ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
Let’s face it, before the arrival of the VW Golf, ordinary cars were pretty lousy. British cars of the 1950s and 1960s were small, slow and unreliable. Sports cars were basic but great fun until the oil crisis of 1973 – just the time drivers began to appreciate ‘classic’ cars because so much 1970s stuff was dross. There were outliers such as the outrageous Lamborghini Countach and the Porsche 911 RS and 930 Turbo, but they were beyond hen’s teeth and the fun-to-pilot, front-drive Mini was past its sell-by date.
The Giorgetto Giugiaro-designed Golf was launched by a moribund company that had produced the woefully out-of-date Beetle and the horribly ugly 411. This new, exciting, modern, good-looking, classless small car was a game-changer and available to everyone. And when it received its GTI badge in 1976, the automotive world was disrupted forever. Every ordinary car became a wannabe Golf.
Meanwhile, another sensible German company was producing worthy cars for those who liked to drive in the middle lane. BMW’s solid, conservative efforts were aimed at accountants. Before World War Two, BMW had engineered fabulous racing cars such as the very advanced 328. But in the 1950s its models were a strange mix of baroque saloons and bubblecars. Things improved with the arrival of the lighter, more contemporary
that evolved into the 2002 in the 1970s: one of the first hot saloons, especially in fuel-injected tii spec. So, while the VW Golf GTI was offering grown-up, Mini-Cooper levels of ‘chuck-it-into-any-corner-and-itwill-get-you-out’ handling, BMW’s dainty-looking yet tail-happy 2002 was providing just the opposite (lock).
As I grew up up in Cape Town, these early BMWs had an impact on me because a friend of my father’s had a white 2002 tii that he used to great effect humiliating supposedly more powerful and faster cars – ours! In the 1970s, saloon car racing was wildly popular and BMW SA decided to have a crack at the idea of ‘race on Sunday, sell on Monday’. So it developed a homologation special, the BMW 530 MLE (‘Motorsport Limited Edition’) in 1976.
This was the E12 series, fitted with a 3.0-litre straightsix, fed by carbs and producing 197bhp. The (always white) bodywork was lightened and the body-kit painted in lurid red and blue stripes. They became the first
M-series cars ever badged as such; only 227 were built. I used to root for the BMWs against the Alfas and Fords because my mother drove a 525. That car was bogstandard, with a manual four-speed geabox and Solex carbs, so nothing like the rodded MLE – although it was the first car I lost control of, when its notoriously oversteery back end got away from me.
Meanwhile, in the First World, BMW was doing good things with the launch of the 3.0CS and CSi. Here was the classy, grown up sports coupé that drivers wanted. Consumers had become more sophisticated and were seeking faster, more comfortable cars for dashes along the autobahn and autostrada to important meetings. Fractional jet ownership was yet to land.
The American market wanted cars that looked good at 60mph. US enthusiast and hobby jet pilot Bob Lutz – the ‘car guy’ to Chuck Yeager’s ‘right stuff’ – was then BMW’s VP of global sales and marketing. He was a proper nononsense petrolhead and racing driver and, working with ad agency Ammirati & Puris, they coined the line: ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’. It encapsulated what BMW was about and its cars adhered to this ethos for decades until, for some nonsensical group-thinking, politically correct, environmental reason, BMW management decided to dump the best headline in automotive advertising and replace it with ‘Joy is BMW’. What on Earth does that mean? Needless to say it was a disaster and BMW is back to UDM with no equivocation.
So which classic BMW to choose? Well, it really should have an M badge on it and a six-cylinder engine and be a coupé. A contender must be the slightly bonkers, skunkworks Z3M coupé of the late 1990s. The one that looks like a breadvan but goes like a true M.
Actually, the BMW that still stands out as a class act is the CSL of 1971. Clean, elegant, with a requisite creamy six-cylinder engine, the four-seater coupé remains one of all-time great BMWs. Ripe for reimagining?
A few years ago at Spa Circuit we tested one of the 39 Batmobiles against a Porsche 911 RS. On the undulating track the Porsche was quicker and more responsive and the better racing car. But the bigger, more comfortable BMW CSL turned out to be the car you might want to live with for more than just a trackday: the Ultimate Driving Machine.
‘WHICH CLASSIC BMW TO CHOOSE? IT SHOULD HAVE AN M BADGE, A SIXCYLINDER ENGINE AND BE A COUPÉ’