Restored roadster revealed
It seems BMW couldn’t wait for its own date to show off the restored 507 sports car once owned by the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley.
BMW revealed last week that it intended to publicly unveil the gleaming white 507 on August 21 at California’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance but at the weekend it went public with a photo roll of the pristine vehicle.
The car was originally bought and driven by Presley while he was doing his military service in Germany in the late 1950s. After that it disappeared for nearly 50 years and was believed to have been lost before returning to the limelight.
The car was found in a poor state in the US and has undergone an exacting BMW Group Classic restoration in Munich. The 507, with chassis number 70079, is now exactly as it was when Presley took delivery of it on December 20, 1958, with paintwork finished in Feather White, the 150hp V8 aluminium engine under the bonnet, centre-lock rims, black-andwhite interior and a Becker Mexico radio.
When discovered, the original body parts and other components were virtually all present and intact, but it had lost its engine and gearbox. The rear axle was a ‘‘replacement part’’ of unknown origin, rust was eating away the floor assembly, the seats were worn and there was no instrument panel.
However, BMW said the fascination of a rare and beguilingly beautiful automobile outweighed all the inadequacies and deficiencies, augmented by the memory of Presley. It headed back to Munich under the slogan of ‘‘Return to Sender’’ as the solution became ‘‘It’s Now or Never’’.
The 507 has always been one of the sought-after rarities in the history of the brand with just 254 produced between 1955 and 1959. After its world premiere at the Frankfurt International Motor Show in 1955, the two-seater, penned by designer Albrecht Graf Goertz, was hailed in the press as the ‘‘Dream from the Isar’’. Celebrity owners like Alain Delon, Ursula Andress and John Surtees contributed to its status symbol image.
Tracing the car’s history was a huge task and it was discovered Presley’s vehicle – which rolled off the assembly line on September 13, 1957, was not brand new when the singer bought it, having previously been used by racing driver Hans Stuck. Between May and August 1958 it won a number of hillclimbs in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
This vehicle had been carefully serviced at BMW after every race, the engine had been upgraded and a new gearbox fitted when it ended up with a dealer in Frankfurt in the autumn of 1958. Presley, 23 at the time, then bought it and used it to drive between his home in Bad Nauheim and the US Army Base in Friedberg. In its original state, the car was white, but Presley painted it red to cover kisses, phone numbers and messages written on it – often in red lipstick – by adoring fans.
In March 1960, Presley, now out of the army, traded it in in New York. The dealer in turn sold the car and it ended up in Alabama where it underwent some very un-BMW modifications. It was fitted with a Chevrolet engine in preparation for action on the race track. This took up so much space that parts of the front frame carrier had to be cut out. The gearbox and the rear axle, and the instruments in the cockpit were replaced.
More changes of ownership followed before the car ended up in California. Space engineer Jack Castor, a collector of classic cars and bicycles, bought it in 1968, using it occasionally as a runabout for everyday use before putting it in storage for restoration.
Many years later an article in ‘‘Bimmer’’ magazine about the 507 led Castor to contacting the writer, Jackie Jouret, saying his car had chassis number 70079. She accompanied Castor to a ware- house for pumpkins where the red 507 was stored.
‘‘Jack had tied down its engine bonnet with ropes,’’ Jouret recalled.
‘‘It took some time until we actually got the engine compartment open and identified the stamped chassis number: 70079, the Holy Grail among BMW numbers.’’
Castor had collected a large number of parts carefully stowed in boxes for the planned restoration but lacked an appropriate engine and the necessary time to see the project through. It was here that Jouret and BMW Group Classic contacts were firmed and several years later a deal was done to get the car back to Germany for the authentic restoration originally envisaged by Castor.
Back in Munch, the car was dismantled in a process that took a week. Initially, the aluminium body was separated from the floor assembly made of sheet steel. This was the only way of retaining as much of the original material as possible. The paint was then removed from the floor assembly in an acid bath and from the body in an alkaline bath. The engine had already been removed and the remnants of the interior that remained had been set aside.
A lot of components had to be remanufactured from scratch because the stocks of original parts for the BMW 507 are limited even at BMW Group Classic.
Traditional craftsmanship in the style of the 1950s joined with high-tech production procedures of the modern world. The instrument panel was newly cast on the basis of the original. The leather upholstery was created to precisely match the pattern shown in old photographs and catalogues.
The engine was rebuilt from spare parts. The 3.2 litre V8 engine was reconditioned precisely to the original specifications, but it was not given an engine number on account of the unavoidable but otherwise unusual use of old and new components. The front frame carrier, which had been cut down at an early stage, also had to be reproduced in its original geometry and integrated in the floor assembly. The wooden nailing strip for fixing the soft top in place was also reproduced using materials and processing methods in keeping with the 1950s.
The finished product is exactly what Castor desired for the roadster but he never saw the finished product, having passed away, aged 77, in November 2014.