Hindsight is always 20/20, and now that my car-sales business has been appropriately downsized and my service business closed, I have some breathing room to reflect on the past. In aviation, debriefing is an effective tool for identifying both the good and the bad elements of a flight in order to improve safety; looking back at some of my decisions, it’s easy to pinpoint a few that, while they seemed like good moves at the time, turned out to be utterly catastrophic.
In 2022, a good friend of mine decided to sell the crown jewel of his E30 M3 collection, a freshly painted 1988 Zinnoberot M3 shell, along with his lifetime horde of parts. The shell was a roller with a Ground Control suspension, a short-ratio differential, and stock wheels—and two trailer loads of parts came with it, including several S14 engines that could be built to everything from stock 2.3 to a 2.7-liter DTM-style motor.
Several Getrag 265 transmissions were also present, including an ultra-rare dogleg gearbox. All in all, there were nearly enough new-old-stock (NOS) parts to finish the car inside and out, including several carbon-fiber air boxes, a dashboard, seats and covers, an M Tech II steering wheel, early-style taillights, a fuel tank, and so on. Most were still sealed in original BMW boxes with white-and-blue parts labels plastered on the side. I get a little giddy when I see NOS BMW parts, especially E30 M3 parts.
Then there were all the used parts, small fasteners, and brackets. The latter can often be maddeningly difficult to find, such as S14 alternator bushings and air-conditioner compressor brackets.
I thought that the numbers were good; the $80,000 trade-in credit I gave toward a hot-rod air-cooled Porsche 911 I was selling made sense, at least on paper, even considering the money and time it would take to assemble and finish the M3. When I was done, it should easily be worth north of $85,000, depending on how I finished it, and the remaining parts could sell for nearly as much. What BMW-phile wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to build what could fundamentally be a new-old-stock E30 M3? Even my cynical voice of reason couldn’t find fault with the plan. I could sell off the parts I wouldn’t use to fund the build, and if I needed out of this venture, I could sell it all and get my money back. I’d done well buying E30 parts lots in the past; it could only be better with unobtanium E30 M3 parts, right?
Well, the real world had other things in mind.
First were the sheer logistics of inventorying and storing two 24-foot trailer loads of parts; the inventory alone took up an entire 50-by-25-foot hangar and countless hours to lay out, photograph, and catalog everything. Then there was the project itself, which needed to be worked into the shop schedule after I decided which S14 engine to assemble and use.
Anyone who’s done it knows that the last 10 percent of a project can require 90 percent of the work, the finishing touches required to make it 100 percent complete. Fear of selling off something I might need put most of the parts in purgatory until I finished building the car, which wasn’t happening fast.
The timing wasn’t great, either. I made this deal in January 2022, a month before Russia invaded Ukraine. Shortly after that, cracks started to fracture the enthusiast-car boom as consumer confidence waned and capital became more expensive. The E30 M3 market had also shifted, moving from an old-school enthusiast-driven demographic to a spectator model mirroring the Porsche air-cooled boom; the good old days of the S14.net and R3Vlimited forum communities had given way to the Internet-dating models of Bring a Trailer and other online marketplaces.
I got scared and posted the car and parts as a lot, just trying to get my money back. The only inquiries I received were lowball offers, or those that were predatory in nature.
In hindsight, I should have posted it as a no-reserve auction on Bring a Trailer and hoped for the best, but the thought of running that auction gave me tremors. It would have likely required taking a week off work to keep up with the questions and comments. Instead, I did the worst possible thing you can do in business: nothing. I pulled the listing, put the parts in storage, and sat on them while the market went down and my capital cost went up. I clung to the notion that I could finish the M3, sell the other parts, and still break even—but as the service business suffered, the M3 became less and less of a priority. When it came time to close the shop and give up the space, I sold everything for 50¢ on the dollar to a good friend, eating several years of holding costs. It turned out to be the single greatest loss I ever took.
On a positive note, at least those parts went to a good friend instead of a speculator, and the M3 will ultimately get finished. When it’s done, it will bring countless smiles, and keep another example alive of what is arguably the most important model in BMW M GmbH history.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to move forward, licking my wounds and learning from the lessons of the past. If nothing else, it’s just another of hundreds of stories and experiences I have yet to tell.