It is surprisingly cold, and there are scudding clouds depositing an occasional light shower. This is not the Costa Del Sol experience I was expecting. I have not packed a sufficiently warm jacket.
Down on the Costa itself, temperatures are little balmier, but up here, at the Ascari Race Resort just outside Ronda, we're on a plateau that pokes some 800 metres into the sky above the sea-level resorts, and the temperatures are heading for single figures. Abridged version? It's nippier than you'd think.
It's also nuts, right? I mean we're here to drive the new BMW iX3 electric SUV on the road for the first time, yet BMW has built time into the schedule for a session, on track, at Ascari.
This is deeply silly, for several reasons. Ascari, nestled in the Parque Nacional Sierra de las Nieves, is not a track you will find on any national nor international racing calendars. It's described as a racing resort which has been designed and built for wealthy track day enthusiasts to come and enjoy in their expensive sports cars, and for car companies to have a private facility upon which to play with their toys.
Today, that toy is a 2.3-tonne electric SUV. Out on the sweeping, mountainous roads that lead up from Malaga to Ascari, the iX3 has excelled, feeling sharp to drive, a true BMW, and yet also showing off its exceptional real-world driving range. So why on Earth do we need to hustle it around the fast corners - some banked, even - of Ascari?
It's too late; the time for me to ask such questions has gone and I'm bundled into the white iX3 resting in the pitlane at Ascari. By happy coincidence, I'm driving the first car in the queue behind our pace car, a last-generation BMW M5 Competition. This, I assume, is just for show. We will trundle around at a gentle pace and then can go away and write fatuous headlines like: "I Chased An M5 Around A Racetrack In BMW's New Electric SUV.” As if...
Then a helpful chap in a BMW fleece (told you it was cold...) pokes his head in the window and cheerfully informs me that the iX3s we're driving have been fitted with Michelin Pilot Sport EV tyres, replacing the humbler, more efficient Goodyears worn by the cars we've been driving on the road. This, I am told, exacts a penalty in range - some 70km apparently, thanks to the grippier nature of the Michelins. That, for an iX3, is less than a ten per cent of its official range, so maybe the Michelins are worth it if they come with other benefits.
Time to find out. The M5 pulls away and we set off for a customary gentle sighting lap, passing along the way a slalom course, and an emergency lane-change manoeuvre set out with the usual traffic cones.
So far, so normal. But then, coming through the long right hander that completes the lap, on which there is still a sheen of the earlier rain shower, the M5 in front of me... goes. Like, seriously goes, with a V8 bellow from its quad exhaust pipes, leaving me with only the option of flooring it to keep up.
The iX3 reacts as sharply as you'd expect of a 460hp electric car, and it's doing a brave job of keeping up with the fleeing M5 as we approach the chicane that flicks left and right at the end of the pitlane. Those flicks pass in a blur as I try to slow the iX3 enough to get through without panicking but still keep the M5's boot lid in my windscreen.
Soon, we come to the slalom course, taken at the customary 60km/h, and the iX3 performs predictably well. Ditto through the lane-change, which isn't as violent as the semi-official 'Elk Test' but still shows that even with all that weight, the iX3 remains unflappably controllable under violent provocation.
Between those exercises, the M5 driver - who I can only assume is late for his own wedding or something - presses relentlessly on, and I'm still trying my ham-fisted best to keep up.
At which point it all clicks. I'm being ham-fisted (I have little choice; racetracks are not my natural habitat) but the iX3 isn't.
BMW has developed the iX3, and its 'Neue Klasse' electric car platform, around four high-powered computer systems which it calls 'Superbrains'. These allow it to cut the amount of wiring, the amount of hardware, the amount of everything that you need to manage the electronics of a modern EV, making for less weight and faster responses.
Each Superbrain manages a different set of functions, but the one we're concerned with here is, with a slight sense of naff, called 'The Heart Of Joy', and it's BMW's effort to distil 110 years of its experience at making cars wonderful to drive, into a black box of wires and binary code.
The name might be cringey, but as I'm fast realising, the Heart Of Joy actually works. Whirring away unheard and unseen beneath your feet, it controls acceleration and braking, vehicle stabilisation, dynamic steering functions and charging management all at the same time, and all much more quickly than any previous system could manage.
Which is all very impressive, but the really impressive part is that BMW has managed to make this digital trickery feel utterly analogue and intuitive. The braking might start with regeneration but the crossover between that and using the physical pads and discs is almost impossible to pick out. The steering is electrically boosted, of course, but has the reassuring heft - and at least some of the feel and feedback - of an old-school hydraulic system.
For all my flailing arms and flapping feet, the iX3, on its trick Michelin tyres, is taking to the Ascari circuit like an aquatic avian to aqua. My own poor choice of cornering lines is occasionally allowing the understeer to build up a bit too much, causing a loss of front grip, but the iX3 just acknowledges my idiocy, soaks it up, and comes back for more. It feels genuinely as if it's rotating around your own hip-point and never allows itself to become unruly. It's also, properly, fun.
Later in the evening, we're allowed to spend some brief time with another car, based on the same Neue Klasse platform, with the same batteries, the same motors and the same Heart Of Joy. Technically, I'm not allowed to tell you anything about that car yet, but if I suggest that it's maybe a bit lower slung than the iX3, you'll probably get the right idea.
Hopefully, when we get to drive that car for the first time, we can come back to Ascari and repeat this exercise. It may have been a wonderfully silly idea to bring a 2.3-tonne SUV to a racetrack, and have it try to chase an M5, but given how good the iX3 was, I half-suspect that this secret other car might have caught the M model. And maybe even passed it...