Funny enough, it hasn’t been by intention or typo that the majority of my BMWs have been from 1987. Just really, really consistent coincidence.
I had coveted this exact car before it had gone up for sale. It may have been just a 325 (no e badge here!), but it had the best of mods for a US-market small-tail E30: Euro Bumpers. No amount of lowering, wheel cramming, color changing, or ghetto rigging could ever make as much difference to a small tail’s appearance as the right set of bumpers. I’ll deal with them when necessary, but the stupid US-market 5-mph bumpers look the same as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson with a Betty White hairdo: wrong.
On top of that, it had Bilstein Sport shocks, Ground Control adjustable sleeves, a shorter final drive, and late model ellipsoid headlights. Almost as important as all those was the crank sunroof, I love stuff like that. Can’t say the car loved me though. I actually crashed it the second day it was in my possession. I was out enjoying a road I knew well, excited to have a nice-ish E30. What I didn’t know was someone had kicked a ton of dirt over the entry of a hairpin, leaving very little for the front tires to grip on. “Hello, wall,” I said as I scaled it with the front end of the car.
Annoying happenstance occurrences like that would dot my ownership. A suicidal raccoon destroyed a front lip, darting in front of me while on the highway. I piled into another low profile dirt mound due to carelessness. And a rear shock would tear out of the body, not because there wasn’t a reinforcement on the tower, but because the previous owner put them on the wrong side of the body, necessitating a proper welded reinforcement. The last straw would also be the most annoying.
As I live on a slight incline, whenever I park I make sure to turn the wheels out in case the parking brake fails. Unfortunately I also live in an area with a lot of college students and others who are generally incapable of driving in a straight line. It took a couple feet, but leaving my last parking spot I noticed the steering wheel and the car did not agree on the direction of travel. And there was the obvious noise of a dragging tire.
A quick peek underneath showed the tie rod on the driver’s side (the side facing out) had more in common with Lombard Street than the steering implement it was supposed to be. The car immediately went up for sale, and ended up with a local guy I knew, who later sold it to another enthusiast. As that car’s luck would have it, last I heard some other driver decided they preferred being behind hatchbacks instead of sedans, and tried to shove the rear bumper up to the parcel shelf.