E36 M3 — the blue Eifelblitz

Johannes Scheid's team won the Nürburgring 24 Hours outright in 1996 and again in 1997. This is the second car. The crew list painted above the door reads Scheid, Reck, Zakowski and Tiemann — four names, which is how you tell it from the three-name car of the year before.

Everything about the graphic is functional. The number lives inside a plain white rectangle on the door and again, smaller, on the rear quarter, because a numeral painted straight onto a dark body disappears under floodlight. The panels are hard-edged rectangles, not roundels and not shields: cheaper to mask, faster to repaint after contact, legible from any angle.

The lower third carries a white sill stripe with a lighter blue line above it, both raked very slightly nose-up. On a saloon shell that is enough to stop the dark body reading as a slab, and it is the only decorative move on the car.

The blue is worth pausing on. Scheid told BMW that the earlier car — the white one — “looked pretty naked”. The car that followed it was painted this. We are reading that sequence off the photographs and the painted crew lists rather than off a stated decision, but the before and after are hard to argue with.