Munich has created a modern reinterpretation of a car an ace Kiwi took to famous ‘Ring victory.

WHAT chance New Zealand will snare at least one example of the latest BMW M product, which stands as a tribute to a legendary 1970s’ racing car whose success was very much down to a Kiwi star of the period?

Based on the current BMW M4, the 3.0 CSL that has just been unveiled in Germany as part of the M Division’s 50th anniversary celebrations is being billed as the "most exclusive special model the company (BMW M) has ever produced", with just 50 examples set to be built.

Each is a homage to the old 3.0 CSL, a phenomenally successful racing car in its day, winning the first European Touring Car Championship in 1973, followed by five more wins from 1975 to 1979.

Drivers recruited by BMW included Niki Lauda, Hans-Joachim Stuck … and Chris Amon.

The Scott’s Ferry-born legend raced the type six times in its primary year and, importantly, partnered with Stuck to claim the car’s maiden win, the 1973 Nurburgring Six Hour – also the first race in which it won with its most famous feature, the rear wing that earned it the nickname ‘Batmobile’.

Four years before his death in 2016, Amon was reunited with the very same car, ‘No.12’, when BMW brought it out of the factory museum in Munich so it could feature at the 2012 NZ Festival of Motor Racing, which specifically celebrated the Bavarian brand. No.12 is fleetingly seen in the video here.

In an interview with NZ Classic Car magazine that can be found online, Amon recalled how he was roped into the drive through March, with which he had signed to race in Formula One. BMW was March’s engine supplier and the thought was that, if Amon raced the CSL, March would get a good deal.

As it turned out, Amon never drove for March F1 – the arrangement turned sour before the season’s first race – but he had a fruitful year with BMW under team manager Jochen Neerpasch, a friend from after they’d worked together with Carroll Shelby in 1964, two years before Amon and Bruce McLaren won Le Mans’ in the Ford GT40.

Amon’s international career until then had been varied: from all sorts of single seaters in Formula One plus sports racers like the GT40, Ferrari 330 P4 and McLaren Can Am cars, among others.

He recalled how the CSL was nonetheless very different to anything he’d raced until then, but he learned the ropes from Stuck. “What I did learn from Hans is that you had to go bloody quickly to be on his level.”

Stuck, in turn, would say some years later than the Kiwi who found his feet in NZ motorsport driving a Maserati 250F and became a favourite of Enzo Ferrari was: “The best driver I ever shared with. I learned a lot from him.”

Amon was hardly highly-familiar with the CSL when they went into the headline event in Germany. His first drive had only been at practice in Austria for the four-hour Salzburg race, the second event on the 1973 calendar after Monza. "Then it snowed so they cancelled the race. I can't remember doing a lot of testing after that,” he told the NZ Herald’s Alistair Sloane.

They missed the next race at Sweden's Mantorp Park. Next was the Nurburgring.

CSLs finished one, two and three. Niki Lauda grabbed pole, set the fastest lap, and came in third. Dutchman Toine Hezemans, Austrian Dieter Quester, and German Harald Menzel took second place, eight seconds behind Amon and Stuck.

"I was still getting used to the car," Amon recounted to Sloane. "Stuck was very good and the worst thing is to be slower than your teammate. The next (24-hour) race at Spa gave me the chance to have two- and three-hours stints at the wheel. Then I was sort of on the pace."

It’s that history, and the regard in which a road car version of that time that was also highly-regarded - due to its aero and light weight of 1270kg – that references the new car.

The design cues drawn from the old CSL are immediately apparent when looking at the new one, the most obvious being that big rear wing, enclosed on the sides, aimed at keeping as much downforce as possible over the rear axle.

The wheel arches are heavily flared, too, housing centre-locked forged light alloy wheels in a gold colour (20-inch at the front, 21-inch at the rear) shod in specially-developed Michelin tyres. The grille has also seen work and is less toothy than the standard M4.

The original CSL used aluminium for many of its panels. The new one uses carbon fibre. The roof, bonnet, boot lid, front and rear aprons, side sills, rear diffuser and spoiler, are all made from the lightweight material, giving the CSL a healthy power-to-weight ratio of 2.9kg per unit of horsepower.

The kilo-culling continues inside the new car. The rear seats are ousted, replaced by to a storage shelf (ideal for stowing helmets on track days, the company says) and most interior parts are fashioned from carbon fibre trim. It gets carbon bucket seats. Engraved into the carbon-fibre trim is the sequential number of each example of the CSL.

For all its sophistication, the 3.0 CSL takes a distinctly old-school approach, utilising a six-speed manual gearbox and sending all the power from the straight-six engine to the rear wheels.

And there's a lot of power, too – 418kW (the original 3.5-litre had 250kW) and 550Nm of torque - making this the most powerful six-cylinder BMW road car yet. The engine features beefed-up cooling and oil supply systems to enable it to be used to its full potential on the track.

The car has an Active M differential to allow torque to the wheels to be regulated and dispensed based on the conditions and driver's preferences. The suspension and its electronically-controlled dampers are adjustable. The feel of the carbon-ceramic brakes (with six-piston callipers up front) can be tweaked as well.

BMW has yet to hare full performance figures. The original car was good for about 275kmh at the Norschliefe.

While BMW hasn't announced pricing for the 3.0 CSL yet, it has said that each example takes around three months of work to build.

There’s another twist the tale. For its own celebration of 50 years of M, held in Auckland last weekend, BMW New Zealand gathered road and race cars significant to the brand’s history.

Front and centre of that display was a reproduction of the original CSL, built by a Manawatu enthusiast, Jonathan Hogg. On the weekend prior to the M show, he’d taken his pride in its first big race meeting, the biggest national annual gathering of historic racing cars, the MG Classic.

The venue for the event? Manfeild, Circuit Chris Amon. The Feilding track designed by Amon was renamed in his memory four months after his death, at age 73.