I’ve been musing recently about what the future holds for smaller, shall we say more boutique car manufacturers in the face of everincreasing electrification. I’m thinking of brands like Atom, Caterham, Morgan and the like. What might their products look like, and will legislation create pockets within which they can thrive, or at a basic level even survive?
Most specifically I wondered what all this would mean for my favourite brand of all, Alpina. Before I managed to put pen to paper, or fingertip to keys, I read in the news that BMW had actually bought Alpina, or more specifically the branding rights (no shares were actually sold). I’ll be honest my heart sank, and despite trying to find positive angles about the ‘sale’ it’s not recovered since.
My childhood dream car, whilst on my early morning paper round, was an E36 B8 4.6 convertible. Most people would dream of an F40 or Diablo, but not me – that was where I set my sights. Sadly, that is a target I have missed ever since but at the tender age of 20 I did find an E28 B9 3.5, which turned out to be one of the UK press cars no less, advertised in the Dordogne region of France.
Like Bob, Elliott shares his thoughts about the future of Alpina.
Elliott morns the endof an era at Alpina...
Detail was completely lacking; the photographs were laughable but nevertheless I booked one-way flights for myself and my good friend, Justin, to get over there and try to get the car back home. The test drive consisted of our expat seller driving the car, fitted with two seats only as the rear seats were in the boot, down some French country lanes, ‘three up’ at over 100mph! The adrenalin was pumping. I was smitten, Justin in the back was very nearly sick. I paid. The car was mine. We had an eventful but never to be forgotten road trip back to Blighty full of incidents and funny moments and I’ve been hooked on the brand ever since. I adore the quietly spoken nature of the brand, the depth of engineering, the audacity to take what was once the ultimate driving machine and make it more focussed, and better. Of course, in more recent times BMW’s M division has taken the M product in an ever more extreme direction so Alpinas have become re-purposed for a slightly different market, but in so many respects they have emerged as better road cars for it.
This is a brand that means something, that is more than marketing bluster and Instagram likes, mainly because Alpina does not really market itself – it lets its products do the talking.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against larger corporate entities investing in smaller ones and giving them the financial firepower to do what they do best, and in some respects, you could argue that is, to some degree what the special relationship forged between BMW and Burkhard Bovensiepen over 50-years ago could be perceived to have been, but I don’t see BMW’s acquisition as that. This isn’t about giving Alpina the wherewithal to do what they do but even better.
Alpina will stop making cars at its Buchloe base in three short years and then what? Will Alpina just become another trim level for the mothership, or will BMW create a whole new range of vehicles under the Alpina brand? One thing is for sure though, BMW is a business that is all about chasing volume and Alpina has never been about that so we can expect a very different sort of Alpina to emerge.
It feels like a sad way to end Alpina’s story under the custodianship of the Bovensiepen family. The engineering knowledge and skills of the team at Buchloe were, still are, first class but I suspect those skills won’t be hanging around to become the plaything of a corporate behemoth. I could have seen a situation where Alpina was to BMW owners what Singer is to the well-heeled customer base of Porsche, an expert reengineering company for connoisseur clients. Re-positioned in this way there could have been a renewed purpose and a bright new future but instead who knows what will happen, but it’s definitely the end of an era, electrification has claimed a casualty that is dear to my heart.
We hopes Alpina will continue to exist as a separate brand
There’s been a lot of weeping and wailing in my social media feeds of late and I’m not just talking about the global situation where it looks like we’re all going to be heading to hell in a handcart. No, amongst the important stuff there’s been a thread of concern about BMW’s purchase of Alpina with many wondering what will become of the Buchloe-based concern. It seems that many are worried that the absorption of Alpina into the BMW portfolio will inevitably lead to a dilution of the Alpina brand and the spectre of seeing a 2 Series Gran Coupé ‘Alpina Edition’ is, indeed, a worrying one.
Bob cogitates what the future will hold for Alpina.
Many argue that BMW already has form for this and point to the dilution of the M brand with virtually every model in the range now available to buy slathered in M badges, but personally I think this is unlikely to happen with Alpina. The bottom line is that Alpina is a very small niche within the BMW world and while it produces superb cars and has afforded me a huge number of great drives over the years the name just doesn’t have a broad appeal. Sure, among our aficionado niche of the BMW world we may all be familiar with the Alpina name, but in a wider context there are a huge number of folk who just aren’t aware of the company. You have to remember that Alpina made 2,000 cars in 2021… BMW sold 2.2 million.
In global terms these days 2,000 cars a year just isn’t going to cut the mustard. In order to be competitive you have to produce 50 or a hundred machines and charge several million Dollars, Euros or Pounds for each one or churn them out by the million. There just isn’t any room for anyone to occupy the middle ground – virtually every small manufacturer left is part of a much bigger conglomerate.
In truth BMW and Alpina have been very closely linked for a number of years, indeed the majority of Alpinas are now built on the BMW factory line with a small amount of finishing done at Buchloe. As far as I’m aware Alpina has been doing plenty of work and development for BMW for a number of years in its state of the art research and development centre so there are already plenty of ties binding the companies together. Historically there has been much discussion between the two companies about power and torque outputs and performance figures, with BMW M beating the Alpina in one regard while the Alpina might eclipse the M car in another, all in a carefully choreographed Top Trumps contest.
My hope is that Alpina and BMW will continue to coexist as more or less separate brands with their own closely linked, but still separate identities. It has been becoming harder and harder for Alpina to continue this thanks to the virtual elimination of the normally-aspirated engine where its traditional skill sets and techniques would previously have been able to shine. Where Alpina has more than made up for this is in its chassis prowess which really has been second to none in recent years, often putting the equivalent BMW product to shame.
While we’re unlikely to see any more of Alpina’s wilder creations such as the glorious B8, an E36 3 Series with a 4.6-litre V8 under its bonnet, anymore, I do hope that BMW will continue with machinery like the B5 Touring as it’s a model for which there’s no direct BMW competitor. Time will tell I guess, but I’m not going to be losing sleep over the possibility of Alpina-badged 2 Series Active Tourers and can only hope that BMW will keep the Alpina brand flying high for those who value something just a little bit different in our increasingly homogenised world.
Then and now, the Lotus Elan could appear to be not a lot of car for the money. Well, until you drive one...
Motoring enthusiasts unable to get to Earls Court in October 1962 for the London Motor Show merely had to pop along to their local cinema to catch the highlights brought to them by Pathé News. A bit more effort required than reaching for your smartphone these days, but surely a more enriching experience. Following a brief sequence on the previous year’s Jaguar E-type, we cut to a lipstick red Lotus Elan, loaded with three cheerful-looking young ladies and rotating on a turntable.
In between innuendo-laden quips, our commentator finds space to talk about the car, ‘Much smaller, but very much in the high-performance class, the Lotus Elan is built on the foundation of racing success and with refinements every owner will appreciate.’ When the cameraman manages to tear his lens away from the young ladies, Sixties motoring enthusiast gets to marvel at what lies beneath those cheeky glassfibre curves. Painted, plated and polished to a level that foretold Seventies customisation trends, the Elan’s simple backbone chassis, independent suspension and twin-overhead camshaft engine certainly promised to live up to the hyperbole of being a product of motor sport-tuned minds.
Strangely for such a racing-focused manufacturer, its Elan wasn’t intended for competition use and it was the customers who provided the initial push onto track. When I say push, that wasn’t meant to be a cheap jibe on the Elan’s swiftly-earned reputation for not always functioning as intended. What racers professional and amateur, and wannabe racers on the road soon discovered, was a machine that reinvented what could be expected from a small sports car, not just in dynamic agility, but how it juggled the conflicting needs of the hotshoe driver with those of the owner who didn’t feel that a tiresome lack of comfort should be an essential price to pay. The hefty £1500 purchase price was steep enough.
All that was 60 years ago and we’re still going on about it. Time for an anniversary special package of features then.
The article on Tony Vandervell’s Bentley (Last Lap of Luxury) had particular interest because I have previously owned and currently own a Bentley with a Tony Vandervell connection. My third of six S-Type Continentals owned over nearly 40 years of driving these cars was an S2, two-door coupé previously owned by him. He may well have kept the Park Ward car featured until he passed away but he supplemented it with the two-door V8 version, covering 95,000 miles in less than three years early in its life. My current restoration project is a MkVI two-door coupé, B 381BG, by Freestone and Webb built for Vandervell Products and delivered in 1948, so presumably the second of the two MkVIs mentioned in the article. I found the car in Melbourne in a near-derelict state while on a BDC tour to Tasmania three years ago. I’ve owned three S1 Continental fastbacks by HJM. The first, a scruffy auto, acquired when our second child came along in 1983 because I couldn’t fit a child seat together with a carry cot in the back of a 911. Subsequent to both the S2, two-door cars above and an R-type Continental I acquired a manual S1 Continental by HJM, but the ’box didn’t suit it and even a clutch change failed to cure the clutch judder when setting off.
Now more than ever, smart buying is about condition, mileage, history and provenance. To retain – or increase – value in this changing market your classic needs to be the proper thing. The real deal with no stories. And that means rebuilt or refreshed mechanicals, straight shimmering paint, equal panel gaps, retrimmed or rejuvenated interior, neat boot and under bonnet areas and lots and lots of paperwork. The veracity of the mileage is important too, so make sure it’s made credible by a paper trail of bills and sheaves of previous MoT certificates. Nobody wants to buy work or projects now. In fact, quite the opposite. The most desirable cars are the ones where successive owners have lost their shirts spending money preserving and pampering their classics. That’s where the strongest value is – where you’re paying sometimes less than a quarter of the total of what’s been spent on a classic over the years. And those deals are out there, more now than ever. As prices soften, more classics will look irresistible by virtue of the sums previously invested by their starry-eyed owners. The shifting market landscape of 2022 could unlock some of the greatest classic car value that we’ve seen for years. Make sure you choose wisely and buy smart.
Not heavy Kudos to Richard Bremner for writing such a brilliant piece on the S.S.1 Airline. I’ve often seen that car at Jaguar Heritage’s collection centre in Gaydon so it was great to read more about its history and what it’s like to drive. I will take issue with Richard, though, describing it as “heavy around the rear”. I think – and most will agree – it’s a very handsome car and not at all as Richard described. Thanks again for a great site.
No less interesting marked the centenary of Jaguar was a masterful piece of publishing, covering all bases of the company’s 100 years. I especially liked the biographies of nine important people and could easily have read nine more! I also liked the E-type and DB6 twin test, two cars I will never, sadly, get to buy myself but that made the article no less interesting. And sorry to read Paul Walton is suffering my issues with his XF Sportbrake. I had a similar car for a few years and similar problems, finally selling it in 2018 for – whisper it – a Honda SUV which (fingers crossed) has been bullet proof so far. Jaguar certainly needs to improve its reliability if it’s to reach another 100 years! Congratulations to all the team for such a great magazine and keep up the good work.
Welcome to our May issue – I don’t know about you, but it feels like this year is flying by; maybe it’s the contrast with the last two years’ glacial pace caused by lockdowns and Covid. This month’s magazine features not one, but two purple muscle cars. This wasn’t deliberate, it’s just a bit like the old bus analogy – we had one then another one turned up very shortly after and we just had to share them both with you.
In some ways they represent different ends of the muscle car spectrum. The ’67 GTO is nearer the beginning of this halcyon period, while the ’72 ’Cuda the end. And that’s the funny thing, the muscle car era barely lasted a decade, yet it’s the era that many enthusiasts wax lyrical about or obsess over… I wonder in the future if the era we’re living through now will be referred to as the Second Muscle Car wave?
After all, you can buy outrageously powerful Camaros, Mustangs, Corvettes and Challengers today… will that be the case in a decade? Hmmmm, what do you think?
Also kicking off this month is the story of my own muscle car’s restoration; it was something I knew eventually I would have to undertake, but I’d been procrastinating about for years, but then events overtook me and I was forced to bite the bullet. There is something quite nice about having a scruffier car, as it means you can enjoy it more without worry. “Another ding? Nah, who cares…!” With an immaculate car, a lot of the fun evaporates, as worries about scratches or worse come to the fore. Well, I hope you’re looking forward to a summer of fun, getting out and enjoying your vehicles!
The Auto Italia radar, I'm sure, detected that Antonio Mandelli has announced the revival of the Cizeta name, with what is tantamount to a new car, but still centred on that unique V16 engine. In the definitive book on the Cizeta cars by Brian Wiklem it is explained that, rather as Dauer bought Bugatti EB110 stock, Mr Mandelli did the same with Cizeta Automobili some time ago, to develop his own modified version, formerly known as the Mandelli Monza.
This Auto Italia reader noticed the repeat of one fact that was refuted by Mr Wiklem, that it was Giorgio Moroder's investment which turned Claudio Zampolli into an independent manufacturer. In fact the author alleges activity had been underway a year already, for Sylvester Stallone was the wealthy friend originally enthused by the talented Zampolli to back his enterprise. The famous actor was a customer of his, very into Lamborghini supercars at the time, evinced by the Jalpa in 1985's Rocky IV. It seems he moved on from Cizeta when the Mimrans asked him about becoming involved in Lamborghini affairs instead. Consequently, the V16 engine already existed and was secretly being road tested by Mr Zampolli in a cut-and-shut Ferrari 308 GTB by the time Giorgio Moroder came on board. He said himself that it was the sight of the engine that convinced him the endeavour was serious and had prospects. I still support the theory that the car was conceived by Zampolli in the early 1980s as an offering to Lamborghini's new owners, the Mimran brothers, to put into production alongside the Countach as a companion model, derived from it, but oriented at the US market. One can see why, when he was later turned down and Claudio decided to create and sell the car himself, he would not want people to see it as a Lamborghini reject. A car to be the next Lamborghini would explain why the Cizeta Moroder was to have a chassis of rectangular (cuboid) tubes instead of cylindrical tubes, a curious choice for a hand-built car. Roundsection tubes can be lighter for the same strength, so they were and still are preferred in motor racing and would be expected for a handmade prestige supercar of the highest quality and price, as the Cizeta eventually became. Round tubes were difficult to machine-weld at the time, so a series production supercar typically used squaresection tubes. The famous motor mogul Bob Lutz, at Chrysler under Lee Lacocca during the Lamborghini era, said that he asked Tom Gale and William Dayton of their Design Center to restyle the Diablo in 1987 precisely because it looked too much like the Cizeta Moroder and not enough like the Countach. It took a year to arrive at a compromise all could agree on — Gandini redid the nose, Chrysler redid the rear. Telling, though, that the altered Diablo still bore Gandini's name on the flank, whereas the purer Cizeta Moroder never did. Well, that's the theory I believe, anyway. Would that Claudio were still here to set the record straight for himself, although Auto Italia did interview him, so we have that. It is a sad fact that many of the people who knew the truth of the greatest era for the cars we like, the 1950s-1980s, are passing beyond the veil now, leaving a lot of vacuum that will fill with whatever prejudice people are happy to believe. I still read, if never in Auto Italia, assertions like Ferruccio Lamborghini storming off to make the Miura after a fight with Enzo Ferrari when in reality they never even met, or that the Lancia Beta and Fiat 128 are merely synonyms for rust bucket, not that they advanced front-wheel drive car design by at least 10 years. Bravo to those who keep trying, but please, heroes, do tell your stories. And tell them here!
The Ferrari Meera S feature was special not only due to the exclusivity of the car, but also because not many motoring publications have ever written about it.
As the car was first commissioned by Saudi royalty, it was the subject of a test drive in an Arab motor magazine called Sport Auto in Saudi Arabia when it was (almost) new in the April 1985 issue. The magazine publishers loved the car so much they made it the cover star, where you can see it driven at speed, kicking up dust! This article is special in many ways. Sport Auto was the first (and only) to introduce Arab readers to the Michelotti-modified Ferrari. It includes the only photos of the Meera while sporting the original KSA registration plates. It also corroborates many of the facts you mentioned, such as having Tateo Uchida as codesigner, technical specifications, the exposed circuits and diodes in the transparent dashboard (so hard to read in dark, according to Sport Auto) and the rearview video camera. One photo showed this camera hanging on the top right corner of the rear screen, very reminiscent of CCTV cameras used in banks in the 1980s!
The last paragraph in the Sport Auto article might help add to ownership timeline and value. It translates: “For the record, this car is a one-off, and ended up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where it was sold for one million Saudi Riyals. However, it is now up for sale for 400,000 SAR.”
In November last year I lost another of my Motor colleagues in November last year – Tony Dron, who was a year younger than me, but had long suffered from a lung condition. He joined Motor in 1971, having won the Sir William Lyons Award for budding motoring writers in 1968. In many ways we were opposites, Tony having almost a pop-star image and personality, with hair style and clothes to match, and me in grey flannels and sports jacket and something of a shrinking violet by comparison. But for some reason we hit it off and became firm friends, until he left in 1974.
This was mainly to concentrate on his professional motor racing career which I think began in Formula Vee, but soon went on to touring cars. For some reason (perhaps we were on the way back from MIRA), I was with him when in 1974 we sat in Ralph Broad’s office in Southam and Tony pitched for a Triumph Dolomite Sprint works drive in the BTCC Championship. He got it too, and proved capable of beating the top drivers of the day. He drove a Unipart March F3 car in 1976 and raced internationally, including Sebring, Spa and Le Mans (where he won his Class in 1982 with a Porsche).
After many seasons as a professional driver, in later years he became a top historic racer, winning the Sussex Trophy at the Goodwood Revival for three consecutive years. In fact, if you want to see and hear Tony in action, try and find a copy of the Sideways in a D-type DVD, which features him in a Ferrari sparring with Win Percy in Nigel Webb’s D-type. Magnificent stuff! Tony was another wonderful person who I will always remember with affection and respect.
Tony Dron in Nigel Webb’s ex-Duncan Hamilton C-type (XKC 004) during a press preview day at Goodwood in 2006, where he gave rides to journalists and guests. Photo: Tony Bailey.
Tony Dron making a rare appearance in an E-type – Anthony Hutton’s mod-sport car prepared by Forward Engineering which Paul arranged for him to track test for Motor around 1972. Photo: Paul Skilleter.
Roger Bell was a leading automotive journalist who joined Motor magazine as a young man in 1959. In Jaguar terms, it’s interesting to note that he was delegated the job of compiling the magazine’s first road test of the new Mark X.
The test appeared in November 1963 and was remarkably critical at a time when some journalists enjoyed a rather too-friendly relationship with manufacturers, and tended to gloss over faults and failings in new models. But not Roger, and in the case of the Mark X, refinement, powertrain noise, the ‘skin-deep quality’ of the woodwork, inefficient heating and an ‘absurd lack of lateral support’ from the seats, were features he commented adversely on. After the test was published, Roger was invited to Browns Lane ‘for a chat’ and he was somewhat taken aback when on arrival he was ushered into a room full of engineers and given a good grilling! But his observations were basically fair and he became a leading road tester, before being promoted to Editor of Motor in 1973.
I had joined Motor in April 1966 and two years later it was Roger who gave me my first drive of an E-type – a story I have related before in these pages. The magazine had borrowed a press E-type roadster (JDU 877E) for a Group Test, and after it had returned from being belted round north Wales, I found on my desk a note from Roger which said something like, ‘In view of your interest in Jaguar, you might like to take the E-type for the weekend’. Would I like to?! So, there followed two days of great joy, driving this yellow ultra-high-performance two-seater Jaguar around the countryside. All these years later I still deeply appreciate Roger’s thoughtfulness. Roger was a fine driver and was highly successful in the British Touring Car Championship in the early/mid-1970s, being runner-up in his Class twice. He drove mainly 3.0 litre BMWs for Dealer Team BMW, but piloted other marques too.
He left Motor in 1981 to edit Thoroughbred & Classic Cars and contributed as a freelance to various other titles and newspapers – so when I conceived a bookstall magazine on Jaguar (Jaguar Quarterly), Roger was one of the first writers I turned to. In the first issue of JQ, published in the autumn of 1988, he wrote an informed piece on three modified Jaguars we had assembled for him – Janspeed XJ6 Turbo, Lister XJ-S and Lynx Performer. Later, he tested JaguarSport products for us. In recent years, Roger suffered from Parkinson’s and it was sad he eventually succumbed to the disease. But I will always remember him with gratitude and admiration.
The yellow E-type Series 1 1/2, which Roger Bell allowed Paul to drive can be seen amongst other cars on this 1968 Group Test. Roger Bell, journalist, editor, author and race driver, pictured around 1970.
Porsche sports cars set new records at Amelia Island Auction
Last month, we brought you news of the superrare Porsches set to go under the hammer at the Gooding & Company Amelia Island Auction. A 1959 718 RSK set pulses racing in advance of the sale, as did a fine selection of other special sports cars from Zuffenhausen, including a 2005 Carrera GT and a 1993 964 Carrera RS 3.8 Clubsport, the latter built at the request of Tobias Hagenmeyer, CEO of transmission giant, Getrag. Presented in black with yellow accents, the air-cooled rarity features seven wholly unique characteristics not found on any other RS 3.8. A 1998 RUF Turbo R Limited also generated interest in the lead-up to the sale, scheduled a day ahead of the weekend’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance. Then, just as we went to print, Gooding & Company announced a late entry to proceedings: 904/6 chassis 906-011, a historically significant Porsche race car which made its debut at the Le Mans test weekend in April 1965 and, later that year, was entered in the Mont Ventoux Hillclimb and the Grand Prix of Solitude. After this season, the car was retired from Porsche’s racing department.
All Porsches offered at the Amelia Island auction were sold, the leading example being the 718 RSK, which achieved $2,975,000 after an engaging bidding war. 904/6 chassis 906- 011, meanwhile, achieved a remarkable figure of $2,205,000. The aforementioned Carrera GT shattered the recently set world record at auction for the model by selling for $2,012,500 (eclipsing the $2,000,000 million achieved earlier this year), while the Hagenmeyer 964 Carrera RS 3.8 Clubsport also set a new model world record, yielding a final sale price of $1,875,000.
Within the same realm, the gorgeous 993- based Riviera Blue RUF Turbo R Limited stunned auction attendees by becoming the most valuable RUF ever purchased at public sale, generating an unanticipated winning bid of $2,040,000. Modern 911s also commanded strong sale prices at the auction, where Porsche was the most represented marque. A 2001 996 GT2, for example, sold for $240,800, while a 2018 991 Gen II GT3 Touring brought in $302,000 after a considerable bidding battle. The event’s most successful lot? A 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C-SS Teardrop Coupe, which fetched $13,425,000.
Of the nineteen auction lots generating more than $1m, eight were Porsches. Late entries included a pair of 1979 935 race cars (sold for a respectable $1,765,000 and $1,462,500) and a 1974 Carrera 3.0 RSR IROC, one of only fifteen 911s specially built for Roger Penske’s legendary race series. RSR chassis 911 460 0085 is one of the few 911s which competed in all four IROC races in 1973/1974. In the first race, Indycar hero, Gordon Johncock piloted the car to a tenth-place finish. For the second event, McLaren F1 driver, Peter Revson, finished fourth. Johncock found himself back in the red RSR for race three, finishing eleventh after throttle linkage issues.
For the season finale in early 1974, the top six performers went head-to-head at Daytona Speedway. AJ Foyt took the controls of this iconic RSR, but finished in sixth place after engine failure early on. Even so, the car’s special history was enough to attract $1,627,500 at Amelia Island.
One man did more than most to highlight the Eastern Bloc car scene in Britain and across Europe, and the launch of this bookazine coincides unfortunately wth his passing. It seems fitting to dedicate this publication to Julian Nowill — a gentleman and a fount of Communist car knowledge; someone with whom I had hoped to speak and learn while compiling this guide and someone who will be missed by all who knew him. These pages will reflect his passion. I hope you enjoy the stories within.
I have read a few comments on social media snubbing the idea of an all-wheel drive M3, I think these detractors need to get real. While I would be the first to admit that the driving dynamics of M3s of old would’ve been ruined had they been four-wheel drive, people need to realise that modern M cars have enormous amounts of power and therefore performance, the likes of which would overpower a traditional two-wheel drive setup and likely be beyond the control of most mere mortals if they were strictly rear-drive. From what I understand the new systems still prioritise drive to the real wheels, but switch to all four only when absolutely necessary – so what’s the problem?
I really enjoyed your feature on Matt Swanborough’s E38 7 Series, not only because I found the story quite touching but also because I found what Matt said about its colour really quite interesting.
These days it seems nearly every car is black or grey, so the purple Mora metallic on Matt’s E38 is a reminder of how people were a bit braver with colour choice not so long ago. It might be my imagination that the 1990s delivered more colourful cars, but I’m certain there were brighter hues back in the 1970s, which is part of what makes classic cars of that era so appealing in my view. Maybe we all need to be a little more adventurous when speccing our new BMWs in future?
I’ve been musing recently about what the future holds for smaller, shall we say more boutique car manufacturers in the face of everincreasing electrification. I’m thinking of brands like Atom, Caterham, Morgan and the like. What might their products look like, and will legislation create pockets within which they can thrive, or at a basic level even survive?
Most specifically I wondered what all this would mean for my favourite brand of all, Alpina. Before I managed to put pen to paper, or fingertip to keys, I read in the news that BMW had actually bought Alpina, or more specifically the branding rights (no shares were actually sold). I’ll be honest my heart sank, and despite trying to find positive angles about the ‘sale’ it’s not recovered since.
My childhood dream car, whilst on my early morning paper round, was an E36 B8 4.6 convertible. Most people would dream of an F40 or Diablo, but not me – that was where I set my sights. Sadly, that is a target I have missed ever since but at the tender age of 20 I did find an E28 B9 3.5, which turned out to be one of the UK press cars no less, advertised in the Dordogne region of France.
Like Bob, Elliott shares his thoughts about the future of Alpina.
Elliott morns the endof an era at Alpina...
Detail was completely lacking; the photographs were laughable but nevertheless I booked one-way flights for myself and my good friend, Justin, to get over there and try to get the car back home. The test drive consisted of our expat seller driving the car, fitted with two seats only as the rear seats were in the boot, down some French country lanes, ‘three up’ at over 100mph! The adrenalin was pumping. I was smitten, Justin in the back was very nearly sick. I paid. The car was mine. We had an eventful but never to be forgotten road trip back to Blighty full of incidents and funny moments and I’ve been hooked on the brand ever since. I adore the quietly spoken nature of the brand, the depth of engineering, the audacity to take what was once the ultimate driving machine and make it more focussed, and better. Of course, in more recent times BMW’s M division has taken the M product in an ever more extreme direction so Alpinas have become re-purposed for a slightly different market, but in so many respects they have emerged as better road cars for it.
This is a brand that means something, that is more than marketing bluster and Instagram likes, mainly because Alpina does not really market itself – it lets its products do the talking.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against larger corporate entities investing in smaller ones and giving them the financial firepower to do what they do best, and in some respects, you could argue that is, to some degree what the special relationship forged between BMW and Burkhard Bovensiepen over 50-years ago could be perceived to have been, but I don’t see BMW’s acquisition as that. This isn’t about giving Alpina the wherewithal to do what they do but even better.
Alpina will stop making cars at its Buchloe base in three short years and then what? Will Alpina just become another trim level for the mothership, or will BMW create a whole new range of vehicles under the Alpina brand? One thing is for sure though, BMW is a business that is all about chasing volume and Alpina has never been about that so we can expect a very different sort of Alpina to emerge.
It feels like a sad way to end Alpina’s story under the custodianship of the Bovensiepen family. The engineering knowledge and skills of the team at Buchloe were, still are, first class but I suspect those skills won’t be hanging around to become the plaything of a corporate behemoth. I could have seen a situation where Alpina was to BMW owners what Singer is to the well-heeled customer base of Porsche, an expert reengineering company for connoisseur clients. Re-positioned in this way there could have been a renewed purpose and a bright new future but instead who knows what will happen, but it’s definitely the end of an era, electrification has claimed a casualty that is dear to my heart.
We hopes Alpina will continue to exist as a separate brand
There’s been a lot of weeping and wailing in my social media feeds of late and I’m not just talking about the global situation where it looks like we’re all going to be heading to hell in a handcart. No, amongst the important stuff there’s been a thread of concern about BMW’s purchase of Alpina with many wondering what will become of the Buchloe-based concern. It seems that many are worried that the absorption of Alpina into the BMW portfolio will inevitably lead to a dilution of the Alpina brand and the spectre of seeing a 2 Series Gran Coupé ‘Alpina Edition’ is, indeed, a worrying one.
Bob cogitates what the future will hold for Alpina.
Many argue that BMW already has form for this and point to the dilution of the M brand with virtually every model in the range now available to buy slathered in M badges, but personally I think this is unlikely to happen with Alpina. The bottom line is that Alpina is a very small niche within the BMW world and while it produces superb cars and has afforded me a huge number of great drives over the years the name just doesn’t have a broad appeal. Sure, among our aficionado niche of the BMW world we may all be familiar with the Alpina name, but in a wider context there are a huge number of folk who just aren’t aware of the company. You have to remember that Alpina made 2,000 cars in 2021… BMW sold 2.2 million.
In global terms these days 2,000 cars a year just isn’t going to cut the mustard. In order to be competitive you have to produce 50 or a hundred machines and charge several million Dollars, Euros or Pounds for each one or churn them out by the million. There just isn’t any room for anyone to occupy the middle ground – virtually every small manufacturer left is part of a much bigger conglomerate.
In truth BMW and Alpina have been very closely linked for a number of years, indeed the majority of Alpinas are now built on the BMW factory line with a small amount of finishing done at Buchloe. As far as I’m aware Alpina has been doing plenty of work and development for BMW for a number of years in its state of the art research and development centre so there are already plenty of ties binding the companies together. Historically there has been much discussion between the two companies about power and torque outputs and performance figures, with BMW M beating the Alpina in one regard while the Alpina might eclipse the M car in another, all in a carefully choreographed Top Trumps contest.
My hope is that Alpina and BMW will continue to coexist as more or less separate brands with their own closely linked, but still separate identities. It has been becoming harder and harder for Alpina to continue this thanks to the virtual elimination of the normally-aspirated engine where its traditional skill sets and techniques would previously have been able to shine. Where Alpina has more than made up for this is in its chassis prowess which really has been second to none in recent years, often putting the equivalent BMW product to shame.
While we’re unlikely to see any more of Alpina’s wilder creations such as the glorious B8, an E36 3 Series with a 4.6-litre V8 under its bonnet, anymore, I do hope that BMW will continue with machinery like the B5 Touring as it’s a model for which there’s no direct BMW competitor. Time will tell I guess, but I’m not going to be losing sleep over the possibility of Alpina-badged 2 Series Active Tourers and can only hope that BMW will keep the Alpina brand flying high for those who value something just a little bit different in our increasingly homogenised world.
Then and now, the Lotus Elan could appear to be not a lot of car for the money. Well, until you drive one...
Motoring enthusiasts unable to get to Earls Court in October 1962 for the London Motor Show merely had to pop along to their local cinema to catch the highlights brought to them by Pathé News. A bit more effort required than reaching for your smartphone these days, but surely a more enriching experience. Following a brief sequence on the previous year’s Jaguar E-type, we cut to a lipstick red Lotus Elan, loaded with three cheerful-looking young ladies and rotating on a turntable.
In between innuendo-laden quips, our commentator finds space to talk about the car, ‘Much smaller, but very much in the high-performance class, the Lotus Elan is built on the foundation of racing success and with refinements every owner will appreciate.’ When the cameraman manages to tear his lens away from the young ladies, Sixties motoring enthusiast gets to marvel at what lies beneath those cheeky glassfibre curves. Painted, plated and polished to a level that foretold Seventies customisation trends, the Elan’s simple backbone chassis, independent suspension and twin-overhead camshaft engine certainly promised to live up to the hyperbole of being a product of motor sport-tuned minds.
Strangely for such a racing-focused manufacturer, its Elan wasn’t intended for competition use and it was the customers who provided the initial push onto track. When I say push, that wasn’t meant to be a cheap jibe on the Elan’s swiftly-earned reputation for not always functioning as intended. What racers professional and amateur, and wannabe racers on the road soon discovered, was a machine that reinvented what could be expected from a small sports car, not just in dynamic agility, but how it juggled the conflicting needs of the hotshoe driver with those of the owner who didn’t feel that a tiresome lack of comfort should be an essential price to pay. The hefty £1500 purchase price was steep enough.
All that was 60 years ago and we’re still going on about it. Time for an anniversary special package of features then.
Vandervell’s Bentleys
The article on Tony Vandervell’s Bentley (Last Lap of Luxury) had particular interest because I have previously owned and currently own a Bentley with a Tony Vandervell connection. My third of six S-Type Continentals owned over nearly 40 years of driving these cars was an S2, two-door coupé previously owned by him. He may well have kept the Park Ward car featured until he passed away but he supplemented it with the two-door V8 version, covering 95,000 miles in less than three years early in its life. My current restoration project is a MkVI two-door coupé, B 381BG, by Freestone and Webb built for Vandervell Products and delivered in 1948, so presumably the second of the two MkVIs mentioned in the article. I found the car in Melbourne in a near-derelict state while on a BDC tour to Tasmania three years ago. I’ve owned three S1 Continental fastbacks by HJM. The first, a scruffy auto, acquired when our second child came along in 1983 because I couldn’t fit a child seat together with a carry cot in the back of a 911. Subsequent to both the S2, two-door cars above and an R-type Continental I acquired a manual S1 Continental by HJM, but the ’box didn’t suit it and even a clutch change failed to cure the clutch judder when setting off.
Now more than ever, smart buying is about condition, mileage, history and provenance. To retain – or increase – value in this changing market your classic needs to be the proper thing. The real deal with no stories. And that means rebuilt or refreshed mechanicals, straight shimmering paint, equal panel gaps, retrimmed or rejuvenated interior, neat boot and under bonnet areas and lots and lots of paperwork. The veracity of the mileage is important too, so make sure it’s made credible by a paper trail of bills and sheaves of previous MoT certificates. Nobody wants to buy work or projects now. In fact, quite the opposite. The most desirable cars are the ones where successive owners have lost their shirts spending money preserving and pampering their classics. That’s where the strongest value is – where you’re paying sometimes less than a quarter of the total of what’s been spent on a classic over the years. And those deals are out there, more now than ever. As prices soften, more classics will look irresistible by virtue of the sums previously invested by their starry-eyed owners. The shifting market landscape of 2022 could unlock some of the greatest classic car value that we’ve seen for years. Make sure you choose wisely and buy smart.
Not heavy Kudos to Richard Bremner for writing such a brilliant piece on the S.S.1 Airline. I’ve often seen that car at Jaguar Heritage’s collection centre in Gaydon so it was great to read more about its history and what it’s like to drive. I will take issue with Richard, though, describing it as “heavy around the rear”. I think – and most will agree – it’s a very handsome car and not at all as Richard described. Thanks again for a great site.
No less interesting marked the centenary of Jaguar was a masterful piece of publishing, covering all bases of the company’s 100 years. I especially liked the biographies of nine important people and could easily have read nine more! I also liked the E-type and DB6 twin test, two cars I will never, sadly, get to buy myself but that made the article no less interesting. And sorry to read Paul Walton is suffering my issues with his XF Sportbrake. I had a similar car for a few years and similar problems, finally selling it in 2018 for – whisper it – a Honda SUV which (fingers crossed) has been bullet proof so far. Jaguar certainly needs to improve its reliability if it’s to reach another 100 years! Congratulations to all the team for such a great magazine and keep up the good work.
Welcome to our May issue – I don’t know about you, but it feels like this year is flying by; maybe it’s the contrast with the last two years’ glacial pace caused by lockdowns and Covid. This month’s magazine features not one, but two purple muscle cars. This wasn’t deliberate, it’s just a bit like the old bus analogy – we had one then another one turned up very shortly after and we just had to share them both with you.
In some ways they represent different ends of the muscle car spectrum. The ’67 GTO is nearer the beginning of this halcyon period, while the ’72 ’Cuda the end. And that’s the funny thing, the muscle car era barely lasted a decade, yet it’s the era that many enthusiasts wax lyrical about or obsess over… I wonder in the future if the era we’re living through now will be referred to as the Second Muscle Car wave?
After all, you can buy outrageously powerful Camaros, Mustangs, Corvettes and Challengers today… will that be the case in a decade? Hmmmm, what do you think?
Also kicking off this month is the story of my own muscle car’s restoration; it was something I knew eventually I would have to undertake, but I’d been procrastinating about for years, but then events overtook me and I was forced to bite the bullet. There is something quite nice about having a scruffier car, as it means you can enjoy it more without worry. “Another ding? Nah, who cares…!” With an immaculate car, a lot of the fun evaporates, as worries about scratches or worse come to the fore. Well, I hope you’re looking forward to a summer of fun, getting out and enjoying your vehicles!
CIZETA MUSINGS
The Auto Italia radar, I'm sure, detected that Antonio Mandelli has announced the revival of the Cizeta name, with what is tantamount to a new car, but still centred on that unique V16 engine. In the definitive book on the Cizeta cars by Brian Wiklem it is explained that, rather as Dauer bought Bugatti EB110 stock, Mr Mandelli did the same with Cizeta Automobili some time ago, to develop his own modified version, formerly known as the Mandelli Monza.
This Auto Italia reader noticed the repeat of one fact that was refuted by Mr Wiklem, that it was Giorgio Moroder's investment which turned Claudio Zampolli into an independent manufacturer. In fact the author alleges activity had been underway a year already, for Sylvester Stallone was the wealthy friend originally enthused by the talented Zampolli to back his enterprise. The famous actor was a customer of his, very into Lamborghini supercars at the time, evinced by the Jalpa in 1985's Rocky IV. It seems he moved on from Cizeta when the Mimrans asked him about becoming involved in Lamborghini affairs instead. Consequently, the V16 engine already existed and was secretly being road tested by Mr Zampolli in a cut-and-shut Ferrari 308 GTB by the time Giorgio Moroder came on board. He said himself that it was the sight of the engine that convinced him the endeavour was serious and had prospects. I still support the theory that the car was conceived by Zampolli in the early 1980s as an offering to Lamborghini's new owners, the Mimran brothers, to put into production alongside the Countach as a companion model, derived from it, but oriented at the US market. One can see why, when he was later turned down and Claudio decided to create and sell the car himself, he would not want people to see it as a Lamborghini reject. A car to be the next Lamborghini would explain why the Cizeta Moroder was to have a chassis of rectangular (cuboid) tubes instead of cylindrical tubes, a curious choice for a hand-built car. Roundsection tubes can be lighter for the same strength, so they were and still are preferred in motor racing and would be expected for a handmade prestige supercar of the highest quality and price, as the Cizeta eventually became. Round tubes were difficult to machine-weld at the time, so a series production supercar typically used squaresection tubes. The famous motor mogul Bob Lutz, at Chrysler under Lee Lacocca during the Lamborghini era, said that he asked Tom Gale and William Dayton of their Design Center to restyle the Diablo in 1987 precisely because it looked too much like the Cizeta Moroder and not enough like the Countach. It took a year to arrive at a compromise all could agree on — Gandini redid the nose, Chrysler redid the rear. Telling, though, that the altered Diablo still bore Gandini's name on the flank, whereas the purer Cizeta Moroder never did. Well, that's the theory I believe, anyway. Would that Claudio were still here to set the record straight for himself, although Auto Italia did interview him, so we have that. It is a sad fact that many of the people who knew the truth of the greatest era for the cars we like, the 1950s-1980s, are passing beyond the veil now, leaving a lot of vacuum that will fill with whatever prejudice people are happy to believe. I still read, if never in Auto Italia, assertions like Ferruccio Lamborghini storming off to make the Miura after a fight with Enzo Ferrari when in reality they never even met, or that the Lancia Beta and Fiat 128 are merely synonyms for rust bucket, not that they advanced front-wheel drive car design by at least 10 years. Bravo to those who keep trying, but please, heroes, do tell your stories. And tell them here!
MEERA OF ARABIA
The Ferrari Meera S feature was special not only due to the exclusivity of the car, but also because not many motoring publications have ever written about it.
As the car was first commissioned by Saudi royalty, it was the subject of a test drive in an Arab motor magazine called Sport Auto in Saudi Arabia when it was (almost) new in the April 1985 issue. The magazine publishers loved the car so much they made it the cover star, where you can see it driven at speed, kicking up dust! This article is special in many ways. Sport Auto was the first (and only) to introduce Arab readers to the Michelotti-modified Ferrari. It includes the only photos of the Meera while sporting the original KSA registration plates. It also corroborates many of the facts you mentioned, such as having Tateo Uchida as codesigner, technical specifications, the exposed circuits and diodes in the transparent dashboard (so hard to read in dark, according to Sport Auto) and the rearview video camera. One photo showed this camera hanging on the top right corner of the rear screen, very reminiscent of CCTV cameras used in banks in the 1980s!
The last paragraph in the Sport Auto article might help add to ownership timeline and value. It translates: “For the record, this car is a one-off, and ended up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where it was sold for one million Saudi Riyals. However, it is now up for sale for 400,000 SAR.”
Super coupe had test — thanks
In November last year I lost another of my Motor colleagues in November last year – Tony Dron, who was a year younger than me, but had long suffered from a lung condition. He joined Motor in 1971, having won the Sir William Lyons Award for budding motoring writers in 1968. In many ways we were opposites, Tony having almost a pop-star image and personality, with hair style and clothes to match, and me in grey flannels and sports jacket and something of a shrinking violet by comparison. But for some reason we hit it off and became firm friends, until he left in 1974.
This was mainly to concentrate on his professional motor racing career which I think began in Formula Vee, but soon went on to touring cars. For some reason (perhaps we were on the way back from MIRA), I was with him when in 1974 we sat in Ralph Broad’s office in Southam and Tony pitched for a Triumph Dolomite Sprint works drive in the BTCC Championship. He got it too, and proved capable of beating the top drivers of the day. He drove a Unipart March F3 car in 1976 and raced internationally, including Sebring, Spa and Le Mans (where he won his Class in 1982 with a Porsche).
After many seasons as a professional driver, in later years he became a top historic racer, winning the Sussex Trophy at the Goodwood Revival for three consecutive years. In fact, if you want to see and hear Tony in action, try and find a copy of the Sideways in a D-type DVD, which features him in a Ferrari sparring with Win Percy in Nigel Webb’s D-type. Magnificent stuff! Tony was another wonderful person who I will always remember with affection and respect.
Tony Dron in Nigel Webb’s ex-Duncan Hamilton C-type (XKC 004) during a press preview day at Goodwood in 2006, where he gave rides to journalists and guests. Photo: Tony Bailey.
Tony Dron making a rare appearance in an E-type – Anthony Hutton’s mod-sport car prepared by Forward Engineering which Paul arranged for him to track test for Motor around 1972. Photo: Paul Skilleter.
Roger Bell was a leading automotive journalist who joined Motor magazine as a young man in 1959. In Jaguar terms, it’s interesting to note that he was delegated the job of compiling the magazine’s first road test of the new Mark X.
The test appeared in November 1963 and was remarkably critical at a time when some journalists enjoyed a rather too-friendly relationship with manufacturers, and tended to gloss over faults and failings in new models. But not Roger, and in the case of the Mark X, refinement, powertrain noise, the ‘skin-deep quality’ of the woodwork, inefficient heating and an ‘absurd lack of lateral support’ from the seats, were features he commented adversely on. After the test was published, Roger was invited to Browns Lane ‘for a chat’ and he was somewhat taken aback when on arrival he was ushered into a room full of engineers and given a good grilling! But his observations were basically fair and he became a leading road tester, before being promoted to Editor of Motor in 1973.
I had joined Motor in April 1966 and two years later it was Roger who gave me my first drive of an E-type – a story I have related before in these pages. The magazine had borrowed a press E-type roadster (JDU 877E) for a Group Test, and after it had returned from being belted round north Wales, I found on my desk a note from Roger which said something like, ‘In view of your interest in Jaguar, you might like to take the E-type for the weekend’. Would I like to?! So, there followed two days of great joy, driving this yellow ultra-high-performance two-seater Jaguar around the countryside. All these years later I still deeply appreciate Roger’s thoughtfulness. Roger was a fine driver and was highly successful in the British Touring Car Championship in the early/mid-1970s, being runner-up in his Class twice. He drove mainly 3.0 litre BMWs for Dealer Team BMW, but piloted other marques too.
He left Motor in 1981 to edit Thoroughbred & Classic Cars and contributed as a freelance to various other titles and newspapers – so when I conceived a bookstall magazine on Jaguar (Jaguar Quarterly), Roger was one of the first writers I turned to. In the first issue of JQ, published in the autumn of 1988, he wrote an informed piece on three modified Jaguars we had assembled for him – Janspeed XJ6 Turbo, Lister XJ-S and Lynx Performer. Later, he tested JaguarSport products for us. In recent years, Roger suffered from Parkinson’s and it was sad he eventually succumbed to the disease. But I will always remember him with gratitude and admiration.
The yellow E-type Series 1 1/2, which Roger Bell allowed Paul to drive can be seen amongst other cars on this 1968 Group Test. Roger Bell, journalist, editor, author and race driver, pictured around 1970.
Porsche sports cars set new records at Amelia Island Auction
Last month, we brought you news of the superrare Porsches set to go under the hammer at the Gooding & Company Amelia Island Auction. A 1959 718 RSK set pulses racing in advance of the sale, as did a fine selection of other special sports cars from Zuffenhausen, including a 2005 Carrera GT and a 1993 964 Carrera RS 3.8 Clubsport, the latter built at the request of Tobias Hagenmeyer, CEO of transmission giant, Getrag. Presented in black with yellow accents, the air-cooled rarity features seven wholly unique characteristics not found on any other RS 3.8. A 1998 RUF Turbo R Limited also generated interest in the lead-up to the sale, scheduled a day ahead of the weekend’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance. Then, just as we went to print, Gooding & Company announced a late entry to proceedings: 904/6 chassis 906-011, a historically significant Porsche race car which made its debut at the Le Mans test weekend in April 1965 and, later that year, was entered in the Mont Ventoux Hillclimb and the Grand Prix of Solitude. After this season, the car was retired from Porsche’s racing department.
All Porsches offered at the Amelia Island auction were sold, the leading example being the 718 RSK, which achieved $2,975,000 after an engaging bidding war. 904/6 chassis 906- 011, meanwhile, achieved a remarkable figure of $2,205,000. The aforementioned Carrera GT shattered the recently set world record at auction for the model by selling for $2,012,500 (eclipsing the $2,000,000 million achieved earlier this year), while the Hagenmeyer 964 Carrera RS 3.8 Clubsport also set a new model world record, yielding a final sale price of $1,875,000.
Within the same realm, the gorgeous 993- based Riviera Blue RUF Turbo R Limited stunned auction attendees by becoming the most valuable RUF ever purchased at public sale, generating an unanticipated winning bid of $2,040,000. Modern 911s also commanded strong sale prices at the auction, where Porsche was the most represented marque. A 2001 996 GT2, for example, sold for $240,800, while a 2018 991 Gen II GT3 Touring brought in $302,000 after a considerable bidding battle. The event’s most successful lot? A 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C-SS Teardrop Coupe, which fetched $13,425,000.
Of the nineteen auction lots generating more than $1m, eight were Porsches. Late entries included a pair of 1979 935 race cars (sold for a respectable $1,765,000 and $1,462,500) and a 1974 Carrera 3.0 RSR IROC, one of only fifteen 911s specially built for Roger Penske’s legendary race series. RSR chassis 911 460 0085 is one of the few 911s which competed in all four IROC races in 1973/1974. In the first race, Indycar hero, Gordon Johncock piloted the car to a tenth-place finish. For the second event, McLaren F1 driver, Peter Revson, finished fourth. Johncock found himself back in the red RSR for race three, finishing eleventh after throttle linkage issues.
For the season finale in early 1974, the top six performers went head-to-head at Daytona Speedway. AJ Foyt took the controls of this iconic RSR, but finished in sixth place after engine failure early on. Even so, the car’s special history was enough to attract $1,627,500 at Amelia Island.
The next gen model was GAZ 24 Volga — the same peace of shit
One man did more than most to highlight the Eastern Bloc car scene in Britain and across Europe, and the launch of this bookazine coincides unfortunately wth his passing. It seems fitting to dedicate this publication to Julian Nowill — a gentleman and a fount of Communist car knowledge; someone with whom I had hoped to speak and learn while compiling this guide and someone who will be missed by all who knew him. These pages will reflect his passion. I hope you enjoy the stories within.
Nice conversion — but petrol power of V8 is just perfect
Four-wheel-drive M3
I have read a few comments on social media snubbing the idea of an all-wheel drive M3, I think these detractors need to get real. While I would be the first to admit that the driving dynamics of M3s of old would’ve been ruined had they been four-wheel drive, people need to realise that modern M cars have enormous amounts of power and therefore performance, the likes of which would overpower a traditional two-wheel drive setup and likely be beyond the control of most mere mortals if they were strictly rear-drive. From what I understand the new systems still prioritise drive to the real wheels, but switch to all four only when absolutely necessary – so what’s the problem?
Colour Of Love
I really enjoyed your feature on Matt Swanborough’s E38 7 Series, not only because I found the story quite touching but also because I found what Matt said about its colour really quite interesting.
These days it seems nearly every car is black or grey, so the purple Mora metallic on Matt’s E38 is a reminder of how people were a bit braver with colour choice not so long ago. It might be my imagination that the 1990s delivered more colourful cars, but I’m certain there were brighter hues back in the 1970s, which is part of what makes classic cars of that era so appealing in my view. Maybe we all need to be a little more adventurous when speccing our new BMWs in future?
Very toll car