It wasn’t exactly my plan to be writing an update on my BMW M3 so soon after the last. It was only in January that I wrote about retiring it from daily use after it spent much of last year being painted, refreshed and polished to a high shine. Yet, as is usually the way with ageing cars, another curve ball was thrown my way.
In my previous M3 article, I told you how cathartic it had been to be reunited and back behind the wheel of my beloved E46 and how excited I had been for many more miles and adventures. I had just driven it back from High Caliber’s workshop where it had lived for a number of months while it had cosmetic work done, and dropped it off into storage as, unfortunately, the number of cars in the Fidalgo fleet has now surpassed the number of neighbours willing to rent out their parking spaces for a non-extortionate monthly fee.
As the car had been off the road for so long, there were some big red circles looming on the calendar in the way of tax, MOT and servicing. Usually, I would have no issue trusting these jobs to our local family-owned workshop, but given so much work had been done to the car aesthetically, I thought I should treat its mechanicals with the same respect. After all, beauty is only skin deep.
