A youngtimer owner’s life has 2 interesting periods. One of them is the urge to “quit”: strip the car for parts, sell it, give it away, delete the numbers of the scrapyards and your accounts on enthusiast forums. Go through a course of therapy and move on. I haven’t reached that stage yet. So let’s talk about the other one, which is just as obsessive.
Your acquaintances, colleagues, friends and relatives have barely recovered from you buying a 30-year-old bucket as a non-refundable investment of the family budget, and here comes another blow. You need another 30-year-old BMW. I need it because of reasons. Because!
One of the reasons can even be a rational one. Only now did I realize that for a proper restoration it would have been faster, smarter and cheaper to buy two at once with the same body. Especially in a country where these bodies (if you find one that hasn’t rotted) cost exactly zero.
But there are other reasons, less rational (at first glance). For example, I want to drive out onto a snowy lot at the peak of road salting season and toss the car into a snowdrift. A 1989 car restored to factory spec isn’t fit for that, either technically or psychologically. I want a village-style welded diff, Bilsteins and VVTI. You can enjoy both the stock concept and a modern take on Fahrvergnügen, after all.
The flexible E30 platform suits different concepts, and they’re all good in their own way. But you need to figure out what counts as a proper concept and what doesn’t. Sure, you can take a dump on the floor and call it a project/concept. Or fit angel eyes and rings in the gauge cluster. But my views on design are more conservative.
For myself, I picked out 4 interesting directions.
Stock. This one is simple and not simple at all. There’s nothing cooler than a youngtimer in factory condition, but there are nuances. The car is so old by now that nobody would dare drive one that has miraculously survived in absolutely stock condition (original paint and parts, intact interior, ridiculously low mileage, etc.). Cars like that sit still in private collections and museums. And we’re not talking about cars that sit still. So stock usually means restoration. And again there are options. Either you do everything on a budget, but with compromises like non-original parts or minor defects.
Or you spend ten or twenty thousand dollars getting factory condition on a car that is still a so-called “replica”. Whose real market value (the price you can sell it for quickly) in Belarus doesn’t exceed the sacred 2k (that is, about 10% of what you put in). And more than half of this car’s age-related problems are still there. And any breakdown or minor fender bender threatens to cost a huge amount of time and money.
Can you imagine the pain of the people behind projects like that?!
Sport. The BMW E30 body is a very popular choice for building a rallycross or drift car. Most often the finished project looks like an M3 because of the characteristic widened body, although amateur motorsport doesn’t need any special chassis changes. I went through lots of photos of cars like this and figured out what exactly I don’t like about the amateur “beaters” built in Belarus. Sure, the body gets cut up, the interior gets thrown out, a hydraulic handbrake goes in and so on, so it’s hard to talk about any particular aesthetics. But the vast majority of local amateur projects have something in common. I described this trait as “tasteless crap”. Let me explain. Most often it’s the eclecticism of the project as a whole (as if different people had worked on it over 20 years). Then there’s the pointlessness of the parts: extra decorations, unnecessary bits (wings, body kits), garish colors (both on the body and on suspension parts!). Technically, this is topped off with a scatter of twisted wire joints under the hood instead of a tidy harness, R17+ wheels out of proportion for 200-250 hp, a front axle overloaded with an insane naturally aspirated swap, etcetera.
I get that clean look is a different story. But why make a car uglier than the functional mods already do? The roll cage and bucket seats already show how serious you are, there’s no need to paint the control arms and rods in cockatoo colors.
Personally, I prefer logically coherent designs, even with a clear bias toward performance.
Sleeper.
500BHP 4.4L V8 SUPERCHARGED E30 TOURING SLEEPER
This type of project hasn’t yet reached its full historical potential. Unlike, say, stance, where the limit has literally been reached (unless you bury the car underground).
A sleeper is the childhood joke about the tiny Soviet Zaporozhets and the Mercedes come to life, and to some extent it mocks the trend for fast non-sporty cars (souped-up SUVs, for example). Of course, people have been playing with projects like this for a long time. But right now you can get absurd power from a small displacement relatively cheaply, thanks to various superchargers and modern efficient engines. Not to mention electric! Yes, Elon, you’re not the only one with access to a 100-year-old technology reimagined. The classic 3 Series body is perfect for it. What could be cooler than an old-school “box” that turns into a dot on the horizon to the soft whisper of its tires. By the way, an electric E30 has existed for a long time, though not as a sleeper: This Electric BMW E30 Is Fast and Green
Granted, an electric conversion is still a toy for the rich. And there are fire safety issues with lithium batteries in projects like this.
The undeniable upside of a sleeper: the whole budget can go into technical upgrades, because the interior is easy. You don’t have to keep the car 100% complete. It’s even better if the paint is original, with the typical signs of age, and a clip or a molding is missing here and there. You can add an original roof rack (I find it more practical and better looking than a tow hitch) and reupholster the original velour seats. The main difficulty is “disguising the power”. Lots of sleeper cars give themselves away with pipes sticking out, bulges on the hood or just super wide tires. In my opinion, it’s better to sacrifice some power but keep a completely factory look.
This brings us smoothly to the concept that’s realistic for our part of the world: Rat-look. It’s the most flexible kind, from a Mad Max movie prop to your grandpa’s old Lada with rust holes through the body. What makes this option attractive is that you can work with any starting point, and the result is limited only by your imagination and how much you want to annoy the people driving next to you. Yes, a rat-look build usually ends up as a car that triggers car enthusiasts and owners of new budget cars bought on installments equally. But out of respect for the classic, I personally wouldn’t overdo the rust on an E30 body, and would only sacrifice the hood. That looks balanced and ironic. Ironic because the hood is the part of this car least prone to corrosion. A roof rack is a must have. It’s the perfect spot for a brown leather suitcase with a wannabe post-apocalyptic survivor’s kit.
Another attractive thing about this concept is that you can mix and match. You can take elements of sport, stance, sleeper and so on. A boosted 2JZ with drift-tuned suspension can be played up with homemade fender flares cut with a hand saw or made from the remains of an old Soviet fridge. Or you can go the sleeper route and hide a modest M20 turbo under a rusty hood, leaving everything else as is. Or do nothing technical at all, since the internal combustion will be complemented by the burning judgment of everyone around. The main thing is not to forget to strap a teddy bear or a rubber chicken to the front grille.
You might think I’ve just categorized what any car enthusiast already knows. Not at all. This article is an official argument for bringing a second BMW E30 into the family! Really, if you have, say, a stock E30, you simply can’t live without a replacement car, a so-called beater (so you don’t have to rip astronomical sums out of the family budget for urgent youngtimer repairs). And the other way around: if you have a track car, it makes sense to buy the familiar and cheap-to-run body in street trim. And you can always fall back on the parts donor argument. In short, just print this article on A4 and put it on the desk of your wife, the woman you love and/or other interested parties. An electronic copy works too.