Call me a typical and narrow minded car enthusiast, but I’ve never been overjoyed at the prospect of driving a convertible. Being someone who enjoys the performance and handling characteristics of a car, having flies blown into my teeth along my favourite stretch of road has never outweighed dynamic penalty that a car pays when its roof gets chopped off. You know, when its designers try to rigidify it, adding weight and inevitably not getting it anywhere near as firm as the version with a roof over its head.

For me, coming home in a convertible has always been more about keeping the lady in my life happy than anything else. And the first time I took the M3 Convertible home, we did exactly what one expects to do with a drop top – a slow cruise along Rivonia Boulevard.

But since this was an M3, I also had an itching to find some far quieter roads and this it’s here that this type of car finally started making sense to me. A ridiculously fast convertible with an M, RS or AMG badge had always seemed like a waste – surely if you wanted a true performance car, you’d just stick with the less compromised tin-top version?

Yeah baby

But after pushing that audacious M button on the M3’s steering wheel and flattening the loud pedal, I realised that with the roof down, I could actually hear that splendid V8 engine in all its glory. I wasn’t cocooned in an insulated cabin like the Germans provide these days and the blizzard of air bellowing at me as I built up speed only made me more excited than I was prepared to admit. Is this the solution to the excessive refinement of modern performance cars? Yeah baby.

The latest M3 Convertible might be the newest kid on the block, but it’s certainly not alone. Merc’s CLK 63 is a very popular alternative in this niche, as was the Audi. Though the RS 4 is no longer in production, and should be succeeded by the RS 5 Cabrio based on the latest platform in a year or two from now, it was a benchmark before the latest M3 hit the scene and it would be almost rude to scrutinise the new Beemer without considering how it fares against its Ingolstadt rival. And besides, there are still low-mileage examples sitting in dealerships around the country, which you might certainly consider as a more attainable alternative to a new M3 Convertible.

Assembled together with their tops down, these three are a beautiful sight to behold. Without getting into tedious detail, they all look the sports car part thanks to styling kits typical of the performance divisions they originate from. But what’s most surprising is how the Audi is still favoured by so many despite its age. While the BMW and Mercedes take the softer and more elegant approach to aesthetics, the Audi still looks the most brute-like, the one you’d least likely want to mess with on a drag strip. At least the Beemer still looks modern and purposeful – it makes the Merc seem like yesterday’s convertible – which it is.

Raise the roof

Raise the fully electronic roofs and the Audi and Merc reveal fabric tops, both of which are well insulated, and the BMW follows the coupe-cab fad with a metal roof that’s styled to make it look like a 3-Series Coupe when the roof’s up. It even has that characteristic Hoffmeister kink in the rear window, but somehow the proportions just don’t go easy on the eye, thanks to that long boot it needs to store the roof in and the many shut lines on the tin top. Even so, it still looks better than the other two black fabric tops.

So even though these three boulevard bruisers resemble the serious performance machines they are, you might be wondering what kind of a performance compromise they dish up, compared to their tin-top siblings. Luckily not much sprinting ability has been sacrificed. They were only marginally slower in the acceleration sprints, a difference that the average owner will hardly notice. With each of them being equipped with a high-revving V8 engine putting out more than 300kW, you’re not going to find much lacking when you really want to gallop.

At first the BMW M3 might seem like the weakest link of the bunch. With 309kW on command, it matches the Audi but falls well short of the Merc’s 354kW. The Beemer’s 400Nm of torque also falls short of the Audi’s 430 and Merc’s mammoth 630. But all is not lost – the BMW’s full twisting power comes on stream far lower in the rev range and against our clock, the three cars were as close as Redneck cousins, with the Merc a few split seconds ahead each discipline and the BMW matching the Audi from 0-100 but proving somewhat faster in the tractability tests. It’s the driving experience that really makes the difference here though, and this is where they start to diverge, with the BMW and Merc being rear-wheel driven an the Audi having the safer and more balanced distribution between all wheels.