A day in the life of a BMW M3 CS Touring owner

The new BMW M3 CS Touring is the track-focussed estate car which could be a petrolhead’s dream daily. For the hefty sum of £126,300, over £34,000 more than the standard M3 Touring, you get a family wagon which can do 186mph and keep up with purpose-built race cars on a track.

So who is going to buy this car? Well I spent a day with the new M3 CS Touring, sampling it both on the road and at Thruxton race circuit to get a really good idea of what this thing can do. This is what I reckon a day in the life of an average BMW M3 CS Touring owner looks like.

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On the to-do list you have the school run at 8am, and Vanos – your young Alsatian – needs dropping off at the groomers by 9am. From there you hot-foot it to Thruxton circuit, where you have a track day booked in until 3pm when it’s time to pick up the kids, the dog and head home. It’s a pretty packed day, so let’s get on with it.

Loading the kids into the back is a breeze, with plenty of space back there for child seats, and the estate car body makes it easy to carry even the largest of dogs. While you’re fighting through rush hour, you can have the gearbox in its least aggressive setting to make it nice and smooth in stop-start traffic.

Jumping in and out of the car as you drop the kids and the dog off is a bit of a pain, because the massive carbon bucket seats aren’t the easiest to get in and out of. With everyone unloaded from the car, you have a B-road blast to Thruxton.

A lot of performance cars are so ballistically fast that you can’t have fun with them on the road, but happily the M3 CS Touring strikes a good balance. The 3.0-litre twin-turbocharged straight-six puts out 550hp, and 0-60mph takes 3.4 seconds. It sounds great, too.

There’s an incredible amount of grip thanks to a handful of suspension upgrades, and the gearshifts are tweaked as well to make them faster and more aggressive. It really adds to the sense of occasion.

For bumpy UK roads you’ll want to leave the suspension in comfort mode, even if you’re driving spiritedly, because anything firmer makes it a bit more difficult to control as the car skips around. You do get a great sense of what’s going on beneath you though – it’s a properly involving car to hustle down a twisty road.

So you’ve now warmed up the car and have arrived at Thruxton, the fastest race circuit in the UK. This isn’t the sort of place you expect to see an estate car, and you should probably remember to take the kid’s booster seats out so they don’t get flung around.

Once you emerge onto the track, you start to get a sense of what the BMW M3 CS Touring can really do. With everything in its most aggressive setting, it will take corners at speeds you wouldn’t even dream of in any other family car, and this is where those super-grippy seats start to make sense as they hold you firmly in place.

I went out onto the track with an instructor, who was telling me to keep my foot down at points where my instincts were screaming “BRAKE, BRAKE”. But even as you come into a corner at over 100mph, you can feel the suspension working away beneath you to keep the car flat and maximise grip. It’s sensational.

Even when I did manage to come into a corner a bit too quickly, the massive carbon ceramic brakes were there to bail me out. One firm stamp on the pedal and you’ll lose speed even more quickly than this car gains it, which inspires plenty of confidence.

After a few laps you could be fooled into thinking you were driving a BMW M4 CS, but then you glance at your rear-view mirror and see a vast expanse of glass and boot space which reminds you that you need to leave the track to go and pick the kids up from school.

At this point, you’ve probably had your fill of adrenaline for the day and just want to cruise home in peace. Well thankfully, the M3 CS Touring isn’t so hardcore that it’ll shake your teeth out. Obviously, it’s not as comfortable or as quiet as a standard M3 Competition, but despite the firm edge to the suspension it’s pretty compliant over bumps.

The term “all-rounder” can be used a bit too flippantly these days – after all, everyone has different wants and needs from their car. The BMW M3 CS Touring, however, is about as close to the perfect all-rounder as I’ve ever driven.

It may be quite expensive to buy, but there is no other car which can serve as a motorway commuter, a family wagon, a tip run car and a bona-fide track day weapon which can frighten even the most hardcore cars on a circuit. If you have the means to buy one, just do it.

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