BMW swore that our X6 M was a burgundy cannonball in a straight line, so our first competition was run-whatcha-brung night at nearby Milan Dragway. This event held great appeal, inasmuch as almost nothing is required of the driver, apart from those long, hot waits in the staging lanes, where most racers place bags of ice on their intake manifolds and fiddle with hot Holleys and push their cars by hand so that the engines remain cool. Not us. We idled for 20 minutes at a crack, with the A/C blasting, seat fans at max blow, seat massagers silently unkinking thigh muscles, and Steve Tormé—Velvet Fog fils—singing “Straighten Up and Fly Right” out of 11 speakers surrounded by “Merino” leather, which perhaps comes from Miami dolphins.

Our X6 M was a prototype and wasn’t equipped with launch control, which will be standard on production models and will likely improve acceleration times by a couple 10ths. So, before each run, it was necessary to program the X6 M for take-no-prisoners mode. I first had to press the minuscule “M” button on the steering wheel that was programmed to disable most of the stability control, then up popped a menu on the nav screen on which I had to toggle through “Settings,” “M Drive,” “Power Sport,” and “Power Sport” again (because the only alternative is “Efficient,” which is not a term anyone would ever use to describe my driving). After all that, of course, I’d worked up quite a sweat, so I had a sip of cool iced tea stored in the center console and calmed my nerves by eating three tasty digestive biscuits.

But, suddenly, as I was still munching, it was my turn at the Christmas tree, where I repeatedly staged too deep and had to back up a couple inches. In the X6 M, this is difficult, especially when a red-faced man in the starting booth is screaming and the competitor in the far lane is overheating the 500-cubic-inch Hemi in his Ford Anglia, an engine he built at the expense of multiple mortgage payments and his wife. To obtain reverse, you have to push a button on the side of this BMW’s bizarre shifter (do not even think of touching the top button, which engages park), then make sure the shifter is in the right-side gate, then push forward and release, hoping against hope that these calisthenics will illuminate the orange “R” between the tach and the speedo. This took forever, inciting the red-faced person to utter a very bad word, although I had said the same word a moment prior.