Lap of Honour

SOUTH AFRICA HOLDS A SPECIAL SIGNIFICANCE FOR BMW, AND THE M FESTIVAL AT THE COUNTRY’S REVERED KYALAMI RACING CIRCUIT IS OUT TO CELEBRATE IT

- ANDY ENRIGHT

I’M ON A bus, sitting directly behind the driver, listening to him rant splenetically about a tent city that has materialised overnight on the freeway reservation. It’s my first acquaintance with South Africa and it doesn’t disappoint. As we pull up at a set of lights, the driver stops mid-sentence, looks in his rear-view mirror, yells “OH, FOKOFF!” and leaps out of the vehicle. An overweight gentleman is attempting to waddle off into the oncoming traffic with a suitcase he’s liberated from the bus’s luggage compartment. We’re here to sample BMW’s M Festival at Kyalami. Seems Johannesburg is here to sample us.

Truth be told, I didn’t have a clue what the BMW M Festival even was. I was furnished with two pieces of information, namely that it would be held at the historic Kyalami racetrack and that the boss of BMW’s M division, Markus Flasch, would be there, which was more than enough to pique my interest.

The program turned out to be relatively straightforward. There was a media day on the Friday, when we had the run of Kyalami, and then the festival opened to the public for the weekend and turned into a brand-building exercise the like of which I’d never witnessed. We arrived on Wednesday, drove a rather pedestrian off-road course in an X5 on the Thursday, and by Friday cabin fever had already set in at the off-world colony that is the Sandton Sun hotel.