Hamann Laguna Seca II

Hamann Motorsport's spectacular Laguna Seca II was one of the best-kept secrets of last year's Frankfurt Motor Show. Nobody outside of the company knew of its existence before Press Day, and in the hours before its official unveiling dozens of journalists walked past thinking it was just another Hamann M3.

Some would argue that installing gull-wing doors on a BMW M3 is a strange thing to do, but, on the other hand, if you really want to raise eyebrows when you pull up outside your favorite local restaurant, this is the way to go!

Oddly enough, that is more or less how this idea was born. "I was eating in a restaurant in Italy when a yellow Lamborghini Diablo GT pulled up outside," explained Richard Hamann. "The drama of this amazing car stopping and its doors swinging open really stopped the crowds, and I thought it was a great idea.

"So I came back and told my staff, who first of all looked at me as if I was barking mad," Richard continued with a big grin on his face. "When everyone had stopped falling about laughing, we got down to some serious discussions on how it might be done.

"When you see the finished product, it looks like a simple and straightforward piece of engineering. But these things never are, and the major issue was the hinge mechanism. We wanted an internal hinge, but this would have required radical modifications to the structure between the bulkhead and the A-pillars," he said. "In the end, we resigned ourselves to the fact that an external stainless-steel hinge was the only practical solution if we wanted to keep things straightforward. The system you see on this car works very well, and we are even considering making a kit so our overseas dealers can do the conversion for their own customers."

While the Lamborghini doors pivot upward around a point, the proportions of the doors and A-pillars of a normal-shaped car like the BMW preclude this. Thus, the doors move outwards in an arc, parallel to the A-pillars and are held open by hydraulic struts. While it still looks spectacular and gives easy access to the interior, this configuration means that the fully opened doors take up as much space as a conventional arrangement. A refinement being worked on is a cover for the hinge, which will also solve the problem of the slight wind noise created by the exposed hinge.

The only other compromise comes if you are in a tight parking space. With the door partially open, you need to crank the window glass down to give you more room to maneuver. Everything else works like on the standard car, the glass dropping slightly when you open the door and closing the last bit after you close it. That is a minor inconvenience, and, quite frankly, if you owned a car like this, you wouldn't want to park it in a multi-story carpark anyway.

Currently there are two complete Laguna Seca IIs roaming the planet. They both look identical from the outside and have the same red and black leather interior trim as well. However, their mechanical configurations are radically different.

The Frankfurt show car has a Hamann-modified 6.1-liter V12 shoehorned into its engine bay. However, the Japanese businessman who commissioned it wanted it flown to his country as soon as possible after the show. Knowing this was going to happen, Hamann initiated a second car running almost parallel but with a tuned M3 engine.

"The original plan was for our car to have a V12 as well," Richard explained. "It is not obvious looking at this huge engine, but because it is all-alloy, it only weighs 12kg more than the M3 motor, which has an iron block. And the latest generation V12 should be even lighter and more powerful.