Coupe, Sport, Light: those are the three tenets of BMW’s CSL badging efforts, delivering a level of performance even beyond what the Munich engineers have for the brand’s relatively ordinary M cars. In one Official video posted on YouTube Over the weekend, BMW’s chief stylist, Hans Rahn, took down three CSL prototypes designed from start to finish. Each is really one in oneand although they never got the manufacturing process as you see it, the technology and ideas they created will continue to inform future M machines.
Take, for example, the first car we see: an E46 M3 CSL with a difference, hinted at by the second circular aperture drilled into its front bumper. This is done to increase airflow because this The same M3 happens with the V8 from the E39 M5, good for 425 hp. That works about 65 hp better than the production CSL and 10 hp more than the S65 V8 in the later E92 M3.
There’s also an M-liveried E60 M5 with a carbon roof and a Getrag .-derived dual-clutch transmission before BMW debuted that gearbox on the E92. Here, the M engineers extracted 621 hp from the sports sedan’s 5-liter V10, an improvement of about 120 hp over your typical E60. Sure, it’s not technically a coupe and maybe not even that light, but I think we can ignore the semantics here.
And then there’s the E63 M6 CSL, where the M team pays less attention to the powertrain and more to making the car more stable at high speeds. To achieve this, aerodynamic elements have been added front and rear, in the form of a splitter that descends from just behind the underside of the front bumper, along with a rear spoiler. The wing in particular seems to be a very delicate piece of manufacturing, suggesting that the M crew is treating this not as a skunkworks experiment but as a project that considers the commercial future. commercial. Eagle-eyed enthusiasts will also notice the Doppelsteg-style rearview mirror, a shape that was later incorporated into production M cars.
This is just the first exploration into BMW’s secret CSL garage, as a second part is already planned. It’s interesting that BMW gives us a glimpse of behind the curtain in unprecedented means; More manufacturers should follow.
