This article first appeared in the speedarticle Post in issue 001
"Just tell people it’s fast."
A statement so bold and barebones it feels absolutely mythological in today’s ad world, where briefs come buried under layers of data and digital posturing. But that was the assignment BMW handed over in 2000.
That was it. No manifesto. No deck full of customer psychographics. Not a complex social media strategy. Just: make people believe this car is fast.
Jan Jacobs, a creative at the now-legendary agency Hunt Lascaris, took those words and turned them into something mythic. Something that still makes people sit up and pay attention, even if they can only find it in 240p on YouTube. They made a land speed film where the car you think is the hero turns out to be a decoy. A fiberglass Trojan Horse. The real monster doesn’t show up until the final frames. An E39 BMW M5. The fastest saloon car on the planet.
BMW, at the turn of the millennium, was borderline unhinged with creativity. This was the era series of eight short films starring Clive Owen alongside supporting performances from Forest Whitaker, Madonna, Don Cheadle, and others and directed by A-list auteurs like Guy Ritchie, Ang Lee, and John Frankenheimer. Released between 2001 and 2002, these films were distributed on DVD and through BMW’s website, becoming instant cult hits and redefining branded content before the term even existed. Automotive enthusiasts rushed to dealers around the world to get their hands on the DVD.
It was a time when BMW still believed cars were emotional objects. And the E39 M5? It was the apex predator of that philosophy. A 400-horsepower V8 with a manual gearbox. Want an automatic? Nein. It had none of the silicon safety nets that neuter modern performance cars. It was the fastest sedan on earth, and it drove like something that had slipped past the German BMDV, before anyone noticed. It was, arguably, the last true "Ultimate Driving Machine" before the accountants and UX designers took over.
So when BMW told Jan Jacobs to make it fast, he didn’t just take it literally. They built an entire short around the idea.
“We wanted to show speed in a way people hadn’t seen before,” Jan Jacobs said. “But here’s the thing, speed is hard to show. If you shoot a car doing 140mph on a flat plain with no landmarks, it looks like it’s doing 30. So we thought: let’s do it metaphorically. Let’s use the fastest thing we can think of.”
That thing was none other than a land speed car. The kind of jet fuel-powered coffin you see at Bonneville, usually only from far away and only for a few seconds. They didn’t borrow, buy, or rent one. Director Kim Geldenhuys and his production team built it from scratch, starting with a dragster chassis and wrapping it in a bespoke fiberglass shell. Jan Jacobs and his assistant designed the livery, inventing fictional sponsor logos and markings to make the car feel like a genuine land speed machine. Like a dusty tribute to speed some Bonneville old timer with a fever dreamed up in a garage with too much time and not enough sanity. Geldenhuys oversaw the construction to make sure the vehicle wasn’t just believable, but functional, it had to move under its own power, track straight on a dusty, crusted pan, and survive long enough to be filmed. "It needed to look like it could break the sound barrier, even if it couldn’t break 60," Kim Geldenhuys later joked. A Frankenstein of speed. Real wheels, real motion, real power, and no CGI. “Everything you see in the spot is in camera,” Jan Jacobs said. “No special effects. Not even the parachute.”
It was filmed on a pan in South Africa called Verneukpan, "the bamboozle pan" in Afrikaans. A flat, surreal landscape that once hosted real land speed attempts in the 1920s. It almost never saw rain. But it did the week they planned to shoot. It was a biblical storm and it drowned the desert. People were stranded on rooftops, and locals died. The camera rig, a wildly expensive Libra Mount flown in from Europe, one of only a few in the world, sat in its crate while the crew waited. Geldenhuys had planned a sweeping, tightly controlled visual language that depended on the mount and without it, the whole shoot risked falling apart. The production was dead. Everyone went home, and waited for it to be quietly canceled, as most delayed and mothballed ideas are.
When they returned six months later, Kim had to adapt to harsh light and blown-out tones, but he didn’t flinch. He lay strapped to a moving tracking vehicle, operating the rig like a human gimbal. "I was basically horizontal, inches from the ground, flying alongside the car while looking through this ridiculous mount," Geldenhuys said. "It was completely mad. But that’s what it took to make it feel real."
But six months later, they came back. The storm had passed and the sun was out. It was punishingly harsh, and oblique. Not the golden-hour fantasy the director Kim Geldenhuys initially pitched. But that violence of light became part of the aesthetic. It made the M5, and the entire scene, look even sharper.
“It was better that way,” Jan Jacobs said. “That harsh look made everything feel more raw.”
The spot itself is a sleight of hand. You spend 45 seconds watching this mythical machine roar across the flats. It looks like a jet. It throws a chute. It stops. Then a man steps out, walks calmly to the camera, and adjusts the lens. Smash cut: the car with the camera on it is an M5. No cuts. No cheat. It recontextualizes everything you just saw. The M5 becomes the enabler, the tool, the true weapon.
It is the fastest thing on four wheels.
That kind of confidence is extinct now. Today, marketing departments would agonize for six months over whether the land speed metaphor tests well with 35-45 year olds who like high-performance sedans, fancy new recipes, and grey boutique flooring. The ad would be a 9:16 reel. There’d be a hashtag, or five. A pre-roll explainer. Probably some AI-rendered drone footage.
But this? This was filmmaking. It was absurd, expensive, and dangerous. It made you feel something. And it only exists because BMW was at its creative peak and had the brass to let its agency take risks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJhkM8I1WlE
Jan Jacobs said it best:
“The brief was simple. The client trusted us. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”
He’s right. This commercial might be one of the last times a major OEM let the leash go completely slack. But it was the creators, Jan Jacobs, Kim Geldenhuys, and the crew behind the camera, who made something that still holds up 25 years later. Not because of nostalgia, but because it was done with clarity, restraint, and obsession. No gimmicks. No crutches. Just vision, execution, and a camera rolling in the dirt. The ad world moved on, but this timeless film, has not.
Special Thanks: Kim Geldenhuys and Jan Jacobs
Archival photos: Jan Jacobs
Film Credits:
Director: Kim Geldenhuys
Art Director: Jan Jacobs
Creative Director: Tony Granger
Copywriter: Clare McNally
Agency: TBWA Hunt Lascaris
Year: 2000
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