Meet your heroes: is the BMW M3 CSL still a performance car great in 2025?

The night before I finally drove the most fawned over and respected M3 of all time, I relived the moment I became infatuated with it. This ‘moment’ is 10 minutes and 34 seconds long, and a kindly pirate has lobbed it onto YouTube. It’s a review of a 110kg lighter ‘superfast’ version of the BMW M3 from 2 November 2003, from a BBC motoring show called Top Gear.

I was 12, so Jeremy’s jibes about unnecessary traction control and the legality of semi-slick tyres flew over my head. Two things stuck to me. First, the location. The test was shot on the Isle of Man, as Clarkson drew an allegory between the island’s Blair-defying, speed limit-shunning rejection of bureaucracy and the hardcore CSL’s two-fingered salute to the nanny state.

Second? The noise. That razor-edged metallic bark of induction roar that sounded as if you were watching the whole thing unfold from inside the 3.2-litre straight six’s carbon fibre air box.

Photography: Olgun Kordal

I’ve waited 22 years for today. You barely ever see a CSL on the road: only 1,383 were ever made and they’re now deemed too valuable to be risked on the public highway or the track days they were bred for. I’ve never sat in one, never even fogged up the glass peering within and wondering what it’d be like to nestle in that bucket seat. Hold on to that thick suede steering wheel. Maybe even drive it.

This isn’t the Isle of Man. But Exmoor is doing a convincing impression of a rock in the Irish sea today – it’s gusty with lashings of rain and 100 per cent cloud cover at a height of three feet. The CSL arrives on a transporter, running late because the truck driver thought there’d been some kind of administrative error. “He wants the one with no tyre tread? The really rare one? In this? Are you sure?”

As it rolls off the truck it’s striking that the CSL... isn’t. In 2003 this hunkered-down, carbon-roofed coupe was the most butch Beemer ever. Compared to today’s beavertooth M3 and the unutterable horror of the iX and XM, the elegant E46 shape is so classy, adorned with CSL upgrades only true M people spot. Asymmetric bumper porthole, that ducktail, those Y-spoke rims.

I’m stalling because there’s a chance this day could become a disappointment – 355bhp is today’s hot hatch territory. Time has not been kind to the early 2000’s obsession with semi-automated flappy paddle gearboxes – the uncanny valley of lightning shift transmissions before dual clutchers revolutionised cog swapping. There’s now a buoyant trade in actually swapping BMW’s clunky SMG box out for a traditional manual.

It feels narrow, and responsive in a way a modern M car, even with all that tech, can’t fake

I wouldn’t. Partly because it’s such a crucial part of the CSL’s character – you have to drive it with consideration, lifting the throttle for each upshift. And partly because the CSL is the bridge between BMW glory days of old and the genesis of the modern configurable M car – all choices, modes and settings. This was the first M to offer switchable shift speeds. Dial it up to the max, then blip the pedal as the needle passes the warm orange lights at the screaming 7,900rpm red line. Yep. It’s exactly as joyously raw, flawed and rewarding as I wanted it to be.

What was in 2003 a rock hard road racer is today leany through turns. But it feels narrow, and responsive in a way a modern M car, even with all that tech, can’t fake. It’s wearing the modern successor to the infamous near slick Michelin Pilot Sport Cups it was sold on, so sploshing down the B3223 still presents an ever present aquaplane danger, but I’ve seen, heard and felt enough to know this is still an all time great street car.

With prices now firmly in ‘POA’ nonsense territory, today’s washout is probably my only chance to bond with a CSL. Still, there’s always a set of headphones and YouTube...