bat vs csl

[HB Chris]

Henric,

Can you share some more info on the 20 factory race cars? What did their VINs look like, were they carbed coupes as well? Thank you.

 

[BMW Pete]

Carb CSL,s

Hi Henric,

I think your guess of 25 carb cars initially built as race cars, is a good guess, I would hazard to guess a little higher. I base my guess on new car, lightweight, aimed at beating the Capri's - here was the lightweight answer to the CS weight disadvantage.

Without the "Motorsport" bodies on the later factory race cars, we have most of the Carb cars leaving BMW in their records as street cars.

Reality is, they sometimes went straight to a race team and were never ever used as a street car. Obviously, if something went to Alpina and did not become a B2S, then we can make some assumptions.

There are a few early Carb cars I know of that had extremely successful race careers with world class drivers, but BMW list them as a delivered street car, which was never the case.

I think the cars that were used as street cars and got turned into race cars at a later date, are very different animals, and I would definitely include them in the street car numbers.

Hi Chris,

My understanding is the motorsport CSL's Vins go backwards from 2276000 - there are better minds than mine on this subject in this group, who can describe what happened much better than I can - but while many think 2276000 was the last car, in fact it was the first and from there you have 2275999, 2275998, 2275997 etc.

Please do correct me gentlemen is I have it wrong?

Pete

 

[CSL 1973]

Indeed, in reality many carbs ended up as race versions. My guess of 25 is based on the number of carb cars that were delivered directly to race-teams or to the tuners. Some other carbs were delivered to a BMW dealer (street cars), bought by race teams and then converted to race versions.

Speaking about early CSLs, one hero who deserves more credit is the UK-based Ralph Broad (Broadspeed) who was asked by BMW to develop a lightweight version. He came up with two CSL prototypes before the production CSLs. If I remember correctly one prototype did one race at Salzburgring (driver John Fitzpatrick) and actually Mr Broad's prototypes kicked-off the development of the first CSLs. This was before BMW (Neerpasch) asked the tuners Alpina, Schnitzer, GS and Koepchen etc to be involved in the development of the CSL.

One interesting question is if the two prototypes developed by Ralph Broad were the two first CSL VINs (the 2210-car + the first 2211-)? If not, there were two unknown additional CSLs VINs.

As regards the factory race cars, it's correct that the first one was 2276000 and next 2275999 etc. This series included some of the Art Cars. I think most of them used the mechanical Kugelfischer injection.

One interesting detail is that the Stella Art Car "nr 2 - Millimeter" from 1976 had another designed paint-work earlier on. Before Stella's piece of art, the car was painted in White with Motorsport stripes on the side of the car starting from the front lower part of the doors and climbing upwards (like Flashes).

Cheers
Henric

 

[Sooner]

Csl

Pretty sure Alf Gebhart could answer some of these questions, he was there at the beginning

 

[shanon]

The early Broadspeed E9 racer is lovely. British racing green with a white stripe and nice truck full of goodies. Its very different now.

Also, many of the first 2800cs racers (including the 70 Alpina SPA winner) have 'morphed' into later 'csl' flared winged cars...

Check those vins

 

[wsk]

A racing CSL was any car that complied with the FIA 1648-71 homologation. It could have been based on any E9 (e.g. a 2800, like many of the early ones) and may in fact have been built from a factory-supplied shell rather than a production car (e.g. the Luigi cars and others). The importance and value of a race CSL rests on its history, not its VIN.

 

[shanon]

Well put WSK: 'History over VIN'.

So does the question become:
"At what point in a car's (or any object for that matter) history is/was its finest?"

That decision might get a little tricky ... ;-)