Alpina Celebrates Its 50th Birthday With 2 of the Fastest New BMWs - The Cheat Sheet
For 50 years now, the answer has been Alpina, a German tuning company that has taken some of the greatest BMWs ever built and added power, luxury, and looks to some of the best cars in the world, and the result has never been boring. While most automakers leave the official tuning of their cars to in-house performance divisions, BMW has worked closely with Alpina for decades to build some of the most unique and unforgettable sports cars in the world. Before the first M Motorsport team got together in 1972 to build the 3. 0 CSL , and before AMG convinced Mercedes-Benz that they needed a go-fast partner with the 300 SEL 6. 8 “ Red Pig ,” Alpina was founded in Bavaria by Burkard Bovensiepen, the... Bovensiepen moved into one of the buildings in his father’s industrial complex, and began building Weber carburetors for the groundbreaking BMW 1500. Alpina’s reputation for quality and durability was established so quickly that by the end of the... By the early 1970s, the tuned cars were making such a name for themselves on the international racing circuit that their roster of drivers read like a who’s who of auto racing, with James Hunt, Jacky Ickx, and Nicky Lauda all driving for the... In 1978, the company developed three BMW-based models in-house, and its turbocharged B7 based on the 5-Series made it the fastest sedan in the world. Source: www.cheatsheet.com
