At the Legends of the Autobahn event during last August's Monterey Car Weekend, we encountered this BMW 1600GT, a car as unfamiliar to most Americans as the BMW Alpina Z-1* featured in the previous post, on display a short distance away. I drove one of these 1600GTs when it was for sale 3 decades ago, and it seemed to offer the performance of an Alfa 1600, with handling a notch lower on the sharpness scale. Like the Z-1, it was unfamiliar in part because it was never officially imported into the U.S. But it's also been forgotten because BMW management decided to erase it from the corporate memory banks, even when it was still being produced...
This seems a surprising factoid, considering what the car was (an Italian-bodied, fastback 2-seater using BMW mechanicals) and when it appeared (2 years before the Datsun 240Z). To understand why BMW practically disowned this car, we'll need to revisit the postwar microcar phenomenon, and the part that Hans Glas and his Goggomobil played in it...
The Glas concern manufactured farm equipment until after World War II, when it switched to making motor scooters, and in 1955 introduced the Goggomobil microcar, a sedan powered by a rear-mounted 2-stroke inline twin cylinder engine of 250 cc (around 15 cubic inches); later engines were available in 300 and 400 cc sizes, and the T-series sedan (optimistically called a limousine in ads) was joined by a Sport Coupe in 1957. Styling was essentially based upon the idea of scaling down bigger cars. Both the sedan and TS coupe managed a certain perkiness (at least visually), with the coupe featuring a horse collar dummy grille that forecast the Edsel which would appear later the same year...
The timing of the Goggomobil's release was good for sales, as postwar West German reconstruction was in full swing by 1955, and the Suez Crisis of the following year increased demand for fuel-sipping microcars in general. Keeping pace with prosperity, Goggomobil introduced the front-engine, rear-drive Isar powered by a 600 cc (later 700) flat twin in 1958, and followed this with the one-liter 1004 model in 1962. The most interesting feature of the 1004 inline four was the toothed rubber belt driving its single overhead camshaft; this foreshadowed the fiberglass toothed belt on the Fiat 124 twin cam by five years. By 1963, Glas had upsized the engine to 1300 cc, and released a coupe with a more modern exterior by Pietro Frua, the Italian coachbuilder known for his work on Maserati chassis. The fastback 1300GT coupe bodywork, with low belt line and glassy cabin, was built in Italy by Maggiora to Frua's design...
The Glas concern had larger ambitions, however, and perhaps with an eye on the success of the recently introduced BMW Neue Klasse, they introduced a 1500 four-door sedan in fall of '63, and 1700 versions of the GT coupe and sedan for 1965. The surprise new model, though, was the Glas 2600GT V8, which was aimed at the same clientele as the Mercedes 250SE coupes also introduced in 1965. The engine was based on mounting two of the 1290cc blocks on a common crankcase; thus the new V8 had a single camshaft per bank of cylinders. Again, the new model was styled by Frua and the bodies were built at their facility in Moncalieri...
The sober, rectilinear forms and tall, curved glass greenhouse recalled the Frua-designed Maserati Quottroporte which began production two years earlier. The resemblance was especially evident at the rear, and the overall impression was so strong that the car was quickly nicknamed the "Glaserati."
The handbuilt cars featured loads of finely-wrought (and expensive) detail, and because they were costly to build, did little to add to the Hans Glas GmbH bottom line. The cars did attract the attention of BMW management, along with the patents for the belt-driven overhead cam and the Glas plant at Dingolfing, which had already produced around a quarter million microcars in addition to the new inline fours and V8s. BMW bought the Glas enterprise in autumn of 1966, and continued manufacturing the Glas model line in 1967.
BMW discontinued the 2600 version of the V8 in late summer of 1967, and introduced a 3 liter version of the V8 which Glas engineers had developed before the takeover. This new 3000GT kept the Frua bodywork and Glas grille design, but sported BMW roundels as well as Glas badging. At the same time, BMW decided to honor the Glas concern's contract with Frua by building the remaining fastback coupes in the contract with the BMW 1600 four and rear axle and suspension. The revised car was called the BMW 1600GT and unlike its big V8 brother, featured the twin-kidney grille up front. Just over 1,200 of these cars, like the gray coupe in the first three photos, were built through 1968. BMW, perhaps influenced by their ongoing experience with the Karmann-bodied 2000CS, seemed leery about outsourcing bodywork. Pietro Frua, realizing that his biggest production contract would end with the 1600GT, embarked on an effort to interest BMW in another design and production contract. The first of these was his 3000GT fastback coupe in 1967...
The car displayed similar proportions to Frua's design for the Monteverdi coupe which appeared in 1967. That car was also a fastback and coincidentally, also a V8 (but a Chrysler). The greenhouse, windshield rake, and angled tail on Frua's Glas BMW 3000GT prototype also recall Giugiaro's Maserati Ghibli first shown the previous year...
Alas for Pietro Frua, BMW had already developed a competing product, the new 6 cylinder version of their Karmann-bodied coupe, which would go into production as the 2800CS during 1968. After that year, BMW phased the Glas V8-engined 3000GT out of their product line.
As a result, only one lucky driver collected the keys to a new 3000GT fastback and enjoyed this cockpit; the Frua show car remained a one-off...
But Frua kept trying to come up with the magic formula, in this case with his BMW 2000Ti from 1968. This time he focused on the popular 2 liter Neue Klasse car with the injected inline four. The forms seem again to recall his work for Swiss maker Peter Monteverdi, who was also trying to launch a BMW-based GT as his "entry-level" (but still expensive) car. For the BMW version, he centered the twin-kidney grille in the shark-like maw of the Monteverdi. That was the main change….
Though the wire wheels Frua substituted for the alloys on the Monteverdi seemed more related to his Maserati Mistral, and by 1968 seemed incongruous on a BMW. Time for a clean sheet of paper...
With his 2002 GT4, Frua came much closer to a design that offered practical advantages over the 2002 which had put BMW on the map in the American market. The first of two prototypes appeared in late 1969, the year after the first 2002. The GT4 was a bit wider, longer and lower than that car, but offered the practicality of a large rear hatch. The car shown above is the glassier of the two GT4s built in 1969-70, and honors the BMW Hoffmeister kink in the side window line.
The other GT4 shows the more usual Frua treatment of the glazing. While BMW put a hatchback Touring version of the 2002 into production for 1971, the car's exterior was standard 2002, which means warmed-over first generation Corvair. Considering the American sales being notched up by the then-new Datsun 240Z, not to mention the aging MGB-GT, Frua's GT4 seems like a good idea that BMW allowed to slip away...
Perhaps discouraged by this, Frua waited until 1975 to try again, this time with the 3.0Si Coupe Speciale. The Karmann-bodied CS was in its last year in Europe, and here was an alternative in the prevailing sharp-edged wedge form, then at its peak popularity (with designers if not with the public).
Frua based his last BMW prototype on the newer 5 Series chassis in 1976; this was the 528GT. This time the approach could be described as a sports wagon, a body style then offered by few manufacturers, and a potential niche filler in the US, where only 2 passenger sports wagons (Volvo ES, MGB-GT) had been offered. Lancia would try a 4 passenger sports wagon with its HPE, which appeared briefly in the US. With BMW's dealer network and better reputation for reliability, this idea might have worked better for them.
Pietro Frua died in 1983 after a long career of providing body designs and finished bodywork for some of Europe's best chassis. It seems ironic that while finishing out the Glas contract for BMW seemed a large order to Frua (1,209 of the 1600GT, and 389 V8 3000GTs), the resulting cars were among the rarest postwar BMWs. In chasing another elusive production order from the Munich firm, Frua made some of the most memorable prototypes of BMWs that never were.
*Footnotes:
The Z1 and its Alpina RLE variant were described in our previous post from 11-24-18, "Forgotten Classics: BMW Z1 and Alpina RLE", and in the post from April 24, 2016 entitled "The Car Search Part 2: The Fun Factor." Other Frua designs are featured in "The Etceterini Files Part 1: Ermini" from December 7, 2015 and in "Concorso Italiano Overview" from August 31, 2018. We'll feature other Frua designs in an upcoming post...
Photo Credits:
Top thru 3rd from top: the author
4th: uniquecarsandparts.com.au
5th thru 8th: wikimedia
9th thru 11th: en.wheelsage.org
12th thru 14th: bmw mobile tradition
5th thru 8th: wikimedia
9th thru 11th: en.wheelsage.org
12th thru 14th: bmw mobile tradition
15th: bmw concepts archive
16th: automotorpad.com
17th: wn.wheelsage.org
18th & 19th: bmw concepts archive
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