I’M ON A bus, sitting directly behind the driver, listening to him rant splenetically about a tent city that has materialised overnight on the freeway reservation. It’s my first acquaintance with South Africa and it doesn’t disappoint. As we pull up at a set of lights, the driver stops mid-sentence, looks in his rear-view mirror, yells “OH, FOKOFF!” and leaps out of the vehicle. An overweight gentleman is attempting to waddle off into the oncoming traffic with a suitcase he’s liberated from the bus’s luggage compartment. We’re here to sample BMW’s M Festival at Kyalami. Seems Johannesburg is here to sample us.
Truth be told, I didn’t have a clue what the BMW M Festival even was. I was furnished with two pieces of information, namely that it would be held at the historic Kyalami racetrack and that the boss of BMW’s M division, Markus Flasch, would be there, which was more than enough to pique my interest.
The program turned out to be relatively straightforward. There was a media day on the Friday, when we had the run of Kyalami, and then the festival opened to the public for the weekend and turned into a brand-building exercise the like of which I’d never witnessed. We arrived on Wednesday, drove a rather pedestrian off-road course in an X5 on the Thursday, and by Friday cabin fever had already set in at the off-world colony that is the Sandton Sun hotel.
This story is from the March 2020 edition of Wheels Australia Magazine.
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This story is from the March 2020 edition of Wheels Australia Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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