CSL

Coupe, sport, lightweight. Only two cars in BMW's history have earned the CSL badge. How does the third stack up?

- OLLIE MARRIAGE

Photographic studios are resourceful places. If you look hard you can find enough clobber to make the basic layout of a car: four seats, hi-fi, steering wheel, stepladder as a centre console, vacuum as the motor, cable reel to represent the electrics, there's a fan in there, a child seat, a broom, helmet, oil can and more besides. Admittedly it got more tenuous. The point is this: that pile you see in the top right photo on the page opposite weighs 100kg. Exactly. I know this because I took my bathroom scales along.

And that's how much weight BMW took out of the standard M4 to create the new CSL. It's a lot, isn't it? Although as we all know, the latest M4 is no flyweight and even with all the subtraction that's gone on, this new car still weighs 1,625kg - a quarter of a tonne more than the last car to wear this, the most hallowed badge in the BMW pantheon.

The first was the E9 3.0 CSL back in 1972. BMW wanted to race in the European Touring Car Championship, so the CSL was the homologation car created to aid that plan. Even at a distance of 50 years, you'll recognise the weight-saving strategy: aluminium doors, bonnet and boot, Perspex windows, the electric windows were ditched, so too various bits of trim and sound-proofing. It worked; 1,265 were made and the CSL won the driver's championship six times during the Seventies.

Hard to say why the badge then lay dormant until 2003. With the E30 M3 BMW favoured the EVO tag, then GT for the E36. CSL returned with the E46 M3. Seminal is a word often bandied about around that car, the first to have a carbon roof (saving 7kg of the 110kg total), plus a carbon airbox for an intake snarl like nothing else. The definitive M car, many reckon, the best there's ever been.