50 years ago, Burkard Bovensiepen, the offspring of an office machine manufacturer, founded his own company, which focused on optimizing and improving automobiles, more specifically BMW vehicles. The aim was to become the Allgäu version of Abarth or Nardi, and to improve the performance of Fiat or Ford as well as BMW. But in the end they concentrated on BMW.
Initially, "Alpina systems" were produced, which used Weber carburetors to get more out of the BMW four-cylinder engines. This was an attractive niche that opened up in Germany, which was becoming increasingly affluent and performance-hungry. News of the German "tuner" (a term Alpina did not like to hear) reached the public early on, as magazines such as Auto Motor und Sport and Automobil Revue took on the fast BMW-Alpina variants.
Success in sport
And in motorsport too, more specifically in touring car motorsport, there was soon no getting around Alpina. A whole guard of racing drivers won in the fast saloons and coupés from Buchloe, including Dieter Quester, Derek Bell, Niki Lauda and Hans-Joachim Stuck.
Even BMW was happy to entrust its motorsport activities to the capable tinkerers in the Allgäu region, until it finally founded its own Motorsport GmbH.
Opel-Alpina?
Alpina became big with BMW, not least thanks to the fortunate coincidence that the warranty and interchangeability remained intact when Alpina systems were fitted. However, there were occasional thaws, so that Bovensiepen let it be known that good business could also be done with Opel. It stayed with BMW, until today. And unlike other in-house tuners such as AMG (Mercedes) or Abarth (Fiat), Alpina could not be bought and integrated.
Milestones
Time and again, the medium-sized, family-run company (Burkard's sons are now also on board) has presented innovative solutions and efficient top performance. One of the most popular models was certainly the B6 2.8 based on the BMW 323i. This car also marked the transition to an actual car manufacturer.
The B10 Biturbo, a saloon that could even compete with a Ferrari Testarossa, attracted a lot of publicity.
Ceremony
Five days (fifty would have been too many) were spent celebrating the anniversary in Buchloe. 8,000 guests were there, including Christian Danner, Dieter Quester and Harald Grohs, who sat behind the steering wheels of the famous Alpina touring cars almost five decades ago. And of course, many of the Alpina-BMWs built also found their way back to the Allgäu - around 200 of them are said to have been built, including a BMW Alpina 16002 Group 2 built in 1967 and a BMW Alpina B10 3.5 from 1986 with 290,000 km on the clock.
Zwischengas wishes BMW-Alpina good luck and success in the next 50 years.
