By Jackie Jouret
Photos courtesy The BMW Archive
When eleven spectators were killed watching the 1938 Mille Miglia, Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the race canceled for 1939. The Axis powers remained eager to demonstrate their superiority through motorsport, however, and the race was back on again for 1940. This time, the Mille Miglia would trade its traditional mountain route from Brescia to Rome and back for a shorter course that triangulated Brescia with Cremona and Mantua. Although it had a few curvy sections, it was primarily held along flat, straight roads that would favor cars with a high top speed over those with agile handling.
If a car could combine those two traits, of course, it would have an additional advantage. As we saw in the first installment of this series, BMW’s 328 roadster had exceptional handling and a fine engine, especially in full-race form, and indeed a 328 with aerodynamic coupe bodywork from Touring of Milan had already won its class in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1939 when it lined up for the start of the 1940 Mille Miglia, aka the Gran Premio Brescia delle Mille Miglia.
In Italy, the Touring-bodied 328 coupe defeated a fleet of Touring-bodied Alfa-Romeos, as well as the other cars entered by the BMW factory team. These included another aerodynamic coupe built in-house at BMW, and a trio of custom-bodied BMW roadsters, two of which we’ll examine here.
First, why would BMW enter both open and closed cars for the same race? In short, because testing had revealed advantages to both: reduced wind resistance and higher top speed for the coupe, lighter weight and better visibility for the roadster. The Mille Miglia course was fast, but it also had some tight sections that might favor the roadsters.
As it had with the coupes, BMW split the production of the roadsters’ bodywork between its own workshop in Munich and that of Touring in Milan. BMW’s motorsport division lacked the production capacity to build three roadsters in time for the Mille Miglia, but it was also eager to build upon the relationship with Touring initiated in 1939 by Prince Max zu Schaumburg-Lippe and reinforced by head of production Fritz Fiedler.
BMW sent two 328s to Milan, chassis numbers 85463 and 85464. Both were built to factory racing specification: 1,971cc six-cylinder engines with 130 horsepower at 5,750 rpm, 10.0:1 compression instead of 7.5:1, three Solex 30 JF carburetors bored out to 32mm, larger valves, lightweight valve gear, and larger counterweights on the crankshaft. A Hurth 328 four-speed gearbox was followed by a taller final drive (3.44:1 versus 3.71). The brakes were 280mm like those on a standard 328, but upgraded to Al-Fin drums with ventilated magnesium backing plates.
Unlike 328 number 85368, which had been sent to Milan in 1938 as a rolling chassis to be fitted with Touring’s Superleggera lattice frame as well as Touring-designed bodywork, the roadsters left Munich complete but for their aluminum skin, which complicates their identification with the Milanese coachbuilder.
“Normally, a ‘Touring-bodied’ car is a vehicle whose body was designed and built by Touring. However, this is not the case with the Mille Miglia Roadsters,” said BMW Archive historian Hagen Nyncke. “The design was made by BMW head of design Wilhelm Meyerhuber and the entire tubular frame was built in Munich. At Touring, only the aluminum sheet over the existing tubular frame was manufactured—just the outer skin, not the entire body.”
As the head of BMW’s “Artistic Design” department since 1 September 1938, Meyerhuber was charged with taking BMW into a new era where the look and function of its cars were concerned. He’d been a painter before taking up a career in automotive design, and he had a keen eye for beauty as well as a superb sense of aerodynamics. He’d rescued BMW’s Kamm-inspired 328 racing coupe both aesthetically and functionally, achieving a drag coefficient of 0.25 that would be remarkable even today. For his next act, Meyerhuber was designing a successor to the wildly successful 328 roadster, and he’d preview that car with the roadsters he designed for the 1940 Mille Miglia.
One would be built in-house by BMW. This car (chassis 85032) became known as the “Bügelfalte,” or “pressed crease,” for the seam that ran along the tops of its fenders, which resembled the crease pressed into a pair of trousers. The other two (85463 and 85464) would be built by Touring without this seam, and with a higher degree of refinement and finish than the car built in BMW’s race shop. All three are low-slung, stylish roadsters, with a minimal windscreen that helped them attain a drag coefficient of 0.37 compared to the standard 328’s Cd of 0.55.
Meyerhuber’s “Bügelfalte” would race the Mille Miglia under the competition number 71, while the other two roadsters raced as 72 and 74. All were painted Fish Silver, a lacquer that uses ground-up fish scales to achieve a pearlescent effect. To differentiate the roadsters at a glance, the kidney grille of the 71 was painted black, while those of the 72 and 74 were painted green or blue. It’s not known which car got which color, as none of the extant color photos from the Mille Miglia show the grilles, but the number 72 car has a green grille that might be repainted in blue should evidence of its original color turn up.
The 1940 Mille Miglia consisted of nine laps of the 103-mile course, for a total of 926 miles rather than the thousand implied by the race’s name. Of the 126 cars to start the race, only 40 would cross the finish line, led by the Touring-bodied 328 coupe driven by Huschke von Hanstein and Walter Bäumer. They’d covered the distance in eight hours, 54 minutes and 46.6 seconds, for an average speed of 104 mph. In second place, nearly 15 minutes behind, was the Alfa-Romeo 6C 2500 SS Spider Touring driven by Giuseppe Farina and Paride Mambelli. Three minutes later, the Alfa was followed by the first of the 328 roadsters, the number 74 driven by Ralph Roese and Adolf Brudes. Fourth overall went to the Alfa driven by Clemente Biondetti and Aldo Stefani, while the number 72 BMW roadster driven by Ulli Richter and Willi Briem finished fifth overall, fourth in the 2.0 liter class. The 71 “Bügelfalte” followed in sixth, fifth in class, with Rudolf Scholz and Hans Wencher another minute behind.
The BMWs had dominated the race, but to an even greater extent so had Touring. The Milanese firm had supplied the bodywork for all but one—the Bügelfalte—of the top eight cars to finish, and even the slowest of those cars ended the race nearly two minutes ahead of the next car behind. (Admittedly, the competition was a bit slim, with no French teams or any German teams besides BMW having entered the race.) Touring had demonstrated not only the quality of its craftsmanship, but also the importance of aerodynamic efficiency in a high-speed event. Meyerhuber’s designs had done well, too: his coupe could have won but not for engine failure, and his roadsters had performed superbly.
Following a victory parade through Munich—the BMWs were driven to and from Brescia rather than being transported—the BMW factory racers and the Auto Union squad went to Romania for the Kronstadt and Bucharest GPs. Just as practice for the first of these events was set to begin, however, the Hungarian army invaded Romania, and the German teams were ordered home—a perilous journey that took several weeks.
Both of BMW’s Touring-skinned 328 roadsters survived the war, as did the Bügelfalte and the Touring-bodied 328 coupe. Today, the coupe and one of the roadsters is owned by BMW Classic, which enters both cars in concours events and vintage rallies worldwide. They’re beautiful cars, representing a fascinating union of form and function as well as a fruitful collaboration between Munich and Milan.
Jean-Marc Creuset says
I find it difficult to obliterate the geopolitical context of the event.
Fritz Huschke von Hanstein displayed the svastika on his overall as an NSKK member. This was a demonstration of the Berlin-Rome axis while Europe was at war, and a mock-up of the real Mille.