The Car BMW Forgot to Build

When Zürich engineer Lukas Baumann first heard rumors of a “ghost CSL” abandoned in a cattle barn above Lake Thun, he assumed it was the usual folklore Swiss mechanics tell over beer. But there it was: a sun-faded, roofless E9 3.0 CSL — decapitated by an unknown 1970s coachbuilder experimenting far outside Munich’s rulebook.

Most restorers would have welded a roof back on and chased originality. But Lukas remembered Bob Lutz’s famous insistence that BMW should be “the ultimate driving machine.” So instead of recreating what once was, he decided to build the car BMW should have dared to make.

He slipped in a modern M4 engine, stiffened the chassis with hidden reinforcements, and reshaped the soft top after obscure coachbuilt prototypes whispered about in Bavaria but never acknowledged. He kept the CSL’s spirit — long hood, shark nose, and that elegant beltline — but gave it the reflexes of a predator born fifty years later.

Now, after its reinvention, the car sits outside a Bernese Oberland chalet at dusk — silver against the peaks, exhaust ticking as it cools, looking entirely factory and entirely impossible. A myth rescued not by restoration, but by imagination.