Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
Back on the market in a reserve auction, the neat to see but slightly questionable 1979 Alpina B6 2.8 from last fall is a great 80s reminder of styling trends. See the post below for some items that look a bit off or out of place. Bidding has been pretty slow and is just over $20,000 – some $12,500 short of the asking price in September. Will it see a new buyer this time around?
When it comes of tuned BMWs, there’s no shortage of examples. Indeed, there are far more tuners of the popular Munich brand than all the others combined. From ABC Exclusive to Zender, everyone had their hand at modifying some series car into something a bit more. Sometimes more was tasteful, and othertimes it was garish – but all the way along, no firm has been consistently more effective at producing a quality product than Alpina. From their roots as a semi-factory race effort in the 1970s right through the dealer-offered cars of today, Alpina’s results have always been top-notch redefinition of the basic car. And while they have subsequently built faster cars, for me the best examples of the ethos of Alpina and its relation to BMW has always been the B10 BiTurbo. BMW built the screaming S38 powered M5, but Alpina provided its clients a private jet for the road:
We’ve covered a lot of Alpina models on these pages, but today’s example was a new one to me. In fact, it may be a new one to you, too – because this might be the most rare Alpina model produced. Alpina didn’t have a lot to do with the early 7 series for a few reasons; one, they didn’t sell in big numbers and most of Alpina’s work was concentrated on the smaller and sportier 3,5 and 6 series. But BMW offered a factory hotrod itself in the turbocharged 745i in 1981, and at that point Alpina seemed to give up the ghost on development of the E23 – or did it? The problem was that in Great Britain, the 745i wasn’t available, so Alpina dealer Sytner had the company develop a specific U.K market model. Based upon the 735i, the B10 3.5 featured a 261 horsepower Alpina 3.5 liter motor, normal Alpina suspension upgrades and wheels and some subtle exterior and interior changes. Although these cars were not built in Germany, they are nonetheless considered real Alpinas. Only a scant 22 were built, and one is for sale today:
What was the first M car? Many would instantly say the M1 – first to carry the magical badge of engineering prowess. But of course BMW Motorsport existed before the M1 came to be, and indeed had already tipped their hat to the market with two now legendary cars in their own right. The first was the 3.0CSL a stripped out and lightened racer for the road. The next capitalized on BMW’s early turbocharged technology. Though the inline-6 would be the staple of the road-going lineup until fairly recently, the performance side of BMW took their inline-4 racing virtually everywhere, from Le Mans to Formula 1. And they won virtually everywhere, too – thanks to adjustable boost, in qualifying configuration the development M12 was reportedly capable of 1,400 horsepower – from 1.6 liters. In the 2002, the more pedestrian M10 was turbocharged, resulting in 170 horsepower. That may not sound like a lot, but consider for a moment that small performance sedans up to that point had considerably less. Take the Lotus Cortina, for example, which only a few years earlier was the hot shoe with 105 horsepower. The 2002 Turbo was really a revelation in performance, then, and BMW never looked back. Produced only in Polaris Silver Metallic or Chamonix White like this one, a scant 1,672 were made and are very collectable today:
Part of the appeal of cheap(ish) cars to me is that when they get older they’re so infrequently seen. It’s not that exotics are daily drivers around me, but once a generation of car’s usefulness has been eclipsed they all but disappear from the roadways, replaced by the newest model. Do you really want a clean Audi 5000CS quattro Avant, for example, or an impeccable BMW 630CS? They can be found, but few and far between best describes the frequency with which they come to market. But as the price goes up, so rises the number of examples that are available at any given time. They may still be classified as “rare”, but they’re rare not because they’re hard to find – just hard to afford. There is nothing particularly rare, for example, about most of the Porsche 911 model range from any generation – they were all effectively mass produced sports cars. But because they were highly priced and treasured, the number of good examples that are on the market today exceeds the actually rare 924 Turbo and late 944 Turbo, for example. Looking in another direction, I marveled that on eBay this week there was not one, not two, not even three – but no less than six Z8s tuned by Alpina. That represents just over one out of every 100 that was produced, all for sale at the same time, all in perfect shape, all with low miles and high prices. In fact, this pool gives us a chance to check out exactly how much mileage changes perceived value – or at least, asking price:
