Watch A BMW M4 CS Receive A Good Spanking In The Name Of Advertising

There's a new Pennzoil film, and it's all about an M4 CS being thrashed on and around the Nurburgring

08 Mar 2018

By and large, adverts are rubbish, aren’t they? They’re usually either cringeworthy or downright dull, but thankfully, there are exceptions, and this is definitely one of them.

It’s another one of those Pennzoil films, which usually involve a handy driver thrashing the living daylights out of a nice car in an interesting location. The last one we looked at involved a Dodge Challenger Demon drifting in Cape Town, and this time around, it’s rallycross driver Rhys Millen in a BMW M4 CS, shredding some serious rubber on and around the Nurburgring.

With drifting, straight-six noise and even a cheeky jump, it’s quite a video. It’s almost perfect, the only fly in the ointment being that the film is embellished with some Fast and Furious-style shots of the automatic gear selector’s manual mode being aggressively shifted, as though it’s a proper manual…

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

To be fair, there could be some logic to using the stick rather than paddles, I mean there’s got to be a reason why they bother giving you the option to use the stick for manual mode instead of the paddles in the first palce.
First thing that comes to my mind; although not from real experience, just sim drifting experience, because the wheel is such a frantic area when drifting it’s nice to only have to use the same hand all the time whether you’re going up or down a gear and to have that hand move away from the wheel rather than potentially having to cross your arms to reach the correct paddle.
As for the aggressiveness, well yeah, you don’t need to shift “aggressively” in a fully manual car either unless its broken the gear stick doesn’t take much force to move so, moot point.