Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
It’s been a little while since we did a wheels post, but I wanted to get back into the swing of things. Here are a few compelling sets I found this week – they all look like pretty good deals if you’re looking for some wheels either set your ride apart or return it to a factory appearance:
I’ve talked about what you could get if you were willing to miss out on the E30 bandwagon, and here’s another example of just how much car you could get. The E31 BMW 8-series is still relatively undervalued; part of that is not yet being recognized as a classic, and the other part is the fear of repairs on this fairly complicated big coupe. That means that if you’re willing to maintain that double-inline-6 motor that those crazy engineers from Munich developed, you can nab yourself a top-rate luxury grand tourer for a song. This example is one of the early M70 motored cars, with 300 horsepower on tap and what I’d consider still a great and underrated design:
As with earlier’s AMG clone 300CE, this 1987 BMW 325i presents a bit of a problem. This particular car also visited a tuning shop in Germany, one that like Ruf and Alpina can be considered to produce its own cars. In this case, this car – had it been fully built and titled – would be considered a Hartge H26. But, also in this case, the car is not fully built and consequently not fully titled a Hartge. What you have, then, is a very good looking 325i sporting one of the less usual engines to see – the 2.6 inline-6 rated at about the same 190 horsepower as the early M3s. Now, perhaps it doesn’t matter to you that it’s not a full Hartge car – but it matters to the market:
The BMW M Roadster with only 21,000 miles we featured back in May is back up for sale, with the price having been lowered $2,000.
The Porsche 944 and BMW E30 are two of the most popular chassis to use in drivers events and club racing. Cheap, plentiful and effective, they’re usually turned up with race suspension, cages, and once you’ve run out of gusto, it’s not uncommon to see them get greater motivation. Generally for the 944, this means looking towards the turbocharged variant of the 2.5 liter inline-4 that was available from Porsche themselves; similarly, E30s receive a great swath of later Munich-based motors including the S50, S52 and even S54 if you’re really racey. But today there are two lesser-used mills powering this pair of perennial favorites. Which is the one for your sporting needs? Let’s start with the 944: