I’m writing this a few days after they’ve just launched the “much awaited” 3.0 CSL. I say “much awaited” in quotes, because at €750 000.00 a piece with a limited run of only 50, there are not many people who are going to get their hands on one of these, and probably even less people in the automotive industry who will get to drive or photograph one of these rarities. So, this is a car that will be kept quite far away from mere commoners like myself, hence not many people to get all too worked up over its launch.
Excuse the digression. There is a roundabout point I am going to get to, and my mentioning the CSL will make sense. Eventually. You see, the CSL is effectively a G82 M4 that has been rebodied in all carbon fibre, has a manual gearbox and RWD. And why do I need to mention that? Well, the current generation M3 and M4 caused quite a bit of controversy amongst M-Division fans for the new front end grill design. It must be said that there are those who hate it, and those who love it, but having dipped my own toes in the waters that are car-related-internet-controversies, it definitely feels like there is a hell of a lot more hate out there for these cars’ aesthetics than there is love. I must say that personally, I am very much more on the hate side of the fence than I am the love side. I think the car(s) as a whole look fantastic, but that grill is some other kind of hideous…
BMW has caused its fair share of upset among its own aficionados. First, it was their step away from the in-line 6 cylinder in the E92 M3. After that, it was the switch to forced induction with the F80 / F82, many years after one of the M-Division’s top-brass had stated quite strongly that “BMW will never turbocharge an M-Car” or something to that effect. At the same time, with these same models, BMW upset fans even more by introducing the “M4” badge for the coupe variant of the M3. In due time, most of the fans that voiced their complaints found things to love about these cars, and the cars ended up being accepted as part of the ever-expanding community of M-Cars.
Now, back to the fiasco with the new grill. The squabbles never seem to end, and I doubt they ever will, and that's fine by me. Chances are I will never own an M, so I keep my disdain to myself. But…that grill I mentioned. What does it have to do with today’s post? Well, you see, the cars pictured here are the last of the Ms to carry the “kidney” grill, which has been a hallmark of BMW since day one. That’s it? That’s it!
I went on a whole entire ramble about the new CSL, the anger every new M stoked amongst its fans, and how ugly the new grill is, only to introduce you to these pictures? Why, yes, yes I did.
The thing is that I shot these photos for BMW South Africa about 8 years ago for the launch of the M3 / M4 to the South African market. The current hype around the CSL is what triggered my mind to think of these again, so I decided to make a blog post about them.
The pictures were shot at Kyalami, South Africa’s most well known racetrack, and one time contender for the 2023 F1 season, at the end of June on two rather crisp Johannesburg mornings. The wondrous thing about winter in Johannesburg is that we are guaranteed good weather. It may be a little cold, but we are assured of sunshine and blue skies. It was a pretty standard shoot with both cars, meaning exteriors of various kinds, interiors of various kinds and two locations apiece. For the sake of this post, I will leave the other, non racetrack, locations aside and focus only on the racetrack images.
The automotive industry in South Africa was, when I was still working there, fairly conservative in its expectations of what press photos should look like. The desired pictures were clean and clear, not overly expressive in their use of lighting or locations, and needed to show the product in as good a light as possible. This was the case not only with BMW, but with many of the other manufacturers as well. There is nothing inherently wrong with this type of photography, except that as a photographer I often felt a little boxed in, with little room for creative expression. Because I had the brief in mind at the time of shooting, I would generally not really shoot anything too “out there” anyway, and as such would end up with a set of rather unadventurous photos. Even when I did have some images that were a little outside the fold, I would not edit them or submit them to the client, in this case BMW. That is what I want to do with these photos. Even though they aren’t the craziest or most exciting, the images I am sharing here, are images that I never submitted to BMW, because the angles were perhaps a little too much, the car was not shown well enough, or there was too much flare (and boy does this set have a lot of flary images).
So, that’s about it. A long-winded excuse to share some photos I shot almost a decade ago. But hey, if the photos are good, and worth sharing, then I’ll find any reason to do so.
With all that being said, here you go: Photos of the last of the pretty M3s (oh, and M4s).
EDIT: This was originally written shortly after the release of the new CSL, but only published towards the end of January 2023.