este Stan dice cosas... Stan Hanks Ah… I’m getting a little misty as I contemplate this. The E9 3.0CSi was the first BMW with which I fell in love So some history on this bad boy which will make the impressions make more sense, hopefully. You may know that BMW got its start making engines - mainly engines for airplanes, and the big wins started in WW I. Following the war, manufacture of anything that could be “war materiel” was strictly verboten so they turned first to motorcycles, then to cars, with some really amazing products in the pre-WW II era, including the “original” 328 Hold this in mind - it’s the spiritual successor to the E9. The 328 was a super successful performer, winning a ton of events - over 100 podiums - including a class win at Le Mans. After the war, a ’39 328 even won the ’48 Austrian Grand Prix. Hell of a car. So, BMW — WW I, pre-war cars of note, war materiel in WW II, bombed back to the stone age… after the war, they like the rest of Germany, rebuilt. Motorcycles came back in ‘48, cars in ‘52. But sales were super slow (who’s buying luxury cars in post-war Europe? no one, as it turned out) and while the Isetta sold well, the margins were bad and the price point was low. BMW was in trouble. In 1962, they launched the New Class sedans - the classic three-box two and four door sedans, engines between 1.5 and 2.0 liters. Big enough for a young family, sporty enough that you could feel like you were driving a proper sports car. Aspirational, as you could aspire to the up-market executive cars in the same line. (this BTW, is the genesis of 2002 and the subsequent 3-series which led to the “Ultimate Driving Machine” branding) Alongside the new sedans came a set of luxury coupes, packing a two liter engine. The new 2000C and 2000CS sold well - nearly 14,000 cars between 1965 and 1969. But the body belied the performance that the two liter four could deliver, and it was time for a change. Enter Our Boy, the E9. That loooonnnnngggg hood? It’s there to accommodate the new-at-the-time inline six, the M30 . You know. the six that was used in pretty much everything they made from the 60s through the mid-90s? Yeah. That one. The original car was the 2800CS, but that yielded in 1971 to the three-liter, with dual carbs and 180 HP at 6000 RPM in the 3.0CS, and a Bosch D-Jetronic fuel-injected version making 200 HP at 5500 RPM in the CSI. (sidebar: that’s the same fuel injection used in the Porsche 914, a variety of Mercedes coupes, and (under license to Lucas) the Jag E-type V12s) You could get your 3.0CSi with a four speed manual (the same as the E12 5-series, from Getrag) or a three-speed automatic. The body was big - 103 in wheel base, 180 in. overall, 3000 pounds. (by comparison, a 1971 Mustang was about 3100 pounds, a 1971 911 was 2300 pounds, but the 1971 Ford LTD weighed 3900 pounds) It wasn’t exactly huge, but it was noticeably heavy. 0–60 time was 7.5, it could turn a 15.5 second quarter-mile and from the factory a 139 MPH top speed. The 3.0CSi ran on stock 195/70–14 tires. The brakes very similar to the units used on the 911. The stopping power was less than spectacular. New, fully optioned, you were looking at close to $16k. These days, if you can find one without major issues, you’re looking north of $70k. So… driving. First, the interior is insanely comfortable. The seats are broad yet supportive, firm yet comfortable. The wheel seems large by today’s standards, but the car did not have power steering, and you kinda need that to have effective leverage at low speeds. Parallel parking, for instance, can be a pretty decent workout. It’s sparse - very spartan compared to modern interiors, but very complete for the day. Most of the passenger controls were in the lower console - power windows, door locks, radio, etc. And the driver controls were “as they should be” - ready to hand, “right there”. Shown is the auto, as that’s what most of the units shipped to the US carried, but the manual is very similar. It’s not a Mercedes. It’s not a Porsche. But you can see the Teutonic DNA, the “enoughness” of everything without being taken to excess. When you fire it up, the M30 is ready to rock. If you’ve driven any of the six cylinder BMWs prior to the VANOS M50s, that’s exactly what you get. If you’re in the three-speed automatic, it’s… nice. Not terribly sporty. Very on par with similar cars - the Mercedes 450SL for instance. If you’re rocking the four-speed… particularly if you have the 25% limited-slip option, things are a bit different. You settle into the seat as you accelerate, and you can wind the engine on up north of 6000 RPM before shifting. First is short, you’ll shift up at about 35, second is a little better and you can pull to 60, third is where you’ll spend a lot of time on the road with a top of 90, and fourth will take you all the way to the top. You won’t hit the advertised 139 BTW. It’s perfectly delightful. Until you need to brake, or turn. Or both. The brakes are anemic, or rather, probably not terribly bad if the car were only about a thousand pounds lighter, but as it is, the leave a lot to be desired. Which pretty much puts a real rate limiter on to what extent you’re willing to drive in a very spirited fashion. So you wind it in. And it’s a good thing, because you notice that you’re starting to overheat a bit. There are two really tragic design flaws in the E9. The first is that the cooling system was designed for climates significantly colder than ours. If you push the car very hard at all, it overheats; if you overheat it, at all, you lose the head gasket and maybe the head. If you love you car, and love to push it, you have to upgrade the radiator, the water pump, the fan… pretty much everything. The second flaw is that the C-pillar rusts, both at the roofline and at the beltline, and sometimes the base of the A-pillar rusts as well. This particular feature is the reason you see many fewer E9s than you might expect. In the 80s and 90s, a huge number of them were scrapped as being uneconomical to fix. These days, that’s still a major issue. If you don’t buy a car that’s known good, as in there are pictures of it going all the way down to metal and coming all the way back up to finished, you may, or may not, have just bought a rust bucket. While you can source nearly all of the mechanical parts trivially, there being nearly a 30 year run there, the interior parts are super, super rare. There are only a handful of E9 specialty recyclers and refurbishers, and finding the parts you need if you have an incomplete car, or a car that’s been altered (tons of these had the door panels and back deck butchered in the late 70s/early 80s as people put in “performance stereos”) you may have a really hard time putting back the way it came from the factory. On the other hand… there’s always the “big brother” to this, the 3.0CSL Known as the Batmobile, this variant (1200 made) was the homologation car for the actual race car. There’s a veritable cottage industry of people selling kit to turn your plain Jane E9 into the Batmobile, and as much as I generally abhor recreations and modifications on classic cars… I would encourage you to pillage that particular parts pile for actual brakes, and cooling system parts. Otherwise, the 3.0CSi is every so pretty, and promises ever so much… and on the third date you realize that unless you keep it very slow, it’s all going to blow up, and it will never live up to your expectations.
