I’ve been bitten by the car bug early on. In building my BMW E36, I went through different wheels and body kits and even couple of engines and turbos. But one story in particular I remembered was back when I converted my car to a widebody. I got the HAMANN HM2 so I can drive the car while I did my research for the proper wheels to run my custom widebody. I knew about the BBS LM even back in ‘94 when I first got my car and seeing it on Albert Roxas’s E46 M3 running on 19×10 with an offset of 25mm was eye opening. My obsession with this wheel grew and was eyeing the super rare 19×11 with a 5×120 offset. At that time, it was impossible to get it here in the states and only way is to get it through BBS Germany but I just had to have it. With all my obsession, I must have downloaded tons of pictures of any cars with BBS LMs on and one that stood out to me was Appleby’s M5.

Stuart Appleby from Australia is a pro golfer, a regular member of M5board and a passionate car guy. I liked his M5 a lot as most of his pictures were from the track showing off his skills and doing some mild drift slides. I remember him even bending his 2pc FORGED LMs. This guys def wasn’t afraid to play around with his car.

Here was his car and how I remembered it.

Now fast forward to the present time and he still have an E39 M5 but a different color. Nice and mildly modded, subdued but can still beat most cars on the streets today.

But his sickness didn’t stop there. As we (all the obsessed car guys) once in a while do after washing our car, we take pictures and stare at them for hours on end to see what else we can do to tweak it out a bit more. Well he was doing the same thing and thought the car looked a little bit like a sport utility truck. This was when the sickness turned into insanity. He is now seeing things that normal car guys doesn’t see.

But he continued to entertain this thought and got some sketches done.. Hmm, the cancer is spreading. He liked the idea a bit more.

and this is the latest picture of how the car looks like from his website. Insanity at its best. haha.

Ok so my 1st thought was what the?! How, why, what, where, when, who?!!????!!!!!

But after going through his website (http://www.m5ute.com/index.htm), I since then understood the reasoning behind the conversion and came to the conclusion that he is just as crazy as anyone of us. Yes, granted we all express our individualities through our hobbies aka obsessions differently but at the end we all do it to please and satisfy one and only one person, ourself. Well at least that’s my reasoning in building my E36. Some people like it, some people don’t. All good in the hood.

What Stuart had done here might offend a lot of BMW purist and even regular sane car guys out there but hey it’s a sickness and we all go it bad. The question is just how far we want to take it.

In no way I would ever do what he did but props to all the crazy sick car guys out there who, at the very least, provides me some entertainment.