While BMW was a well-known name throughout Germany in the 1960s thanks to their prolific motorcycle history and pre-War exploits in the Mille Miglia and other sports car races with the 328, outside of Germany they remained fairly unknown in the 1960s. Indeed, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, if you asked someone to identify where the kidney grills belonged in Britain, they’d probably point you towards the BMW-derived Bristols of the day – straight copies of some of the first post-war BMWs, right down to the grill. So in the 1960s and 1970s, BMW went racing to try to spread the reputation of their engineering out of motorcycles or perhaps some veiled World War airplane references with their “New Class” sedans. It was independent tuners like Schnitzer and Alpina that first really started to get the small sedans noticed in Touring classes. While the large coupe based upon the New Class design wasn’t raced much in its day – efforts instead focusing on the smaller, lighter and similarly powered sedans – it’s none-the-less exciting to see a 2000CS that has been modified in the style of the period racers:
