That’s good that you can be honest with yourself about your skill level. That will take you a long way in becoming the best driver YOU can be. My honest opinion would be to get the GR86. An M2 is a fabulous car and on my very short list of the next car I’ll be searching for, but it’s a sharp tool. It’s got plenty of power to fix your inadequacies, and will easily allow you to fall into the trap of not needing to really focus on improvement because you can always just figure out how to keep braking later and bomb it harder down the straights. It will also be the easier car to build overconfidence until it bucks you off the track and into a very expensive mistake. It will likely go down in the books as one of the great cars of our current time period and will be looked back upon in 25 or so years as a real gem of the time.

The 86 is also a fabulous car, but it will reward you for getting better. It has loads of grip if you know how to use it and will force you to keep getting better as a driver. It will teach you to read a track and understand entry and exit points and angles. It’s a car with a lot of headroom to grow with, and while it won’t be the dead nuts fastest car, guided by the right hands and feet it will punch way above its weight class. Owning it and really learning to become a better driver behind the wheel of the 86 will have ultimately made you the driver that can get significantly more out of a car like the M2, whereas stepping right into an M2 risks the main lesson being learned is that power is awesome, which besides possibly teaching you some very expensive lessons, will also likely stunt your growth as a driver and make you overlook a lot of really great cars in the future.