Article Summary
- The M3 CS Touring averaged 28mpg over 489 motorway miles on day one, then spent the following day doing passenger laps at Anglesey before driving straight to Edinburgh — without any complaints from the car.
- The carbon ceramic brakes glowed red through repeated hard laps during a night track session and never faded, underlining why Harris rates the CS so far above a standard M3 remap.
- At £140,000 it's double the price of a standard M3 Touring, but Harris thinks it'll hold its value — a pure, non-hybrid performance estate that BMW M is unlikely to build again.
Chris Harris woke up in Dubai, flew to the UK, loaded up a British Racing Green BMW M3 CS Touring, drove to North Wales, spent a day lapping Anglesey at night for charity, then drove to Edinburgh. He called it a test. Most people would call it a breakdown waiting to happen. The car costs around £140,000. His opening verdict: possibly the best all-round performance car ever made.
The trip starts at 8pm with Harris running on roughly 20 hours of travel. The destination is Anglesey Circuit, where Mission Motorsport where Harris shows us why the M3 CS Touring is THE M car to buy today. Getting there meant 489 motorway miles. The CS averaged 28mpg with no particular effort at economy. Harris’s main complaint on the drive wasn’t fatigue or the winter weather — it was that BMW deleted the cup holders when they built the Competition up into a CS. They also took out the center armrest. That’s in line with most complaints about the CS models.
The fixed bucket seats, which look like instruments of suffering, turned out to be fine hour after hour. Better than fine — Harris reckons they’re more comfortable over distance than the standard chairs.
The track day
At Anglesey, Harris pushed the car through passenger lap after passenger lap, eventually into the dark. The carbon ceramic brakes glowed red and kept working. No fade, no long pedal. It’s a 1,800kg estate doing repeated hard laps through the night, and the brakes just didn’t care. At 9pm the event finished. Harris loaded the boot and drove to Edinburgh.
That’s really what the whole video is about. Five hours after leaving the circuit, the car was cruising north of the border. The 14.5mpg average from the track day is what it is, but the fact it could go from that straight to a motorway run without skipping a beat is what Harris keeps returning to.
What’s good, what isn’t
The suspension is the big upgrade over the standard M3. Harris is clear that you can remap an ordinary M3’s engine and get similar power figures, but the CS chassis tune isn’t something you can just replicate. The throttle response is sharper too — the kind of thing that tends to get blunted when tuners chase headline numbers at the expense of feel. The boot is well thought out. Heated floor for dogs, rear seats that fold from the boot area, a towing eye tucked in a little bag in a cubby. Practical in a way that suggests someone on the engineering team actually uses touring cars.
On the price
At £140,000, the CS Touring is expensive in a way that’s hard to argue with a straight face. A standard M3 Touring is around £70,000 and is, by most measures, a very good car. The CS costs double and comes with fewer places to put your morning coffee. But Harris suspects these will hold their value. Given what happened to E46 M3 prices, that’s not obviously wrong. And honestly, this car even at a high price point would sell like hot cakes in America….
