By Jackie Jouret
Photos courtesy The BMW Archive
To be successful at Le Mans, or in any high-speed competition, you need more than just a powerful motor. You also need effective aerodynamics. With low drag combined with stability at speed, power becomes less important overall, and even a relatively underpowered car can win races.
BMW’s 328 had been winning races since its 1936 debut at the Nürburgring, but it did so largely thanks to exquisitely balanced performance and responsive handling rather than outright power. (Which is not to say that the M328 six-cylinder engine was anything short of a masterpiece; it remains a superb engine, with hemispherical combustion chambers and an innovative valvetrain.) Those traits had allowed the BMW roadster to sweep the podium for 2.0-liter sports car class in the 1938 Mille Miglia, for instance, where the mountainous course played perfectly to the car’s strengths.
The Mille Miglia was one thing, Le Mans quite another. If BMW wanted to take sp orts car racing’s top prize, it would need to replace the 328’s curvaceous roadster body with something more aerodynamically efficient. Adler had already begun experimenting with aerodynamic bodywork, and a pair of streamlined Adlers finished sixth and seventh overall at Le Mans in 1938. Those cars were built by Wendler of Reutlingen along lines dictated by Paul Jaray’s aerodynamic research; at least two BMW 328s would also get that treatment.
Jaray was one of two leading academics researching automotive aerodynamics in the 1930s. The other was Dr. Wunibald Kamm, whose principles BMW followed as it pursued its own aerodynamic bodywork for the 328. That work showed great promise, but it was proceeding slowly. Only one car would be ready for Le Mans ’39, much to the dismay of the factory drivers who’d be relegated to standard-bodied 328s for this high-speed race.
Rather than wait, one driver decided to take action for himself. Prince Max zu Schaumburg-Lippe had joined the BMW team from Adler for the 1938 season, and he’d driven a 328 roadster to tenth overall, third in the 2.0-liter class in the Mille Miglia. He followed with fifth in class at Anvers, then finished third overall, first in class at the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, where he headed an all-BMW podium.
BMW had sat out Le Mans for 1938—racing boss Rudolf Schleicher knew the 328s wouldn’t be competitive against the streamlined Adlers—but planned a return for 1939, when its cars would be equipped with more aerodynamically efficient bodywork. Alas, “cars” became the singular “car,” and Schaumburg-Lippe wasn’t tipped to drive it. Rather than race a standard-body 328, he commissioned an aerodynamic coupe from Touring of Milan.
Touring was founded in 1926 by Felice Bianchi Anderloni and Gaetano Ponzoni. In 1937, Anderloni patented his Superleggera or “Superlight” construction, which replaced a car’s wooden frame with an aircraft-style lattice of small-diameter metal tubing. This weight-saving measure also improved chassis rigidity, giving Touring’s aerodynamically-efficient aluminum racing bodies a technically sophisticated underpinning.
One of Anderloni’s creations had allowed Raymond Sommer’s Alfa-Romeo 8C 2900 to dominate much of Le Mans 1938; he’d been 12 laps ahead of the second-place car when an oil leak caused him to crash. As it turned out, Touring’s bodywork for the Alfa could be easily adapted to the smaller BMW, and indeed the car built for Schaumburg-Lippe ended up being nearly identical.
According to Rainer Simons’ seminal history of the 328, BMW sent 328 rolling chassis number 85368 to Touring in Milan on behalf of Schaumburg-Lippe. The chassis had been completed in Munich on 7 March 1939, designated as a full factory racer. As such, the car was equipped not with the standard 80-horsepower (at 4,500 rpm) engine or even the usual 130-horsepower factory racing engine but with the BMW racing department’s hottest M328 six. Still displacing 1,971cc, this highly-tuned engine delivered 136 horsepower at 6,000 rpm thanks to 11.4:1 compression (and the special racing fuel that required), a trio of Solex 30 JF carbs bored out to 32mm, oversized valves, high-lift cams, lightened valve gear, and a crankshaft with nine counterweights instead of the usual six. It also got a stronger Hurth 328 gearbox, a taller final drive, and Al-Fin drum brakes with the same 280mm diameter as stock but with ventilated magnesium backing plates.
The chassis was trucked to Milan by the BMW racing department’s Blasi Huber, a sheet-metal specialist who would supervise the construction and fitting of the bodywork at Touring. BMW’s head of vehicle development, Fritz Fiedler, would also go to Milan while the car was being built. “He cultivated good relations in and with Italy, and he was a good friend of the Italian engineer Ugo Gobbato, with whom he had studied at the Zwickau School of Engineering,” Simons wrote. “Both Gobbato and [BMW factory driver Count Giovanni] Lurani were close friends of the Anderloni family, who owned Carrozzeria Touring.”
Upon its completion, the Touring coupe was photographed in Milan. It’s a lovely little car, one whose sides are almost flat but for a series of air vents for the engine bay and two external door hinges. Spats cover the rear wheels, though the front wheels remain exposed. The hood curves gently around the engine, covering the area between the two fenders with no drop in height as would have been typical of the era. (That kind of volume was fairly revolutionary on Anderloni’s part, and it gave Touring’s cars a look that was far ahead of their time.) The bodywork tapers sharply at the rear, Jaray-style, in height as well as width. The roof is much narrower than the body throughout, and especially at the rear, where small, high-set window must have limited rearward visibility as surely as the lack of side mirrors.
With a wet weight of 780 kilograms, or 1,716 pounds, Touring-bodied BMW coupe #85368 was no lighter than a standard 328 despite the “Superlight” structure below its skin. Its aerodynamic performance, on the other hand, had been vastly improved. A photo of the Touring coupe next to standard 328 roadster taken prior to the start of the Le Mans 24 shows that Touring added considerable frontal area, but the design overall yielded a drag coefficient of 0.35, far lower than the roadster’s 0.55. (The coupe built in-house at BMW would be even slipperier, posting a Cd of 0.25 when test in the wind tunnel.) That gave it a top speed of 220 km/h (137 mph) rather than the standard 328’s 150 km/h (93 mph), a difference that would prove crucial on the high-speed straight at Le Mans.
Painted white, the coupe arrived in France just in time for practice and qualifying for the 1939 Le Mans 24 set to begin on June 17. The rapidity of its construction had no ill effects: Schaumburg-Lippe and BMW factory mechanic Hans Wencher raced the Touring-bodied coupe to fifth overall, first in the 2.0 liter class, with an average speed of 82.55 mph. They were first among BMW drivers—BMW’s own aerodynamic coupe hadn’t been finished in time to race at Le Mans—and they’d beaten the Adlers, too, when both of those cars suffered mechanical failures.
It turned out to be the last race of Schaumburg-Lippe’s career, and it might have been the end of the line for the Touring-bodied 328 coupe, too. BMW hadn’t planned to enter it in any other races for 1939, Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries and France in May 1940 made racing at Le Mans impossible for the immediate future.
The Axis powers remained keen to demonstrate their superiority through motorsport, however, and a new course for the Mille Miglia would provide an ideal venue for the Touring-bodied 328 coupe. Spectator fatalities in 1938 had canceled the 1939 running of the event, but the Mille Miglia was on again for 1940. This time, the race would avoid the mountain roads between Brescia and Rome in favor of nine laps of the largely straight, flat roads that connected Brescia with Cremona and Mantua. Like Le Mans, the course for this “Gran Premio Brescia delle Mille Miglia” would favor top speed over handling prowess.
The Touring-bodied 328 coupe was repainted in BMW’s official Fish Silver, a lacquer that gained a pearlescent quality from the addition of fish scales. It was assigned the racing number 70, and it would be driven by factory pilots Fritz Huschke von Hanstein and Walter Bäumer. Hanstein had won the 1938 German hillclimb championship in a BMW 328, but he was probably chosen for his experience in the streamlined Adlers he’d raced at Le Mans and Spa in 1937.
In Italy, Hanstein drove for nearly the entirety of the 927-mile race, letting Bäumer behind the wheel only at the end. The Touring-bodied coupe fended off an early challenge from another 328—the Kamm-style coupe built in-house at BMW, which can be seen just ahead of the Touring-bodied coupe in a photo taken upon the cars’ arrival in Brescia—that ended when that car’s engine ran out of oil not long after the start. After 8 hours, 54 minutes and 56 seconds, the Touring-bodied coupe was 15 minutes ahead of the second-place Alfa 6C 2500, and 20 minutes ahead of the nearest BMW roadster. It had averaged 108.928 mph, an astonishing figure for a 2.0-liter car with 136 hp.
The Touring 328 coupe resumed racing in 1946, then came to North America with former BMW racing engineer Claus von Rücker. Rücker sold it to New York photographer Bob Grier in 1950; Grier drove it on the street and raced it in SCCA events through 1954, then secreted the car away when he ran into tax trouble before his death. It was tracked down and restored by Jim Proffitt, who sold it to BMW Mobile Tradition (now BMW Classic) in 2003. It spends most of its time in the BMW Museum in Munich, but it comes out now and then to reprise its famous victory in the Mille Miglia, and for other historic racing and concours events.
The success of Touring’s aerodynamic bodywork, as well as that from Wendler and other coachbuilders, would have ushered in a new age of automotive efficiency had World War II not put an end to racing and other peacetime pursuits. Almost a decade would pass before racing would return to a normality, and it took even longer for automotive designers to pick up the work of Jaray and Kamm once again.
As for the Touring-BMW collaboration, the coupe was joined by several roadsters, which we’ll explore in our next two installments of this series.
*The slab-sided design was termed “Ala Spessa” meaning “broad or thick wing,” an attempt to enhance aerodynamics while eliminating the pronounced fender lines so popular a the time. Alfa management, according to Touring, did not like the concept.
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