard and want to access the sport mode quickly, it’s just not ideal. Really, the only true irritation are the unnecessarily fiddly air vent controls.

This is a compact car, so not that commodious to start with, but the good news is that sports seats are no larger to the standard types, so rear seat occupants won’t lose any additional lower leg room. which is good, because there’s not a huge amount to give way to start with. Rear headroom might also become an issue for the tall.

Happier news is that it’s not among those all-wheel-drive cars that have to abdicate boot space to accommodate the drive hardware. The boot here still offers competitive luggage capacity behind the rear seats.

Notwithstanding that Japan (Honda Civic Type R, Toyota GR Corolla) and South Korea (Hyundai i30 N) also contribute some awesome competitor choices, Germany has become a specialist source for cars such as this. Out of that ilk, there’s one more that hasn’t been mentioned yet but could be the arch-nemisis of all the elite-end offers.

The VW badge might not have quite the same kudos as the AMG, Audi and BMW monickers, but the Golf R is a very potent rival; the R stands for ‘rennen’, which is German for ‘racing.’ It’s just as competitive, has decent cachet … but demands less cash. The $20k saving over this BMW would pay for a swag of track days and plenty of fuel.