How do you get to work on time if you live in a tourist trap? Simple, blast past the caravans in your 240bhp Evo Sport – Total BMW
Good things take time to happen, they say. Alan and Rachel know this well, as they’ve been together for seven contented years. They have settled down in a pretty town on the Cornish coast. But all the time, Alan has harboured a secret passion, and when he finally got to realise his dream he added a second love to his happy household and became a very contended man indeed.
Like most sentient males of the right age, our man fell hook line and sinker for the M3 when it burst on to road and track in 1986. And with each successive evolution his passion deepened. Logically, 1990’s Evo Sport transfixed him. And so it should. The M3 only existed to satisfy BMW’s Touring Car ambitions – the road cars beign as much a necessity to homologated the box-arched wonder as a service to Munich’s petrol-headed roadgoing customers.
1990’s Evo Sport was the ultimate expression of the concept. Squeezing Mercedes-beating ability out of the E30 involved a car that – even in road trim – had 238bhp on call, from a 2.5 litre version of the superb twin-cam four-pot engine. The aerodynamic, package was a development of the Evo 2’s, with both the front and rear spoilers being adjustable three ways to trim the car during practice.
Trainspotters will tell you that the front wings of this model are unique, being slightly wider than ever before, as BMW fancied shoehorning even wider wheels than before underneath them in race situations.
The Evo Sport was so utterly a homologation car that it was only produced between January and March 1990 and just 600 were made. It was a car to bow down before, and most of us did. That includes Alan. He might only have been 12 years old at the time, but he still wanted one.
Most of us harbour a deep-seated desire to own one of these cars, and toy occasionally with the idea of buying one as used values plummet. The editor and I periodically discuss chopping in our Tourings for decent, cheap M3s before realising that 30,000 miles a year are much less frenetically passed with a relaxed six murmuring away under the bonnet than a competition-bred four just begging to be flogged to the redline. And, as we need our driving licenses to stay in work in this business….
Not so Alan. “He doesn’t drink or smoke,” said his mate Marcus, along for the photo shoot. “But he has this vice. And when he wants something, he plans for it, works fo it, and get it. Me, I’ve got vices, a really boring Escort and an overdraft, dammit.” The plans were hatched more than three years ago. Despite saving for a house, Alan was also filling a jar with change. And looking for a good Evo Sport. Well, he, Rachel and, for that matter, Marcus, have good jobs with Cornwall Country Council – he and Marcus work together in the IT department – but this is not an area of the country awash with dot.com money. Cornwall is also, as we found out during the six-hour trek down there, pretty far from most of England.
With enough cash saved for an Evo Sport, Alan began the search for his car resigned to a series of huge treks across the nation to view potential candidates. In the event, this lovely red example turned up in Saltash, just 40 miles along the coast.
“I couldn’t believe my luck when I found,” Alan recalls. “It hadn’t been abused, and had all the documentation I needed.” In fact, it hadn’t been in the country all that long, having passed most of its life in the hands of a very Germanic chap in Luxembourg, who’d obviously not parked it on the nearest street corner.
It had been imported by the man he bought it from, who had kept it all of 18 months. “He’s got a really low boredom threshold,” laughs Alan. “He was just selling it to move on to an M Coupé.”
The man’s obviously mad, but his lunacy provided rich pickings for Alan. One very happy day Rachel drove him along the coast, watched him hand over £15,000 and then tried vainly to follow him back home. After three years of saving, he was behind the suede-covered wheel of what many would argue is the best driving experience ever to snarl its way out of the Munich factory. He thoroughly enjoyed the journey.
And so he should. The wheel, gear-knob and seats are unique to the model, and each adds a little extra piece of enjoyment to the – let’s face it – already gargantuan amount of fun on offer. The unabused chassis was at taut as the day it was assembled, thanks to meticulous maintenance. There are so few cars that can be placed as precisely, that turn in so deftly, and can be balance so beautifully through a bend with the right foot. The Evo Sports were pretty well speeeed too, so Alan’s car has the bonus of air conditioning.
And Alan lives in Cornwall, where chronically twisty roads were invented. “Mind you,” he says, “we also survive down here on tourism, so the roads are unusable for most of the summer season. By the time they’re clear, it’s all rain and mud. But you can always go to Dartmoor in the early morning.”
I’d choose Saturday morning, I reckon. Get up at five, throw a cup of tea and some toast down your neck, then motor over to Dartmoor. It’d be light by the time you got there. You’d have a good hour of slingshotting the Evo Sport along some of the trickiest roads in the nation before the local communities woke up and began lumbering stinkily around on manure-encrusted tractors. At which point you return home, your mind clear of the working week you’ve left behind, refreshed and ready to enjoy the weekend.
Because, of course, the Evo’s arrival in the household meant that then there were three. “Rachel’s been really understanding about it,” he says, looking suddenly serious. “Because it has become, to a certain extent, her and the car.” That’s not an easy circle to square, is it, unless you go through life utterly oblivious to other peoples’ feelings thankfully, Alan’s not that way inclined. “But she still takes precedence. I’d be stupid if she’s didn’t….wouldn’t I?” Poor chap, he’s obviously had to think this one through quite hard.
What about the future though? An E36 M3 Evo perhaps? After all, the newer car’s advantages are devastatingly obvious. How’s a 3.2 litre, 24 valve six providing 321bhp, laid to tarmac via a six-speed sequential gearbox? Oh, and the M5’s floating calliper brakes to rein it in?
Well you can have it because, funnily enough, like many die-hard E30 M3 drivers, it doesn’t fit Alan’s idea of what the M3 is all about. “Power, that’s the theme, isn’t it?” he says. “Sure, the E36 has a great chassis, but there’s still just one stunt to the handling, isn’t there? And where in Cornwall has the room to do tail slides everywhere? The E30 is all about the art of driving, which is going to keep my attention for much, much longer.”
So much longer, in fact, that he can’t envisage ever wanting another car. As time goes on, he’ll continue the good work he’s been doing since October, replacing the bits of the Evo that have perished a bit over the last 11 years. A BMW inspection revealed a list of faults running three pages long, although it mainly consisted of entries such as: ‘glove-box torch – missing’. There was the odd piece of rubber looking tired, he though, and he’d love to renew the steering wheel and gearknob, whose suede is getting rather shiny.
He shows me where a piece of foam, designed to keep air flow off the edge of the front grille at high speed, is getting tired, and wonders where he’s going to find that particular, model-specific part.
There’s also been some tuning work taking place on the quiet. Not the full-on 500bhp the 2.5litre factory Evo racers boasted, but a much smoother torque curve thanks to remapping of the ECU by Motronic specialist AmD. This procedure is all about mapping the fuelling and ignition curves to specific engine in the name of efficiency and the benefits can be felt on most Motronic cars, whether they’re 320i Tourings or M3 Sport Evos.
There’s a fine line between attention to detail and madness, and as yet Alan hasn’t crossed it. I asked – innocently enough, I thought – if he was going to show the car in concours competitions when all the remaining details had been sorted out. He looked faintly offended, which relieved me no end.
Of course, there’s always the worry that, once he’s got the car completely right, he’ll lose interest and have to sell it. It does happen, after all. But it sounds pretty unlikely. And what else goes and handles like the Evo Sport? I suspect it’s perfectly safe in his garage for a while yet. Of course, once he’s driven the E46 M3, maybe he’ll start saving again, and start a collection.
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March 2, 2009
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