Is BMW's Hommage R racer the finest concept of 2015 so far?

Oh, to have been the marketing man for BMW of North America in 1975. Your employer has just launched its first volley of non-European sales, managing to time its debut Stateside with the recent oil crisis fallout.

The sickly dollar ought to have favoured the new imports, but Americans got cold feet about buying automobiles for the first time since the Wall Street Crash. The crisis could’ve sunk BMW in what was then world’s biggest car market without a trace. BMW’s Don Drapers must’ve been weeping into their oversized ties.

Then came the BMW 3.0 CSL. The Batmobile. One of the ultimate expressions of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’. BMW’s shark-nosed upstart won the 12 Hours of Sebring on its first attempt, mere weeks into the 1975 International Motor Sports Association GT championship. Not until McLaren stunned the prototypes at Le Mans two decades later would racing see the formbook shredded in quite such an unprecedented fashion.

The Batmobile rammed home its credentials with victories around Laguna Seca, Daytona and Talladega. That’s like Accrington Stanley gaining promotion, securing Champions League football then winning away at Barcelona and Real Madrid.

BMW had won America’s premier sports-car race series first time out, crucially adorned with large-print ‘Bavarian Motor Works’ script on the cars’ sunstrips. The punchy branding was added after it was suggested many uninitiated Americans believed the initials arranged around the blue and white propeller stood for ‘British Motor Works’. Bet the marketing men treated themselves to new flares after that.

All of which means that this sensational creation, the BMW 3.0 CSL Hommage R concept, is not lacking in pedigree. A racing-inspired refresh of the Hommage concept shown earlier in 2014, it riffs on BMW’s most iconic competition car – tricolour livery and all. It has hard-earned authenticity.

Any tuning firm can rock up at a motor show with a slice of brightly coloured unobtanium wearing flash wheels and a big wing. The Hommage is cool because it oozes credibility. Just the right amounts of where BMW has come from and, what with those i8 nods in the bodywork, sports-hybrid drivetrain and 22nd-century man–machine interface inside, an idea of where BMW is going next.

If there’s another car revealed this year that has so much intricacy to drink in, we can’t wait to see it. The Hommage, overseen by BMW design boss Adrian van Hooydonk, is festooned with clever modern interpretations of the original. Stunning i8 rear haunches recall the classic’s box arches, lovingly faired into the swept-back rear wing, complete with its ribbon of light sweeping around the rump. Likewise the hooped roof spoiler and the iconic fins atop the front wings.

There’s no particular attempt to make these retro references overtly functional – no claimed downforce sense-of-humour failure. All the right cues are present and correct, but honed for a more rakish, intimidating car.

The main difference, besides the knee-trembling paintjob, between this R and the earlier Hommage concept is the race suit BMW has designed to go along with it. Normally, matching branded gear for your car is the height of poor taste – Ferrari polo shirts and ‘Porsche Design’ trainers, we’re looking at you. But we’ll allow BMW a free pass here on the basis that its dabble in fashion design is supposed to help a would-be racer of the Hommage R drive it faster.

The helmet (complete with that nod to BMW’s no-nonsense Seventies-era branding) features a head-up display built directly into its visor. Red tape sunk this sort of X-wing pilot gadget for the real world, but in our retro-futurist fantasyland, line-of-sight tech is fair game. Speed and current gear selection are a given. What would really get the FIA in a twist is the colour-coded suggested line, beamed directly onto the track ahead of the driver’s eyes. Just like when you’re learning how to tackle the fearsome Corkscrew on Gran Turismo.

The race suit itself is more of a wearable Christmas tree, with light-up pinstriping in the arms and legs, which illuminates to supposedly demonstrate how information flows back up through the controls toward the pilot’s brain. Not sure Hans-Joachim Stuck would’ve deemed a fibre-optic onesie a must-have for successful CSL racing, but we are talking about a car inspired by a Seventies icon. A German one at that. Inevitably, kitsch had to creep in somewhere.

If you’re staying true to the Coupe Sport Leichtbau’s original mantra, you ought to drive it in your undercrackers anyway. Much lighter. The original road-going 3.0 CSL binned its aircon, bumpers and soundproofing in the pursuit of adding lightness, and draped thin-gauge steel and aluminium panels over what was left. Unless, of course, you were a namby-pamby, mollycoddled Brit. The nervy UK importer asked subcontracted builder Karmann if it wouldn’t mind awfully plugging all the heavy equipment and luxuries back in, given the CSL cost £7,500. That’s £80,000 in today’s money, and give-or-take what you’d fork out for a toy-laden M6.

The Hommage naturally uses carbon fibre where its ancestor favoured flimsier metal, but what’s surprising is how its interior sticks to a more old-school, everything you need, nothing you don’t ethos. Take the wraparound wooden crossmember, structurally stressed as well as home to the eBoost charge display, in Gordon Murray-pleasing two-jobs-in-one style. A plain sexy nod to both the old CSL’s dash, and the arch-cool Scandinavian vibes you’ll find in an i3. Besides the wooden trim, and the carbon-fibre seats, there’s very little interior to speak of.

The steering column houses two vents, which funnel non-conditioned air straight to the driver. The passenger is left either to melt or walk, which may or may not be the most brutal tactic yet for saving unnecessary weight.

All the treats and titillation is reserved for the driver, most of them in the gorgeous form of the control-yoke-aping steering ‘wheel’. An item of considerable beauty, it features buttons for the pit speed limiter, wipers and laser-light flash, dotted around its aluminium extremities, Ferrari-style. Enormous gearshift paddles lurk behind. It’s all about focus. No flimflam.

So onto the powertrain. The fact the numberplate reads ‘3.0’ is a clue – it had to be a straight-six. Not that of an M3, though: at 4,997mm long, the Hommage R is a big beast, and the one-off shares the bones of its underpinnings with a modern-day 640i. Its 3.0-litre six is turbocharged, unlike the original, and, by the sounds of what spits from the side exit exhaust, is chucking out a good deal more than the 316bhp of a base 6-Series.

The supplementary eBoost system, juiced by batteries behind the two bucket seats, adds an unknown quantity of torque. Numbers aren’t important here. On the evidence of the i8 and even the naughty-fast i3, it’s not going to be a Tamiya motor bolted into the transmission (an 8spd ZF auto, since you ask).

Since the Hommage R has very real, road-legal oily bits hidden deep beneath the garnish, and BMW has a strong history of turning radical concepts such as the Vision EfficientDynamics into a road-going tech tour de force, you know what comes next. Will BMW actually build Hommage Rs for well-heeled buyers to drive? To race, even?

No. Sorry. BMW likes to crow about taking the i8 from show pony to showroom, but the Hommage cars – remember the M1 concept and beautiful 328 roadster? – are simply design exercises. BMW now offers a racy coupe complete with a hulking wing, but it's called M4 GTS, not Hommage CSL.

So you’ll just have to look at it on these pages, because BMW isn’t actually going to build a run of Hommage Rs for us great unwashed to buy and drive. It’s arguably a new art car – sculpture rather than painting. Five metres in which BMW proves it’s got a nostalgic side, still sees value in the discipline of racing motor cars and believes a car built over 35 years ago is still relevant today.

That ever-more stringent safety and emissions legislation just ramps up a designer’s appetite to be let off the leash – even when there’s no hope of it being made for real. Because what’s cooler than being a rebel without a cause?