“No car looks as good as a BMW 635CSi.”
So says Phil Stacey, who bought his Cinnabar red example back in 1990 and has since spared no expense to keep it in mint condition.
“I’m the same with the mechanical side as the bodywork,” he says, “as soon as I notice that anything is a little bit off, it’s into the garage.
“I class it as the German E-Type, because where E-Types don’t really date, I don’t think the old 6 Series dates either. It looks as good now as it did when it was new.”
Phil reckons he’s spent around £30,000 on repairs and maintenance over the past three decades, in addition to the £12,000 purchase price.
“But if you change your car every three years, you’d spend more than that over 34 years,” he says, “and this car is going up in value rather than down.
“I’ve never thought of getting rid of it; I can’t think of a better replacement.”
Phil’s love affair with BMWs started with a 320, which followed a tuned Mini Cooper and a Volvo 164 when daughters Claire and Dawn came along.
His wife Ruth was learning to drive, and she wanted a car to learn in.
“I had the Cooper at the time, and it was only happy when driven hard, so it was not a car to learn in,” says Phil, 68, a semi-retired carpenter.
“A friend of ours had a Fiat, so Ruth decided she wanted one. We went to a garage and there was a Fiat standing alongside this 320, and I said ‘how can you compare that with that?’ She said ‘all right then, we’ll have one of those’, and that was the start of the BMWs.”
Phil upgraded to an E21 323i, just before the E30 325i came out, but his head had already been turned by a much larger beast.
“I used to see the 6 Series about and I thought ‘I’d love one of them’,” he remembers. “They were the price of a house when they were new, the flagship of the range at the time.”
When he saw his dream car up for sale at a garage near his Cambridgeshire home in 1990, he had a decision to make.
The building trade was not in the best of health, but the car was up for what appeared a relative bargain.
“In those days, an X or A reg was going for that sort of money so, when I saw it was a C reg, oh yes…” he says.
“I went in and saw the chap and said ‘why is that so cheap?’ and he said ‘because we’re selling it for a customer as a private sale’.
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“Ruth and I could both have had a brand new Rover 214 or something for £12,000, and this was a five-year-old car.
“But, despite the building trade being in a slump, I thought ‘if I buy it, at least I’ve had it, even if I have to get rid of it’. I’ve still got it 34 years on, and it’s not going anywhere!”
Phil very nearly missed out on the car, another customer almost beating him to it.
“I went in to have a look at it and the chap came out and said ‘oh you’re too late, so and so’s just taken it down the road’,” he remembers. “But this other chap brought the car back, parked it up and just walked off.
“I had no need to drive it really – I knew I was going to have it because I just loved the look of the thing.”
Launched in 1976, the aggressive, shark-nosed E24 6 series coupe underwent a facelift in 1982, taking some parts from the E28 5 Series.
Like Phil’s post-facelift car, the majority were automatics, mated to a 3.4-litre straight six M30 engine.
Although his car carried an ‘M’ badge when he bought it, it is not the M88-engined ‘M’ model, any more than it has the Hartge upgrades, despite the badge that remains on the car.
Phil is only the second owner since the car’s early life as an ex-demonstrator, and its second life as a getaway car…
“I’d had the car for three days when the police came round and said ‘can we have a look at your car?’” he smiles.
“I said ‘why, it’s not a hot one is it?’ ‘No, we believe it’s been involved in a series of robberies’. It turned out it was the getaway car for a series of computer robberies and, at one of these robberies, they found a torch from the glove compartment.
“They wanted their forensic people to match it up with the socket in the car. I never had the torch, so I was going to have to go to court to say that, but the chap pleaded guilty in the end so I didn’t have to.”
Phil and Ruth are inveterate caravanners, but asking for a tow bar to be fitted to the 6 Series caused some raised eyebrows.
“They said ‘you can’t put a towbar on a car like this’, but that’s basically almost all it’s used for now, towing the caravan,” he says.
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The couple have been to campsites all over England and Wales, from Cornwall to Carlisle, and the Cotswolds to Scarborough.
“I’ve gone on sites and people have said ‘now that’s what I call a tow car’, though I was upstaged in the Cotswolds once by someone towing a caravan with an E-Type,” says Phil.
“We see various people on different sites, but they don’t remember us, they remember the car.
“We went to Somerset, and the warden on the site said ‘have you ever been to Incleboro Fields at West Runton in Norfolk?’ We can’t remember you, but we’ve seen that car before.
“The amount of interest we get when we go away, it winds Ruth up! We’re sitting in the caravan on a site and people will be going round the car taking photos. They don’t come in and say anything.”
Back when it was the couple’s only car, Ruth would use the BMW to go supermarket shopping.
“You know how people park there,” he says. “Quite regularly when I was cleaning it, I would find a little scratch or small dent, so to keep it up to my standard it would mean a trip over to Andy at A K Bodycraft for a repair, which was becoming expensive. So I bought her a small car of her own.
“When we are away in our caravan and we go shopping, I always park in the most remote area I can find.
“Last year when I was in one of these positions, we came out after collecting supplies and there was a small car parked right next to me. The chap driving it was sitting in it, he opened his window and said to me ‘you parked over here so nobody would park next to you didn’t you?’ I told him he was correct…”
Despite this obsessive carefulness, there’s sometimes no accounting for other drivers.
“On June 18, 2022,” he says, the exact date seared into his memory, “this chap came out of a side road and ran into me in Evesham (damage pictured).
“I rang Andy up and said ‘you’d better see if you can source a new wing’. He had a phone round and there was only one left in this country, so I said he’d best buy it. It was £830, though the third party’s insurance paid for it.”
It wasn’t the only mishap on Phil and Ruth’s cross-country travels.
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“Back in 2007, we were going away and I got to Thrapston when I noticed the temperature gauge was a bit high, so I pulled in a layby and both my front wheels were very hot,” says Phil.
“So I said to Ruth, ‘we either call the RAC and they tow us home, or they tow us to the site in the Cotswolds’. She said ‘well, we’d rather have the holiday’, so I got in touch with a BMW dealership in Gloucester and said ‘we’ve got problems with the brakes heating up, will you be able to sort it out in two weeks?’ No problem, they said…”
The BMW was towed to the site at Broadway, then towed again by a local recovery firm to the garage in Gloucester.
“We came back on our push bikes, about 30 miles,” he says. “By the time we were due to go home, they hadn’t fixed the car, so I had to get a friend to come down to the Cotswolds and tow the caravan back.
“I left the push bikes there, and the next week I went down in the work van to pick them up, and I asked the garage how they were getting on.
“They said they were still waiting for the new callipers to come from Germany, and this went on for a month. In the end, I sent one of the local recovery chaps from round here to pick the car up. When it got back here it was in a heck of a mess, it had never been in such a mess.
“My local garage here then sent the callipers away and got them refurbished and it was right as rain again.”
Waiting for parts to come from Germany is not uncommon, however, and over the years Phil has had to replace the instrument cluster, the fuel tank, and the car’s computer ‘brain’.
Rust has been an intermittent problem, with the other front wing also replaced, and some major repairs to sills, wheelarches, rear quarter panel, bootlid, and rear panel (pictured).
“Andy was restoring an E-type when he was doing my wheelarches, and the radius is the same, so there’s a bit of this E-Type wheelarch welded in mine,” he smiles.
The wheels themselves were swapped in its early days with Phil, from the standard type to a set of Dotz, for two reasons.
“These ones are easier to clean, but also the tyres for the original wheels are a metric size only made for the 635 and the Ford Scorpio,” he says. “The price of a tyre, if you can find them, is £450 each, so it was cheaper to buy the modern wheels and modern tyres.”
Given caravanning is a May to September pursuit, the BMW spends a fair amount of time in the garage, resulting in problems with not only the brakes sticking, but the oil seals in the gearbox drying out.
“When you first drove off, it used to labour, but after five miles it was OK because it got the oil round it,” says Phil. “I took it to the garage, but they couldn’t find anything wrong, so I left it with them to have a drive first thing in the morning. They found the problem then, and the gearbox was taken out and reconditioned.”
When it came to replacing the exhaust, Phil was quoted £850 for a replacement pattern part.
“But then I found a firm in Walsall that did stainless steel bespoke exhausts, and they wanted £530, £300 cheaper, which was a no brainer,” he says. “When I was up there they said ‘what do you want it to sound like?’ I said ‘much the same as it does now’ and they said ‘well, it will be a bit louder’. I left at 8am and got back at 8pm, and I pulled up outside the garage and purposely revved it a little bit. Ruth said ‘was that you? I could hear you above the television’.”
Daughters Claire and Dawn remember travelling in the rear bucket seats as teenagers, but as they’ve grown the seats seem to have shrunk.
“They went on a girly outing in Cambridge when Andy was repairing the wings, and I took them in Ruth’s Yaris and then picked them up in the BMW,” says Phil. “They hadn’t been in the back since they were teens, and they said ‘yeah, this is definitely a sports car’.”
The 6 Series served as Claire’s wedding car (pictured) and, in 2023, the prom car for one of her friend’s sons, Charlie.
“He had been at the wedding, and his dad asked him what car he wanted to go in for his prom, and he said the 635,” adds Phil. “When I was cleaning it to get it ready for you, there’s still glitter in there, even though I’ve Hoovered it God knows how many times.
“It’s my mate’s granddaughter’s prom this year, so it might be doing another one.”
Pencilled into the diary for 2024 are caravanning trips to Battle, Rutland, Suffolk, among others.
“We go away every month if we can from May to September,” says Phil. “I don’t use it enough really, because I do like driving it. Although it’s 39 years old, it’s still got really good performance. As they say, it’s the ultimate driving machine. It’s fair to say it doesn’t do many miles to the gallon of polish.”
The MkI 6 Series is an increasingly rare sight on the UK’s roads, although Phil does remember forming part of a convoy of three travelling into Ventnor on the Isle of Wight.
“If you do see the odd one, it’s always hands up and a wave,” he says.
“We do struggle a bit getting in and out of it now, because it’s a bit low. Ruth has to sit on two cushions to see. But as long as we can get in and out, it’ll be there.
“Nothing compares to it for me – I wouldn’t be interested in anything else. As Queen sang, ‘I’m in love with my car!’”
