The engineers at BMW’s M Division could hardly have known their M3 – initially a by-product of the company’s racing ambitions – would anchor a decades-long dynasty on road and track. The very first M3, known as the E30, was produced as a homologation special: a road-going version built specifically to allow BMW to enter a full-fat race car bearing its resemblance in the DTM series. Not a bad move, considering it went on to become the championship’s most successful race car of all time.
It was a Frenchman who coined the phrase “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, but a quick look at the M3’s lineage suggests the Germans were listening in. The neat, friendly styling of the earlier E30, E36 and E46 generations hinted at their youthful, playful driving dynamics, before the approach was turned on its head in 2007 with the arrival of the monstrous, V8-powered E92. The squared-off bodywork of the first M3s gave way to the angry, flared shapes of the E92, F80 and G80, with an equivalent shift in driving manners.
While enthusiasts can argue in circles about this evolution, the M3’s DNA has never wavered: more performance than it has any right to, with almost no compromise on day-to-day liveability. Forty years on, the car has outlasted trends, rivals and entire segments of the market. What it has built along the way, perhaps more than any performance car of its era, is a community.
With three generations of M3 (an E36, E46 CSL and G81 Touring) offered to me by the team at BMW Australia, I found myself in the thick of the travelling circus that is the Targa Classica. A four-day rally paying homage to Italy’s storied Targa Florio and Mille Miglia, stretched across 1,200 kilometres of meticulously planned Victorian roads. Ninety drivers and their navigators got behind the wheel of cars ranging from moving barn-finds to the sharpest two-door machinery fresh out of Modena. But for BMW, and for the M3’s 40th, the Targa was in many ways more reunion than rally.