Oh dear, someone's scribbled all over your M3. Hang on; I'll get a Brillo Pad...

No, wait. Don't. That's not scribbling, that's art that is. It's been done by famed designer Walter Maurer and it's a copy of the livery he applied, also by hand, to the BMW M1 ProCar racing car, nicknamed "Münchner Wirte", back in 1981, just before the car raced at Le Mans.

"Although the two cars are very different, it was surprisingly straightforward to carry over the design from the two-door BMW M1 racer to the four-door BMW M3 Sedan," reports Maurer. "I hatched the plan to turn this very special artwork into reality in 1981, together with my good friends and long-established Munich restaurateurs Putzi Holenia and Karl Heckl, and the then head of the BMW press department, Dirk Henning Strassl."

The original M1 ProCars were something else - mad, bewinged mid-engined supercars with 470hp (rather more than the new M3's 431hp...) from their straight-six engines, and mostly racing with F1 drivers of the day on board as undercard events at Grand Prix meetings. The M3 has been painted up as part of the celebrations for Oktoberfest, which is, yes, a beer-drinking festival, but is also a celebration of Bavaria and Munich and so the car kinda fits in.

The livery has Bavarian-style façade painting and blue and white twisted cords, along with depictions of Munich landmarks (such as the Olympic Stadium, Siegestor, Frauenkirche church and BMW's headquarters - the "four-cylinder" building), a roast chestnut seller and the Wiesn-Schänke beer tent at the Oktoberfest.

The M3 will be on display at BMW Welt (BMW's combined museum and customer service centre at the factory in Munich) all through Oktoberfest. Proßt!