Thank Frankel it's Friday: Lusting after the original sports exec

It comes from this desperate old car condition from which I suffer and, as you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’re a victim too.

There are of course many old cars I’ve wanted all my life – a Porsche 911 2.8 Carrera RS and Dino 246 GT to name just two that have reared their beautiful heads as I write these words. But in my head and not on my drive they’ll stay because I could not begin to afford either. The good news for me is that there are still plenty I can afford, but cars that fall into that category tend also to be cars I’ve driven and been disappointed by, or driven, loved and bought. 

But there is another category. A category of car I never think about and whose absence from my life brings no pain at all. I don’t lie in bed devising plans that might lead to me owning one, nor do I sit scratching my head thinking of stories to pitch to editors that might result in me driving one. I never think of them at all until…

Until I see one completely unexpected. So not, in other words, anywhere near the tax-free car park at Goodwood. Sometimes the thought just flits into my head and falls out again almost as quickly, as it did with a lovely Triumph Dolomite Sprint I saw in the paddock at Castle Combe a few weeks back. But sometimes it bores in a little deeper, sprouts roots and stays there. This was one of those times.

It was earlier this week and I was at the Silverstone Wing to attend Autocar’s annual awards. I’d come from another job in the locale so was rather early into the facility. And there it was: a 1979 BMW 320 in unashamed gleaming 1970s gold. The original 3-series.

So I went and had a closer look which was a real mistake. I’d forgotten just how brilliant the interiors of these cars are. If you want to see the clearest and, in their own minimalist way, most beautiful instruments ever fitted to a common-or-garden mass produced car, take a look through the window of an E21 BMW. What a view you’d have every time you drove it.

I had an hour to kill so sat in my car doing some work but I couldn’t concentrate with it sitting just over my left shoulder and went back and drank in some of the other details – the shark nose, the lovely turbine wheels and the Hofmeister kink in the C-pillar. Which is probably where all hope of it leaving my head any time soon departed.

The problem is I’ve never driven one. Indeed the only one in which I’ve travelled was a then-new 323i owned by a friend of the family and the only thing the 14-year-old me learned that day was how to feign being impressed by his wholly inadequate driving.

I don’t even know much about them. I know enough to say that if I got one it could only be a manual 323i, but there’s something in my brain from all those years ago that suggests they came with a close ratio gearbox and a limited slip differential as highly desirable options. Or did I dream that?

My fear is that if I drove one it would just feel old and inept, but lacking entirely the charm that earn my few even older and more inept cars space in my shed. So I asked Twitter to advise me and got responses varying from ‘don’t go near it’ to ‘buy now, you’ll never regret it’. So that didn’t help at all.

I must say I like the idea very much. I’ve always appreciated the sadly now extinct breed that is the two-door saloon, especially when properly proportioned like this. Obviously, I like the idea of the brawny but super smooth 6-cylinder motor and I like even more the reputation these cars had for oversteering absolutely everywhere. And, to be honest, I’d think long and hard about buying one just for those gauges.

But it seems that, sadly, I’m not going to be getting one after all. The one thing everyone who got in touch agreed upon is that it is almost impossible to find a nice one. It seems that many of those that have not yet dissolved into a pile of ferric oxide or disappeared backwards through the scenery, have been modified – I might say mutilated – and now look like rather poor caricatures of their former selves. I expect there are better examples on the continent but while I don’t mind left-hand drive cars usually (and already own two), I would need the BMW to be right-hand drive. I don’t know why, but probably because I want a speedometer with the more sparsely spaced miles per hour calibrations. And I’m not kidding.

So unless you know different, that’s probably it: I am fated to wander the earth thinking of nothing else other than E21 3-series BMWs for the rest of my days, or at least until my attention gets diverted by something else I’ve not considered before. Think I might pop down to Combe this weekend and see what’s around…