bb, Rainer Buchmann: Innovation, Design, Emotion

GEROLD LINGNAU, Heel, £39.95, ISBN 978 3 95843 393

The first thing you have to do when you approach this book is to clear your head of prejudice, for within its pages are examples of the most extreme 1980s hedonism. Never before or since have so many suppliers of car ‘styling’ accessories made manufacturers’ designs so obviously worse. Zender, Kamei, BBS… you know the sort of aesthetic crimes I mean.

It’s the story of Rainer Buchmann, one of the bs in bb, a German customiser of Porsches and, it turns out, quite a lot else besides. He set up his company near Frankfurt with the help of a payout following an accident involving a bus and his somersaulting 911, and came to fame in 1976 with a 911 Targa Turbo – a body and engine combination not on the Porsche price list – decorated in rainbow stripes as publicity for the Polaroid company.

Subsequent alterations included a slant-nose Targa Turbo with hints of 959 – ‘unlikely to cause her any embarrassment’, says this one’s caption, debatably, of the woman standing by it – and a 911 with a gold dashboard billed as the most expensive Porsche ever. ‘People buy Porsches for their effect on women,’ Buchmann declared.

Then there was the Polo en Vogue, its edges seemingly clad in cardboard packaging, and a retro-style Mercedes 600 Pullman that even Buchmann preferred to disown. But, also, there was genuine cleverness. Designer Eberhard Schulz arrived at bb with his proposal for a mid-engined, gullwing-doored ‘new Mercedes 300SL’, for which M-B eventually allowed use of the three-pointed star. Strange, then, that it had a role in the film

Car-Napping as a prototype Lamborghini. bb also pioneered remote central locking, digital instruments and a multi-function steering wheel, all dismissed by manufacturers who then created their own. Bankruptcy arrived in 1986, but in 2014 bb made another ‘rainbow’ 911. In tune with the then-current zeitgeist, this one’s monochrome.