The best three box design ever.. the E30

It is one of the Ultimate Driving Machines, at the time, the most affordable Ultimate Driving Machine. Despite the upright front end, it actually challenged cars like Citroen in the ‘drag coefficient’ stakes. It’s headlights were good for 70mph vision on dark winding country roads. A ten year old example would drive better than a new car of almost any make.

The car was designated E30, and was the car which saved BMW from oblivion. It was the preferred transport of the ‘upwardly mobile’, and if you have ever driven one, you will understand why.

The photo shows a 2 door 318i, the junior model if you will. Even so, ALL of the models were subject to meticulous design and construction.

The engines are very efficient, and there isn’t an aftermarket device that can make them any better. The car’s handling will suffer if you make ANY changes to it, lowering it, wider wheels and tyres etc.

Inside, the dashboard controls are turned towards the driver and are as ergonomically placed as you will ever find in any car. The seats are firm but they hold you well. The brakes are powerful but never grab, and the Getrag 5 speed gearboxes are slick and short throw.

When you get into an E30, you can just sense the difference between it and any other three box car.

The only criticisms are the height of the boot (trunk) lip, and the fact that they can get tail happy when pushed very hard, especially the straight 6’s.

The M3..

Despite looking like one of the family, very little of the standard E30 was used. The front spoiler was lowered and designed to get maximum air to the front brakes. The bonnet, roof and sunroof were the only shared exterior panels. The trunk was raised to improve stability at high speeds.

The engine was a mix of parts and designs, essentially a four cylinder M10 with six cylinder technology added to it.

Front suspension was of the type used on the M5 as were the brakes, rear suspension was typical E30.

To help with 50:50 front rear balance, lighter panels were used, and even the battery was moved to the back of the car.

The end result, a car which absolutely deserved the title ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’. Of course, there is a price to be paid for a car which performs like the M3. I am not talking about money here. The M3 is a handful, a little bumpy and quite noisy, and may not suit everybody’s vision of an every day drive.

So there you have it. The E30 BMW, arguably the best ever small saloon, convertible, Touring (Estate), road racer and AWD.

Yes, AWD signified by an ‘X’ added after the ‘i’ in the rear badges..

That was a GTI?

A GTI what exactly? It was a VW Golf GTI.

This car almost single-handedly killed off the small cheap British sports car. It could manage almost 110mph, wasn’t drafty inside, didn’t shake, rattle or roll, didn’t get stuck on sleeping policemen, could easily seat two adults and two kids, and there was room for golf clubs in the back.

You didn’t have to fight with it to keep it on the road either. There were no nasty quirks like lever arm suspension, a la MGB, swing axles a la Spitfire, and cart springs a la Midget. It was built like a tank, and it didn’t lose bits to the side of the road. To add insult to injury, it would start every morning, first turn of the key.

What we were witnessing was the birth of the ‘hot’ hatchback, a sporting theme applied to a ‘shopping trolley’. This car could give a Triumph TR6 a good run for its money. What it lacked on the straight (a theoretical 7mph) was easily made up at the first corner.

As with all good things, they come to an end. The Golf put on weight, losing the crisp lines of the original, and some of the raw performance too. The sprightly character was lost, something that never happened to the British affordable soft-tops. They were originally designed as upholstered roller-skates, and stayed that way into oblivion.

The S’es

The year is 1961, and a man called John Cooper had been working with a BMC Mini. Having driven one and discovered the amazing handling and road holding of the car, he saw potential for a lot of fun and chequered flags at the end of rallies.

The first Cooper, an ‘848’ stroked to 997cc was the first. There was also a 1071cc version, and it is this one that was the first Cooper S. Two other S variants appeared, homologated for circuit racing, a 970cc and the famous 1275cc.

Unless you were a ‘club’ racer, the only S of interest was the 1275.

The photo shows an authentic ‘63 Cooper S. This car started a huge industry in customizing and tuning which still exists today. Regardless of what Mini you owned, a standard Mini, Clubman or Moke (if you were brave enough drive fast on what was essentially a floorpan with a windshield), there was a tuning company somewhere in the UK which had a mass of parts waiting for you to buy and collect.

OK. These cars were noisy, bumpy, uncomfortable, cramped, they let in water around the doors, the battery would rot its way through the boot floor, and they wouldn’t do 100mph on 10” Minilites.

Like any owner cared. These cars were as fast through bends as they were on the straights, the exhaust note was worthy of an engine with five times the displacement, and the induction roar from the wire pancake filters was better than anything on any car radio.

Torque from the 1275 was such that you hardly had to use gears below 3rd, and only really needed second for starting off on steep hills.

There are cars running around now with S badges pinned on them, but they are nothing like the originals. BMW may e build them well and I don’t doubt that they are way more comfortable and refined, but who ever bought a Cooper S for comfort and refinement.

The Cooper S was the most fun you could have in a cheapish car available straight from any BMC dealer showroom.

At age 60 and falling apart at the seams, I doubt that I could still get into and out of a Mini, but I would like the chance to once again take a ‘hot’ Mini over Hardknott Pass in Cumbria. Talk about excitement.. WOW.. 

Incidentally, it was the 1071 Cooper S which made the car famous on the Monte Carlo Rally, not the 1275.

The Silver Cloud..

I sat in the back of one of these a long time ago. The other rear passenger was a cute blonde girl, but we were both too young to know what to do next other than snigger and sit for a few minutes before alighting. That was the last time I ever had the chance to sit in such an impressive vehicle.

Power was always rated as ‘adequate’, but the owner would not have concerned himself with technical details. More important was the state of play with the decanter and glasses, ergonomically contained in a beautifully crafted drink cabinet within the back of the front seats.

They say that, on the move, one could only hear the clock in the dashboard. There are others who say that the clock was deliberately made to be that noisy such that the makers could claim ‘one can only hear the clock’ regardless of the thrashing under the bonnet.

It doesn’t matter, because this is a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud Mk 1, one of the finest cars in the world. The body shown in the photo is stock R-R, but one could have any permutation inside it.

For the cost when new, one could have had built a substantial four bedroom house in only the very best bricks, so these cars were not exactly in range of the average family man. That isn’t a bad thing. If they were too common, they would have lost their prestige. As it was, one had to travel to London to see these elegant old girls being driven around.

What a dream.. being chauffeur driven to the Savoy just in time for cucumber sandwiches and a cup of Darjeeling, accompanied by the cute blonde girl.

Two horses..

The design criteria:

• Cheap to make
• Cheap to fix
• Low Maintenance
• Must drive over a ploughed field at 40kph without breaking eggs placed neatly in a basket
• Have enough room to accommodate a medium sized pig or twenty chickens
• Removable seats such that the operator could stop and take lunch in style and comfort

Yes, it is the Citroen 2CV. Note the side windows which facilitate the easy ejection of Gauloises cigarette butts.

I don’t think that I had ever seen anything so ugly as the 2CV. The originals looked to have been constructed from surplus corrugated steel, and were even uglier than the 1966 model shown here. Every panel was removable, doors included, and the retractable roof rolled back to the top of the boot lid. The 2CV was a convertible with typical French attitude.

The two cylinder air-cooled engine did not give the car any sporting pretentions, and you wouldn’t want one of these if you lived in England’s Peak District because uphill performance is ‘bad to not going to make it’.

But wait. Fuel consumption is in the same league as a moped, and you really can take the doors off and the seats out. This is a car for the serious picnicers, the type who in 1963 would casually pull up on the centre reservation of the M1 and take tea and sandwiches while watching the MG’s, Triumphs and big Vauxhalls strut their stuff in the fast lanes.

It’s a shame that Brits didn’t have the courage to buy 2CV’s back then. They were a source of amusement for British holiday makers driving down the N7 in France in pursuit of sunshine and a bit of glamour. These were the quirky things that leapt out at one of the many ‘Passage Protegé’ side roads.

Don’t mock the 2CV. The suspension allows these cars to get over quite rough terrain, and there are few cars which can corner with all four wheels in contact with the road while the body lists over at an angle where, if it was a ship, you would have abandoned it hours ago.

Needless to say, it was not the ugliest car ever. There were two derivatives, one called the Dyane and the other called Ami 6.

Citroen brought the 2CV forwards with fancy colour schemes called Charleston and Dolly, and these did catch on in the UK.

For me, it is one of the motoring greats, and it made the roads more interesting than they ever are today.

The Metropolitan

I was around 5 years old when I first saw one of these. It is an Austin Metropolitan, essentially a Nash Metropolitan but made at BMC’s Longbridge works. I liked it so much that I declared that this was the car I wanted when I grew up.

It never happened. There was a dire shortage of these by 1970, only nine thousand or so ever having being produced and I wanted something that could easily be repaired. Alas I never got my ‘rubber’ car that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a fairground bumper car ride, or maybe even floating in the bath.  

It was not to British tastes for sure, and prospective buyers were few. In Britain, we were still obsessed with cars painted in camouflage colours finished off with a coat or two of laquer. The two tone, bright cheery nature of the Metropolitan was in stark contrast to home grown stuff and the dour post WWII countenance of many a Brit.

Performance wise, it could manage 70mph if you believed the blurb, and could manage 27mpg flat out, again if you believed the blurb.

Basically, it was all just too much, but is a collectable these days.