Projects

Push the start button and the car immediately explodes to life with the aural chaos of about eight oil drums full of flashbangs hurled down an enclosed metal staircase. Just after everyone around it involuntarily blurts an expletive, the ripped little Benz finds a bassy idle that transmits through the soles of your shoes and into your bones. It’s impossible to forget that the big supercharged V8 moves a lot of air, even before you’re sitting in the driver’s seat.

This is the one-of-one Mercedes-Benz C63 DTM Evolution, the unholy spawn of a pokey old 1985 Mercedes-Benz 190E sedan and a 2010 C63 AMG—the body of the former, the complete guts of the latter, with a fully custom interior whose astounding quality could shame most OEMs. Strapped in and behind the wheel, my only instructions are to hold back until the oil comes up to temperature. Given the intimidating noises the thing is already making, that sounds like a perfectly fine plan.

The idea behind this project was to build the ultimate BMW using the best of the best from their line up. Some may argue whether or not the E30 M3 had much to improve on in the first place. Of course, it didn’t! The E30 M3 is and always will be a great performer in factory trim and truly is a classic. We’ve simply used the E30 M3 as a platform to build a whole new breed of the BMW M series.

To start we stripped the car of everything suspension, engine and drive train related and trashed it. KIDDING… we sold it to a few lucky E30 owners. But come to think of it, nothing except a few body panels and interior trim remain. That was the easy part.