Pick a B-road. Any B-road. It doesn’t really matter. You could throw all the numbers into a hat and select at random. You could add some science: the longest, the B6318, runs for 61 miles; the most northerly is the B9087, which is up in the Shetlands. Then there’s the B660. In places it’s only five feet four inches above sea level and it’s miles away from the coast. There are 18,800 miles of B-roads in the UK, and I guarantee the BMW M2 is fun on every single one of them. I’ve got the B3081, which probably sounds to you as though I’ve lucky-dipped, but a few years ago this was named Britain’s twistiest road. That’s a bit misleading, because for most of its 42 miles waggling south-east from Shepton Mallet to a final headbutt into the A31 near Ringwood, it’s perfectly ordinary. Magnificently ordinary, as only a rural British B-road can be.

Photography: James Lipman

This feature was originally published in issue 290 of Top Gear magazine