The BMW M3 CSL Intimidated Me, Until I Drove It

It’s the mid-2000s. I’m not sure exactly when, but I can’t be more than six or seven. I’m sitting in the living room, watching a Top Gear rerun. The episode’s a couple of years old; maybe one of those packaged-up ‘Best Of’ DVD compilations. A young – well, younger – Jeremy Clarkson is standing on a quayside on the Isle of Man, walking around a grey BMW.

I can’t quite understand what’s so special about it. It’s not low-slung, or pointy, or red, or Italian, or any of the other things I’d been told made a car special. But then Clarkson points at the tyres, and they don’t look anything like the ones on my dad’s Subaru Legacy. He explains that if you buy one of these BMWs, you have to sign a piece of paper to say you understand that if it’s cold or wet, that rubber won’t work properly. That was the moment my nascent petrolhead brain registered that the E46 BMW M3 CSL was something… different.

It’s October 2024, and I’m standing next to a grey BMW just like the one Clarkson was walking around on the Isle of Man all those years ago. The one that, for years, I knew as the car with tyres that didn’t work properly in cold weather. And this morning was the first since last winter that I had to scrape my car windscreen. Hmmm.

Asymmetry on a car is usually a sign that functionality has taken precedence above all else. The fact that BMW gave the CSL that distinctive round opening on the left-hand side of its bumper, allowing its enormous carbon fibre airbox to greedily suck in air, then didn’t bother fitting a dummy on the other side, says one thing: this car means business.

There’s plenty more of this throughout: the bare carbon roof, the subtly extended ducktail spoiler, the way those delectable lightweight wheels fill the lowered body’s arches, the fact that there were just two unerringly monochrome colour options – Silver Grey or Black Sapphire.

This wilful rejection of embellishment comes together to create an overall design that is – and there’s no PG-friendly way of putting this – fucking awesome. It helps that the standard E46 coupe was a handsome thing, but there’s no angle where the CSL doesn’t ooze subtle, purposeful menace. It doesn’t brashly display its tail feathers like modern M cars – just drops little hints that it’s a predator, not a peacock.

The same goes for the inside. The fixed-back bucket seats don’t proudly carry their maker’s logo, or even the M division crest that would inevitably be embossed into the headrest if it were made today. They’re just… there, inviting you to awkwardly slide your bum over their high bolsters and drop down into them, leaving them gripping your hips and propping you bolt upright.

The steering wheel is just that – a steering wheel. It feels small and thin by modern standards, its rim wrapped in Alcantara. There’s a tiny M badge on the bottom spoke, and a single button marked with a digital O/I symbol. This activates the car’s track mode, loosening up its stability control. It’ll be kept well away from in a British autumn.

There’s nowhere to rest your arms; the central armrest is gone and the usual door cards are replaced by simple exposed carbon fibre pieces. It really is stripped down to the bare minimum, although BMW’s UK heritage car isn’t quite the full road racer – like most of the 422 UK CSLs, it had the boxes ticked for air-con and a radio.

The best example of this car’s functional beauty, though, lies beneath its bonnet. The huge carbon airbox that gives this uprated 3.2-litre S54 straight-six so much of its character is a piece of absolute sculpture. It occupies about half the usable space in the engine bay, and it’s almost a shame it has to spend its days hidden from view. At least you can hear it, though. My word, can you hear it.

Start the CSL, and it settles into a gruff, industrial idle. And now we have to address The Issue; the one point of contention that people have with this car. Because to move off, you don’t depress a clutch and move a manual gearknob up and left, but simply snick the funny little SMG gear selector across to the right.

Trundling around town, the six-speed SMG gearbox – effectively a deconstructed manual, with an automatic, hydraulically-actuated clutch – isn’t great. Quelle surprise. Left in automatic mode, it slurs upshifts and tosses your head back and forth on downshifts. Even at these speeds, though, you can feel the directness of the surprisingly heavy steering rack, and the immediateness of the throttle’s response.

Freed from 30 zones, and once all but the last couple of the little orange lights encircling the rev counter have extinguished to let you know that everything’s up to temperature, the CSL can come properly alive.

The way the engine gathers revs is unlike very few other cars I’ve experienced. It starts off deep and guttural, gets all zingy in the mid-range, and then peaks with an angry, animalistic bark. It’s such a purposeful, authentic noise – there’s nothing artificial, no ostentatious crackles or bangs. It’s as raw and unfiltered as a double espresso, and makes you feel just as tingly and awake.

And then, as you approach 8000rpm, you get to pull the right-hand paddle or nudge the SMG selector backwards and do it all again. I’m not going to pretend this car wouldn’t suit a manual, but the sheer aggression of the SMG feels like part of its character now. High up in the rev range, upshifts wallop you in the back with a jolt that feels like the car violently dissipating all the energy it’s built up.

The CSL had the SMG ’box’s deliciously anorak-ish feature that allowed you to adjust the gearshift ferocity. For the full experience, it’s really worth cranking it up. Downshifts elicit a little yelp of revs, setting you up for the other thing this car’s good at: corners.

Truthfully, the nerves around the CSL’s bite-your-hand-off reputation pretty quickly disappeared. Tyres have come a long way since 2003, and BMW’s car wears some much friendlier Michelin PS4 rubber than the slightly scary PS Cups it left the factory on.

This means you can properly lean on the car’s considerable abilities. In the dry, grip is abundant, and its near-perfect weight distribution keeps everything beautifully balanced. You’re always reminded of the fact that 355bhp is going to the rear wheels, but as long as you don’t get too silly, it never threatens to overwhelm them. The steering, while not super-talkative, is so direct and perfectly weighted that it gives you all the confidence and control to string together a series of twists with utter precision.

And then, when the roads open up, you can indulge a little more in the CSL’s glorious acceleration. 355bhp and 273lb ft was pretty staggering for a 3.2-litre naturally aspirated motor back in 2003. It’s still a lot today, especially in something that weighs a reasonably scant 1385kg – around 100kg less than a standard E46 M3. The 0-62mph time is quoted at 4.9 seconds, and it feels every bit that quick. When the acceleration is so beautifully linear and consistently strong, and accompanied by that soundtrack, it’s more than quick enough.

The CSL feels like the result of BMW packing off its entire accounting team to the south of France for a couple of weeks, and letting its engineers have at it while the bean-counters were distracted. Every little detail feels optimised to be as good as it possibly can – not to please marketing teams or accountants or regulators, but to just burrow straight into the base of your skull, to appeal on an almost animal level.

Cars like this can’t really exist anymore – even in the lightest, most hardcore, track-optimised stuff, the realities of emissions rules and our ever-growing desire for more of everything dulls the tingle created by pure, raw engineering.

The M3 CSL originated in a moment in automotive history that wasn’t going to last for much longer. Perhaps seeing this, BMW threw all of its expertise at it. It’s undoubtedly this nostalgia for the not-so-distant past that’s driven the prices of these things to the silly sphere, and left anyone that picked one up seven or eight years ago, when they were around £30k, laughing.

It’s little surprise that it’s such a sought-after thing, though. The result of the M division giving it their everything is a car as primally exciting, as base-level satisfying, as anything I’ve ever driven, and one utterly deserving of its legendary status.