M3L

I was in love with the E46 M3 ever since I played Need for Speed: Most Wanted, where the hero car was the E46 M3 GTR with the V8 and straight-cut gears that made a high-pitched whine as the car entered the higher RPMs. Even though getting your hands on one of those is impossible, that didn’t stop 8-year-old me from falling in love with every body line of the E46 M3 available to the public. The car was perfectly proportioned and balanced, with 50/50 weight distribution, 333 horsepower, and about 260 ft-lbs of torque. While the numbers were not huge, anyone who has ever driven this car will tell you that you can use all of it with confidence, allowing you to wring every ounce of speed this machine is capable of.

When I was around 13-14, slowly getting into the racing scene in my dad’s commuter Civic, I told my dad that this car was going to be my first car. He scoffed and said, “Sure, if you can buy it yourself.” I accepted the challenge, and by age 17, after working in a convenience store nearly full-time unloading trucks throughout high school, I had saved up enough money. Then the pandemic hit, sinking used-car prices. I drove with my dad to Pasadena and bought the car in cash. It was a 2005 model year, in mint condition, with 63k miles, in the exact color I wanted: Carbon Black Metallic.

From there, I felt myself connect with a machine the same way I would a human being. M3L was with me for every major milestone of my life since the age of 17, from high school graduation, to my first girlfriend, to dogfights on the touge, and every drive flying through my thoughts just to clear my head. Not to mention the color: a deep midnight blue that was black at night but a shimmering dark blue in direct sunlight. The best way I can describe the color is emotional, and pictures do not do it justice.

Learning how to truly drive this car was what I imagine jazz musicians felt like when they could finally express their emotions through the saxophone.

Surgery

Ever since I owned the car, it has been a labor of love to keep it on the road because, in typical BMW fashion, these cars break and need love to remain in competitive condition. Any dollars I could scrape together between internships and odd jobs were spent on car parts to lower the suspension to a competitive stance, and to hunt for rare racing-spec parts, like the equal length headers that give the car a sound reminiscent of an air raid siren.

With slim pockets and an addiction to how this car makes me feel, I had to keep it on the road at all costs. So when it inevitably broke, I also found myself doing surgery on the car to bring it back to life, more often than I would like. But god, was all the work fun. Every turn of the wrench and every bolt broken felt like painting, bringing me one step closer to soaring through the mountains, making every step of the journey cinematic.

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What It Becomes

Once funds permit, I am excited to finish the car. My vision is to build M3L specifically for the touge. I want to remove the driver’s side headlight and replace it with a hole directly into the intake for better airflow into the CSL airbox, which I would also add. I’d also want KW V3 coilovers, which would be nice for the additional freedom to adjust damping and ride height, with black two-piece Work Meister SP1 wheels with a chrome lip, eleven inches in the rear, ten in the front. I feel like Japanese wheels on a German car are the only way to go. Oh, and I would add a light bar on the lower grill to help light the road on the mountain, where there are no street lights.

Once I blow the engine, or world events make it necessary, I would swap in an LS3 Corvette V8 and take the car in an entirely new direction, inspired by the Ghost Camaro driven by Danish special forces veteran Helge Meyer.

You may ask, “What does touge mean?” It translates to mountain pass in Japanese. Japanese drivers would race each other up and down tight single-lane mountain passes for the fastest time and for the reputation of their drivers’ clubs. This style of driving was made famous by the anime Initial D.

For this style of driving, you could not track spec your car, as you were on a public road with dips, potholes, and wildlife, not a prepped track, so driving a car nearly scraping the ground would not be wise. Traditionally, corners were very tight, so high power numbers would be a huge disadvantage. What you wanted to build was a light and nimble car that could take corners as fast as possible.

I would race with one of my childhood best friends, Preston, who drives the stage 2 Audi A4 in the videos. This quickly became our obsession, as you can see us chasing each other on our local touge, Lake Berryessa. The run starts in a small town called Winters and ends in Napa. It contains everything from elevation changes to tight corners and straights, with many corners featuring sheer drops. From start to finish, the run is equal to more than two laps of the Nürburgring, non-stop and without a prepped road. So you could imagine, building a car that consistently survives it is a definite challenge.

After taking a friend, who owned a newer BMW with a tune, on a run up the mountain in the passenger seat of my fighter jet, he said that there was only one word that could describe my car:

Violent.

Here are some clips of my favorite sections of the touge from M3L’s cockpit. The ones in daylight are with the racing-spec headers installed. Pay attention to how I am turning the wheel and how the air freshener moves, to give you a sense of speed in the corners. This might give you an idea of why I do what I do, but truly, videos don’t do it justice at all. You’ll just have to come on a run with me.