Once upon a time in a little corner of verdant green Germany, lived a whole lot of people who worked for the world's most prestigious carmakers.

Every day, they’d go to work to try to build the world’s best cars. They had to work quite hard at it because all those other people working at those other carmakers were trying to do the same thing — all of them wanted to win.

Trouble is, there can only be one winner.

Anyway, back to the story at hand. Then one day the fellows right down south Munich way decided to go one up on their rivals and built a car called the M3. So successful was that little four-cylinder, that not only did it destroy anything that dared come into its path on road and track, but it spawned a whole lot more M3s over the years to come.

M3 grew and grew every generation — that humble four-cylinder spawned a straight six that basically rewrote the rulebook all at once. Suddenly we had a normal series production car capable of sub-six-second 0-100km/h and those rotten German authorities decided that 250km/h was simply fast enough — and they limited its top end to that speed.

A few years later M3 got a few extra horses and a couple of extra doors to herald a truly versatile super saloon — imagine that — a family car capable of crushing Porsches, Ferraris and Lambos on the Autobahn?

You may have noticed something here — the others hadn't done much in the twenty years or so since that first M3 came to town. But wait, it's gonna get interesting — just now.

Undisputed king

Still the undisputed king, M3 spawned its fourth pretender to the throne around the turn of the millennium — still a six-cylinder, this one was even more serious than before and soon settled the establishment down to its accepted pecking order.

This one was only a coupe, but over the hills and not too far away, the folks in the forest of Stuttgart had had about enough of their rivals down south and a new phenomenon soon challenged the M3. AMG C32 was a supercharged bent-six with the power to challenge M3 on any Autobahn — and it was ready and willing to do just that.

Trouble is when they took the reigning M3 and the AMG up north to the Green Hell, the M3 still came up trumps — its manual gearbox and nimbler underpinnings saw to it that its newfound rival never quite had it in it to really compete at the ultimate limit.

No problem. C32 was soon disposed as King of AMG by its kid brother C55. Now there was a thing — see C55 was bequeathed with a fine 5.5-litre V8 that surely had to have the edge on the good old M3, which by then had pretty much ruled the roost for well over twenty years.

Well it was quite a toss-up — bequeathed with the sedan comfort, power and poise to out-gun Old King Coupe M3 pretty much everywhere. Except of course up on the Green Hell — where it really mattered.

Enter the RS4

Now this is where things started getting really interesting. Remember those other people in the third forest not far from the first forest that also always wanted to build the best cars in the world? Well they out of the blue decided that they too, wanted a piece of the action and invented a really cool car called RS4, equipped with a whipping 4.2-litre direct-petrol-injection V8 with three-hundred-and-plenty kilowatts and all-wheel drive.

And guess what — the folk from that third forest called Ingolstadt caught their countrymen from down in Munich and across in Stuttgart with their pants down. Germany had a new king. For a while…

See, after so long depending on a straight-six, the fellows down in Munich were not quite too happy about being dealt an AWD V8 lesson and soon had their next M3 ready to wrest that throne back — and it too had a three-hundred-and-plenty kilowatt 4-litre V8 snugly stuffed into an all-new coupe shell.

So before too long Munich had re-asserted its advantage — albeit a rather tiny advantage by this time — over its newfound Ingolstadt rivals with a so-sweet rear-drive V8 M3.

But alas, the people of Stuttgart were now intent to teach everyone a lesson and before we knew it, it had managed to make the AMG into a 6.3-litre monster with three-hundred-and-plenty-more kilowatts into its sedan and fired it across the bows of M3 and RS4.

Only trouble is there have never before been three competing cars that were real rivals — but new M3 has solved that by serving up a sedan version of its latest King. And at last we have the opportunity of gathering together those three pretenders — direct sedan rivals RS4, C63 AMG and M3 for the ultimate shootout.

Off to Kyalami

The Green Hell is a bit too far away, so we opted for Kyalami and at the first opportunity of shooting them out, we had them assembled on a crisp early winter's morning…

But before we had them duke it out on track, we took a little time to explore them on the road — city, suburban and out of town…

The Audi's a bit of an enigma here because it's already out of production and while there may be one or two left to buy new, it's almost off the market already. But it had to be here…

Our test unit boasted beautiful Recaro pews and its cabin — albeit almost already replaced by the latest A4, is that typical symphony of Audi perfection. I was happy to be able to adjust those seats to suit my stature and was soon quite comfortable, if a little tight in there. One aspect I am still frustrated by is that secondary Start button situated miles from the key you must first insert…