"We love orange. And we love the 2002 Tii. And we also love the otherness of the Alpina badge - a twisted version of the workaday beemer brand that always throws a quantum of otherness into the mix. The 'Touring' "
Alpina B6 3 Series
For some reason, somehow, my oldest friend had one of these for his first car.
Quite inexplicable, really. He wasn’t a rich kid. His dad helped him out, sure – but it wasn’t the sort of family who did flash cars. Said dad, for gawd’s sake, drove a very down-at-heel Vauxhall Viva.
The car was fast. It was horribly unreliable – used to overheat constantly. It drove with a sort of lurching wheeze – and the gearbox had obviously been thrashed to within an inch of its life before my mate got hold of this thing.
But around the A-roads of Essex in the early 1980s – a place replete with every kind of Dagenham dustbin known to the Estuarine region – it was something special – and it set those that drove her and those that rode in her apart.
That’s the appeal of a sub-brand like Alpina. There’s an otherness to them that once tasted, will stay with you forever.
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