BILSTER BERG

Some circuits are about outright speed. Others take a little longer to work out.

Bilster Berg is very much the latter.

Tucked away in the Teutoburg Forest in Germany, the circuit is unlike pretty much anywhere else we’ve driven. Built as a private testing and driving facility rather than a traditional race circuit, its 4.2km layout follows the natural contours of the land, with huge elevation changes, blind crests, compressions and corners that seem to disappear just as you arrive at them.

It’s technical, unforgiving and incredibly difficult to learn quickly.

Which made it the perfect place to find out just how good our E92 M3 had become.

We’d made the trip over for the Eventuri Invitational, bringing together cars and people from across Europe, along with a few who had travelled over from the US.

The variety of machinery was ridiculous, but what made the weekend was the atmosphere. Good cars, good people and two days centred around actually driving them.

For us, there was also a target.

Sub two minutes.

Our E92 isn’t some 700bhp time-attack build.

The engine remains essentially stock power and the modifications we’ve made are relatively mild, concentrating instead on making the car work properly on circuit — chassis, suspension, brakes, tyres and all the details that allow you to use what the car already has.

Bilster Berg was going to put all of that to the test.

The first few sessions quickly made one thing obvious: this is a circuit you need to know.

There are sections where you’re committing to corners before you can properly see where they go. Crests hide braking zones and apexes, elevation changes alter the balance of the car, and linking one section together properly can make or destroy the next. It rewards confidence, but that confidence only comes from laps.

Gradually, though, it started coming together.

Braking points moved. Lines tightened. Places where we’d initially lifted became flat, and the stopwatch started heading in the right direction. Then we got it.

A 1:59 lap.

Sub two achieved.

For a stock-power E92 M3 with a relatively straightforward collection of track-focused modifications, that’s proper pace around Bilster Berg — and, more importantly, we knew there was still plenty left in it.

More time learning the circuit would have unlocked considerably more. There were still corners where familiarity rather than the car was the limiting factor, and sections where another day of laps would have given us the confidence to carry more speed.

In some ways, that was probably the most satisfying part of the trip.

We hadn’t reached the limit of the E92. We’d just started discovering where it was.

Away from the track, Eventuri used the weekend to present some of its upcoming products and talk through the history and philosophy behind the company.

Hearing how the brand approaches development was particularly interesting as its catalogue continues expanding into increasingly serious machinery, where manufacturers have already spent enormous amounts of time optimising every detail.

Finding genuine improvements on cars at that level isn't simply a case of making something bigger, louder or prettier.

It means understanding airflow, temperature, packaging and how all of those elements interact — then finding the small opportunities the original engineers either couldn't exploit or had to compromise on.

That obsessive approach to refinement felt pretty appropriate for the weekend.

Bilster Berg itself is a place built around exactly that mentality.

It isn't just a ribbon of tarmac with some garages attached. The entire facility exists around driving, development and extracting more from both car and driver.

And after two days there, you understand why.

We went to Germany wanting to see what our E92 could do.

We came home with a 1:59, a much better understanding of the car and one overriding thought: There’s more in it.