2003 Donington BMW Show
Alpina Report
By Pete Thorpe

The C1 2.3 is in black with the broad Alpina body striping in green and it has the full Alpina interior, Anthracite with green and blue striping. It has covered about 107,000 miles and the current owner, Alan Wood, is looking for 'around' £5000 for this extremely rare model. He can be contacted on 07971 767266.

The B10 V8 is in Alpina Blue with a black Montana leather interior. It also has Switchtronic and a satellite navigation system with wide screen TV. It has covered about 40,000 miles, so for more information call Michael Wisher on 07866 318795, he is asking £32,500 for the car.

Darren Brailsford's Diamond Black B10 and Andy Wightman's automatic Polaris B9 have both received external body striping in the last year, Darren's B10 in silver and Andy's in blue and green, which suits the car very well. Andy has also replaced the leather interior with an original velour one in Anthracite with the blue and green striping, and his car has recently been featured in 'Classic and Sports Car' magazine. Both Darren and Andy are from the Leicester area, as is Simon Alcorn who brought along his immaculate Dolphin Grey E30 C2 2.7, which was this year's 'Show and Shine' winner at the BMW Car Club national gathering at Gaydon in August, and well deserved it was too.

There was another C2 2.7 at the show in the shape of Paul Watkinson's lovely Alpina Green car. With Paul on the Derbyshire Area Group's stand was Les Bush with one of the other E28 B9 cars, his pristine example being in a relatively discreet Zinnober Red with no external striping. Both of these cars have been featured in separate articles in 'Total BMW' magazine.

On the Total BMW Magazine stand was Aman Singh's (very) recently acquired Sapphire Blue E34 B10 Bi-Turbo; he had only bought the car from Peter Walsh the previous day! Aman is one of the guys who runs bodywork and respray specialists Bodytech in Edmonton, North London, and they can be contacted at carbodywork@hotmail.com.

The third E30 Alpina at the show belonged to Steve Haslam of Chesterfield. He is the proud owner of a B6 3.5S, one of only 62 built. His car is in Mimosa Red his upgrades to the car have included brakes and suspension, along with the addition of various AC Schnitzer 'bits'.

Later 3-series models were represented by an E36 B3 3.0 Touring, which was on show on the HAC Service Centre stand (hacservice@freeuk.com) and belongs to one of their customers. This car was in Individual Metallic Blue and was also fitted with Switchtronic.

The fourth E28 belonged to myself, Pete Thorpe, from Basingstoke. My 1983 B9 is in Arctic Blue with silver body striping and Anthracite interior with the Alpina blue and green stripes. It must be said I was pleased with the number of favourable comments the car received during the course of the day.