Loaded BMW is a story, a phenomenon, or whatever you can call this seven year old project. It all started when I bought one of the 1400 specially built BMW M3 CSL in 2003. This model was made by BMW during six months only, and of the 1400 nine was brought to Sweden. You could say that it is just an ordinary car if it wasn’t for everything that happened to this car after I bought it.

2003, the same year I bought the car, I got interested in one of the most dangerous, maybe even the most exotic racing track in the world, and this was found in Germany. The racing track is the legendary Nürburgring. It has a north and a south loop and the north loop, the ‘Nordschleife’ is the one with the strongest attraction all around the world. The Nordschleife is 22.8 km long and is situated in the very hilly and flourished Eifel Mountains. What separates this track to many other racing tracks is the fact that anyone with a driving license can drive any vehicle at a non-limited speed, but there is a small charge for this, and this activity is called ‘tourist drive’.

The idea in 2003 was to rig a supercharger on the car to increase the horsepower’s from 360 to 450 hp, and then drive the car as fast as possible on this Nordschleife. When I started to rebuild the car during the fall 2003 people started to notice the reconstruction project in different forums all around the world. The biggest reason for this attention was that this crazy Swede had started to rig a supercharger on a coming collector’s car. What a sacrilege! Some people expressed madness whilst other expressed admiration for this daring action, but everyone wanted information about the plans and the goal with this construction.

A web page was created for this car, which was very unique in 2003. The car got the project name LOADED since it loaded its suction air with the help from a supercharger. www.loaded.se became the identity of the car and the homepage on the internet.
The project got hold of a young and bold racing driver that was able to perform the mission of driving the car fast around the Nordschleife. His name was and is Richard Göransson, today both European champion and a numerous Swedish champion in STCC, the Swedish touring car championship. The goal was to drive faster than the existing record on the Nordschleife, 7.32 minutes, set by a Porsche Carrera GT.

The project realized fast that what were most attractive by the internet visitors were film recordings. Already in 2004, when youtube was pretty young and unknown, we served the visitors on www.loaded.se with film recordings on our own server. The hysteria to spread the homepage reached its acme in December 2004, when we had more downloads in volume than the whole H&M’s visitor statistics on the internet during the Christmas rush. This was of course very costly, but you could say that we were ‘saved’ by youtube. Ever since then, our film recordings on youtube have been shown all together more than 15 million times. This is very unique since this project is only about a car.

2005 our chance finally came to drive a so called Time attack on the Nordschleife when we had the possibility to hire the whole track for an hour. The whole world was now waiting on the result, how would this end? The challenger, the little project against the big giant Porsche. 10 minutes before start of our hired time on the track, the weather changed from 23 degrees and sun to 14 degrees and downfall and we needed to cancel the Time attack. Naturally, we were very disappointed, but we realized that supporters and followers from the whole world had taken breaths during this critical moment. We felt bound to continue what we had started. Shame on those who abandon their missions because of some setback.

The statistics about this time in 2005 was chocking. We had over 20 000 unique/individual visitors on our homepage every day during a period. We tracked discussions in over 100 car related forum all around the world and we had visitors from 125 nations spread all over the world. The phenomenon was a fact. Now we were not the only ones who could decide the future.

2006 we considered a lot about the continuation until the settlement came from Michelin in France that wanted to sponsor a new attempt. Even KW Suspension helped us with chassis and experts. Michelin gave us access to freely drive the car on one of their time slots that they have in a common industrial pool for European car industry on the Nordschleife. During these times device and coming car specimens for the whole car industry is tested. We felt honored and decided to give it a try again. We did also take the opportunity to upgrade the supercharger with an increased charging pressure and horsepower’s. Now we had 530 hp on the rear wheels.

Finally the opportunity came in late 2007. It was a chilly morning in November after the snow in October had melted in the Eifel Mountains. It was only four degrees, but we were just happy to finally succeed with the project. After the third lap, Richard Göransson set a record time of 7.22 minutes on the Nordschleife and it was far below from what we had expected. We beat the giant Porsche with 10 seconds with our tiny resources. Our supporters and followers all around the world were cheering. We did not only manage to reach our goal, we had also driven faster than Koenigsegg, Pagani Zonda, well, all the serial produced super sport cars that are street legal.

At last the car was to be sold, or? Well, almost, because a Swedish television program testing cars ‘Motorjournalen’ wanted to drive the car in their program, but the thing that could not happen, happened. One of their reporters crashed the car on the Falkenberg track. This was a very remarkable event, so we made the decision that as a repayment, they were permitted to show the crash in TV. It became a serial story of three episodes during the spring 2009. This made the car very famous amongst people in general in Sweden since even the newspaper ‘Aftonbladet’ wrote about it with the headline ‘TV journalist crashes a hundred thousand dollar car’.

All the people around the Loaded project find passion in big challenges.
This is neither the beginning nor the end of The Loaded Story.