New project inbound! (Patreon)

Say Hallo to project Chicago!

That's right, finally an Alpina on the channel!
2008 Alpina B7, black on black, 128k miles, loaded, Texas car all its life with a clean title. 

I was not looking for a BMW with a famously "reliable" N62 engine, but it rather found me. A nice viewer from Chicago, Antonio, emailed me and said he has a broken but running & driving Alpina B7. They were always out of my price range so I wasn't expecting it would work out but then he responded the asking price is $4k. That makes it obtainable and pretty sure the cheapest B7 in the world currently. 

Obviously the car has issues, it had a minor accident in the front and the bumper was poorly repaired. The check engine light came on and the owner took it to some independent shop where they found misfire and valvetronic codes, coolant leaks and quoted him 11k to repair it! They quoted him for a fully timing chain job which makes no sense based on the codes and pretty sure not the problem. No blue smoke out of the exhaust when cold starting or when revving the engine so the valve seals are likely okay for now.

Anyway, he had it for around 2 years and in mid-2020 he relocated to Chicago. He didn't want to deal with the repairs and he offered it first to me before posting it online. After hearing everything, I also received a video of the engine running/walk around, I quickly decided to buy it. Didn't negotiate as I felt it was priced very fairly and the seller is a stand-up guy. Honest and very easy to deal with.


The car was located in a suburb of Chicago, Lemont and as luck would have it, I have a close friend that lives in Chicago and has a trucking company in Lemont, 7 miles from the seller. He met the seller this past Sunday, confirmed everything is as described, paid the guy and drove it back to his company HQ where it will be stored until it's picked up and shipped to Germany. 

I didn't know much about E66 Alpina B7 so I started researching and man, what an impressive machine. Supercharged beast with 500 PS, 698 Nm of torque, 0 to 100 km/h in around 5 seconds, bespoke Akrapovic exhaust, Alpina block, forged crankshaft and high strength Mahle pistons.
As it can be seen on the window sticker, it was $117,075 back in 2008 and I bought it for $4k 13 years later. Pretty crazy.
I know looks of E66 are hate it or love, but with Alpina rims and other goodies, I actually quite like it. I just wish it was blue and not black, I hate black cars as they are pain to keep clean but can't pick a color on a used car.

The reason I bought it is, well the paragraph above, but also for content. Hoovie had one that he sent to the junkyard and it had pretty good view counts so I'm hoping it'll attract a bigger crowd. Plus, it's something different that I've never done before and will be fun for me to work on it as well. 

No big plans for now, I'm doing some research and getting a general idea of what might be causing the codes but we'll see once it arrives. It's probably going to be a few months before it arrives but I'll keep you posted here.

Please keep this to yourself as I don't plan to unveil it any time soon.

Hope you are excited about it! I can't wait to see it in person.

P.S. Alex from Legit Street Cars emailed me recently that he might be coming to Europe and wanted to see if I'm up for a collab (of course!). I told him about the Alpina and if he wants to collab on this one, make a video on it or something. Waiting to hear back from him.