But at first I questioned the adoption of rear-hinged cabin doors on a 17-foot-long coupe weighing 5,380 pounds.
The long-wheelbase coupe garnered the second-highest price of any car here and the highest ever paid for an American-make car at auction.
Gourvannec's dismissal, not long after an embarrassing Coupe de France loss to semi-pro Granville and a disastrous Europa League qualifying exit to Videoton in the summer, even led club captain Jérémy Toulalan to ask to be released in support of his coach.
But rather than engaging in a re-badge for re-badging's sake, BMW has built a better two-door, with the longer, lower, wider stance long championed by performance coupes from US manufacturers, and a new turbocharged four-cylinder engine called on for low-end punch and improved efficiency.
For certain models, a lower case letter placed after the alphanumeric designation indicates powerplant type ('h' for hybrid, 'd' for diesel), while capital letter(s) placed at the end indicates a class subtype (e.g. 'L' for long-wheelbase, 'C' for coupe, 'AWD' for all-wheel drive).
And the Coupe has a long road life.
But few had expected something quite as dramatic as the 2+2 coupe, with its long hood and curvaceous tail.There are plenty of small but significant historical tips to the design, most notably to the Maserati A6 GTS of 1954, suggested Lorenzo Ramaciotti, the head of global design for Fiat, Maserati's parent company.
In terms of scale, it's exactly the same as the two-door coupe – 4,638mm (183 inches) long, 1,825mm wide and a wheelbase of 2,810mm.
Nestled under the long hood of this new coupe, it makes 503 horsepower and 479 pound-feet of torque, and will hustle the GT S from zero-to-60 mph in 3.7 seconds, Mercedes said.
Best Sporty Coupe: Seeking a long-term relationship?
