I just cut and pasted the WSJ article. Hope that's ok with Dow Jones & their lawyers
but I do give full attribution to the author & source. Enjoy!
By A.J. Baime
Feb. 20, 2021 9:00 am ET
Richard Varner, 66, chief financial officer and partner in the MotoAmerica motorcycle racing series and the chairman of the board of the Petersen Automotive Museum, on his 1973
BMW E9 racing and road cars, as told to A.J. Baime.
I grew up in Wichita. In the spring and fall, it was hot and there was no air-conditioning at my junior high, so the windows would be open. My friends and I sat in the back of the room in history class and we would hear cars and motorcycles roaring down Oliver Avenue. We bet pennies and nickels on what kind of motorcycle was going by. That was our window into the world. It was like staring through a knothole in a fence, with the whole world on the other side.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the cool cars were Corvettes and Camaros and Mustangs. But everything changed when we started to see BMWs. I remember the first one I saw, at a dealership the size of a gas station on Second Street in Wichita. I remember driving by and seeing a 3.0 liter BMW E9 and thinking it was the most beautiful car I had ever seen. E9 was BMW’s code for a series of vehicles built in the 1960s and ’70s. I read all about the E9 in magazines; it was this pioneering German four-seater that you could drive at 100 mph all day long.
Photos: A Pair of Vintage BMWs
Richard Varner shows off his two 1973 BMW E9s.
This BMW CSL was built in Germany in 1973 to race. Richard Varner bought it in 2018 and plans to race it in Vintage Auto Racing Association competition.
JESSICA PONS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Fast forward all these years, and I own two 1973 BMW E9s, and the relationship between the two is, to me, interesting. I found the road car—called a CS model—in California five years ago, and a tuner and restoration man named Jeff Tighe, who has a specialty in BMWs, restored it over the span of about 2½ years. The engine is not original. The architecture of this car is so well designed that you could drop in a later model engine, upping the power output a good 40%, and the vehicle remains immensely drivable. We lowered the suspension. The car is kind of a hot rod, and I drive it every day I am in California, where I keep an office.
The E9 racing car is badged as a CSL model. Built out in Germany back in the day, it is a racing version of the CS road car, and you can see the development of the racing ideology of the era just by looking at it. It has a shopping cart full of aerodynamics: air dam on the front, wing on the back, wing on the back of the roof, flares over the wheels. They were trying to find every aerodynamic advantage they could to make the car go faster.
It was originally raced in Germany and came over to the U.S. sometime around the early 1980s, and it has some Hollywood history. It was owned at one time by the son of Buster Crabbe, who was an Olympic swimmer and an early Tarzan in the movies. I bought it from the documentarian and podcaster Adam Carolla in 2018. I had some work to do on this car and am just now preparing to race it in Vintage Auto Racing Association competition. I put my number on from when I played football at the University of Nebraska—No. 67.
These cars remind me of those days when I used to sit in history class dreaming about going fast, and all the wonderful people I have met in the car world ever since. For someone who loves mechanical things, it has been a great life.
Write to A.J. Baime at
[email protected]
www.wsj.com
