As always when the BMW Ulti­mate Drive comes to town I try to talk every­one I know into par­tic­i­pat­ing. So far with my co-workers I have had lim­ited suc­cess, but with the fel­low MMC mem­bers I have had bet­ter luck.

This year I had almost talked one of our young engi­neers into doing it. He was on the fence until I men­tioned that they had an M3 Coupe in the line up, then he started lean­ing. He cur­rently dri­ves a tarted up Lexus IS250 with inspi­ra­tions of turbo charg­ing it.

When Donna and I left work on Mon­day he said call him if they had the M3 avail­able and he would seri­ously con­sider tak­ing a half day off. When we saw the M3 sit­ting there in the morn­ing I gave him a call, he said he would be there in the after­noon. Because it was just sit­ting there wait­ing, Donna and I took our first loop in it. A cou­ple of miles into our loop and hav­ing lis­tened to the sound com­ing from the exhaust pipes when main­lin­ing bursts of accel­er­a­tion I told Donna to call Ian’s work phone. I wanted to seal the deal and make sure he came over by hav­ing her hold the phone out the win­dow when I punched it. He must have been work­ing because he didn’t pick up.

Turns out he didn’t need that sound incen­tive because up he drove at about 12:45. At that point the Sur­vivor Drive was in progress so there were no cars to drive. I told him to park and go inside to reg­is­ter. At that point of the day it was tak­ing a while to reg­is­ter, so it took about 20 min­utes before he showed up back out­side. He had a dis­ap­pointed look on his face, turns out you have to be 30 years old to drive the M3. He wasn’t to badly hurt because he had lined up a round of golf for later that after­noon, so he just got there early and hit a bucket of balls before playing.

I think Donna and I felt worse about it than he did. I didn’t think any­thing of it when I asked him to come drive. I thought there might be a 25 year-old age limit on the 6 & 7 Series cars, but I didn’t know about the extra 5 years needed for the M3 Coupe. Because he is so mature act­ing I thought he was in his upper 20’s, but as it turns out Ian isn’t even old enough to drive the 6s or 7s. He is only 23.