That was an excellent film. I loved being able to hear the cars as they blazed by. It is one thing to see all these lovely pictures of the cars, but to hear them at full wick is something I never thought I'd be able to do, given the rarity of footage from the era.
I also thought it was hilarious how their racing car had all the chrome and a full driver door panel with wood, as well as a full dash. It's like a slap in the face of the competition.
As for the device on the rollbar, based on the plug shape, I'm going to guess it is a helmet radio connector.
My definition of 'excellent' is a little different. If you look at this video, generally this style of video - well until the begining of the 80's it was done / directer / filmed /whatever usually with one guy. There is an article about him in ... i think one of the german sport auto magazine (sorry I am not at home to check his name).
These videos (the csl videos, the bmw motorsport junior team training and bmw e21 320i race reports, etc) are containing of some bits of the events, and the director decided to put more 'art' into the videos, insteading of correctly documenting all the facts and happening at the races.
As I don't beleive (at this point) that some really new, factory made material will be released - as there were like 4-5 videos like this from 1973 to 1981 - it is clear that there weren't any real excellent videos made by bmw.
Excellent for me would mean the following:
- Quality recording: even the original video (before the compression) look like a super 8 video with very low resolution (lph). In the seventies there were lots of camera / celluloid films to make quality picture, so it would be possible to 'scan' them in 2k or 3k resolution (it is happening now when you buy a blu ray version of your 70's and 80's film).
- Quality sound: the videos have very bad quality sound, like a cellphone
- Correct development, preparation, race documentation for every cs/csl race car about every race, every day (slalom, etcc, targa florio, rallye, etc), with minimum 30-40 minutes 'in race' video and some onboard video (and not just putting 2-3 camera to different static places)
I think the misconception of 'excellent' came from the fact that some cs owner didn't know about this very-very-very-very well known video. Beleiving that no csl race video were made by bmw, and then seeing one or two is a big step. But in reality, if you want to see the whole scene, and if want to get real quality, detailed document about this era, then it will be clear that there is none.
In my opinion the reason that these videos were made is not that bmw want to document everything correctly in great quality, but making some video material for _MARKETING_ reason. As we know, marketing doesn't car about the documentation, they only want to show the strenght of a product (for ex your 3.0 cs roadcar came from a real csl race car, same breed, etc), and SELL.
So it clearly show how bmw think about the whole 70' and 80's. All they care is sell new cars with the support of MARKETING. Nothing has change in the past 30-40 years.
