BMW 1600 GT restoration
Words: Mike Ryan. Photos: BMW
Like most carmakers with a long history, BMW has found that tapping into that history can be profitable. The carmaker’s ‘BMW Group Classic’ division, which includes the BMW Museum, company archives and BMW Group Classic Services, has found a willing market amongst classic BMW owners looking to service, repair, or restore their cars using genuine, BMW-approved parts and fitted by trained BMW personnel.
But while heritage operations are designed to grow business, they’re not always about profit. Sometimes, projects are taken on just for the pleasure of bringing a piece of the past back to life. Such was the case with this ‘BMW 1600 GT convertible’ pictured. While it may bear the BMW badge, its roots lie in another German carmaker, as well as an Italian coachbuilder.
Broken Glas
Hans Glas GmbH is a car company that’s been dead for more than sixty years, so it’s no surprise that most people today have never heard of it. Even when they were in business, Glas wasn’t a name that people outside of the company’s base in Germany connected with carmaking, but Aussies would almost certainly know of one of their cars - the Goggomobil.
First produced in Germany in 1955 to feed the booming microcar market, Goggomobils came to local attention thanks to the entrepreneurial Bill Buckle, who combined the car’s chassis and running gear with locally-built fibreglass copies of the steel bodies these vehicles wore in Europe.
Buckle’s Sydney operation turned out these compact runabouts in sedan, coupe, cabriolet and even cargo van form, but the best known Goggomobil here, the Dart, was Buckle’s own creation and never a part of the Goggomobil range anywhere else.
To backtrack a little, the Goggomobil cars produced by Glas followed a scooter called the Goggo, which itself was born out of a need for the company to diversify from its main business of building farm machinery.
As Glas’s carmaking operations grew, so too did the cars on offer, with bigger, better-appointed and more sophisticated cars produced compared to the spartan Goggomobil. But company boss Hans Glas’s insistence on producing almost all of his vehicle components in-house, and refusing to borrow heavily to fund future expansion, had put the company in financial danger by the early 1960s.
A merger of Glas, Auto Union and BMW had been proposed, but Hans Glas refused, pushing ahead independently with the development and release of new models that featured innovative mechanical elements and - when Pietro Frua was consulted on design, attractive styling, too.
The Glas 1300 and 1700 range, including sporty fastback GT versions, were stylish cars for their day, but the larger 2600 and 3000 V8 models were arguably less so.
By the mid-1960s, stagnant sales and outdated, labour-intensive manufacturing processes, along with quality-control issues with the Frua-supplied bodies, led Glas to finally seek a large capital injection. It was not forthcoming, but in 1966, BMW stepped in to “save” Glas and the workforce at its Dingolfing plant.
BMW cherry-picked the best of Glas’s mechanical features for their own cars and briefly co-badged some models, but the Glas name would be gone within a year of the takeover, with surviving models, like the 1600 GT featured here, rebadged as BMWs.
Surprisingly, the diminutive Goggomobils continued to be produced until mid-1969 under BMW ownership – but these never carried the BMW badge or signature kidney grille!
Two down to One
The car featured was originally one of two, both of which were bodied by Frua on BMW commission and sent to the formerly Glas, now BMW plant in Dingolfing in October, 1967, for fitout, painting and assembly.
BMW parts in what was essentially a Glas car included the same 77kW four-cylinder engine used in the 1600 Ti, as well as that model’s rear axle, single lens tail lights (the Glas version had dual tail lights), seats and a few other components.
BMW had actually commissioned the bodies as testbeds for a possible 2.0-litre engined car to offer to the US market in both coupe and convertible forms. With this usage in mind, Frua built each convertible with a stronger floorpan than the Glas models to handle the extra weight of the larger engine.
Sent out onto local Bavarian roads for testing in November of 1967, one of the cars was damaged in an accident early in this process and scrapped. The other survived, but the planned 2.0-litre project was abandoned soon afterwards, leaving the surviving car as an orphan.
Gifted to Herbert Quandt, BMW’s major shareholder and the man who had saved the company from a potential takeover by Daimler-Benz at the end of the 1950s, the one-off 1600 GT convertible stayed with that family for many years.
Passing through other private owners afterwards, the car later became part of the ‘Allianz Centre for Engineering’ in Munich and received its first restoration there.
It came to BMW’s attention more recently and given its rarity, they negotiated its purchase and treated it to a more thorough restoration, backed by the resources and personnel of BMW Group Classic.
Old and Young
A key component of this restoration – which was years in the making – was the involvement of young apprentices in BMW’s vocational training team.
Under the guidance of BMW Group Classic experts and trainers, the restoration of the 1600 GT formed part of the training for apprentices learning bodywork, mechanical engineering and vehicle construction skills. BMW Group Classic sourced rare NOS parts for the project and those that couldn’t be found were remanufactured.
In something of a completing-the-circle moment, the restoration took place at BMW Group Classic’s Dingolfing facility – essentially the same ground where it was first built 51 years ago. Completed late last year, the 1600 GT convertible is now part of BMW Group Classic’s growing collection of rare and significant cars from BMW history.
