BMW reveals ‘clown shoe’ homage
BMW is pretty good at concept cars. We’ve had the gorgeous 3.0 CSL Hommage, the equally pretty 2002 Hommage, and now the Bavarian maker has tipped its hat to the weird-but-kinda-cool Z3 M Coupe from 1997.
Colloquially known as the ‘‘clown shoe’’, the Z3 M Coupe featured a shooting brake design as a two-door hatchback with a long bonnet.
It wasn’t a bad car, but the design was divisive and 15,322 Z3 M Coupe’s were produced globally from 1997 to 2002. If you’re lucky enough to have one with an S54 engine, keep it because those are one of the lowest production BMWs with only 1112 built in total for all markets.
As a nod to the clown shoe, BMW has built a one-off Z4-based concept called the ‘‘Concept Touring Coupe’’, revealing the car on the shores of Lake Como in Italy.
The donor is a Z4 M40i, meaning power comes from a turbocharged 3.0-litre straight-six offering 285kW/500Nm. Obvious changes include the deletion of the soft-top roof for a hardtop with a Hofmeister kink at the rear window.
It’s more angular than the Z3 M Coupe but you can still see a clown shoe in the profile if you hoping for a modern-day Z4 M, BMW doesn’t have plans to put the Touring Coupe into production.
But, if you’ve got enough zeroes in the back account (before the period),BMW group design director Adrian van Hooydonk said at a media roundtable at the Villa d’Este Concorso d’Eleganza that ‘‘. . . we made the agreement before we set sail for Lake Como that, if there’s enough interest, we will take a look at it. That could be a very low-volume version, like 50 cars or so.’’
Apparently, two or three people have expressed interest in the car at the unveiling. However, the process is not quite as simple as ‘‘take the concept and build more of them’’.
‘‘Typically, when you do a low volume, and we did that with the 3.0 CSL Hommage, you have to be smart about how you do it. You cannot cycle it through the factory. That’s impossible. They cannot deal with that low volume,’’ van Hooydonk said.
‘‘So, you have to do it outside of your production structures, and you have to have several companies that help you with various pieces and then final assembly and quality control you do in-house. So that’s how we did it with the 3.0 CSL.’’
The 3.0 CSL Hommage saw production this year as the M3-based 3.0 CSL.