In pictures: the rare BMW that launched a racing dynasty

Hands-on with the ultra-rare 3.0 CSL in its purest form

Like many of history’s great cars, the BMW CSL – launched in 1972 – was a homologation special: a roadgoing masterpiece built to qualify the model for racing.

While it enjoyed great success on track, the street variant of the CSL also became a legend in its own right – a 3-litre lightweight saloon with incredible performance, built to the tune of just 1200 examples.

But, while the fabled ‘Batmobile’ variant has always captured the most attention thanks to its bonkers body kit, it was the purer, carburettor-equipped early cars that really created the CSL.

Few were built and little is known about them – so how did they come to be? Here's the story.

Unexpected racer

In many ways, BMW’s E9 coupés – with their heavy luxury trim and not-so-stiff shells – were unlikely racing cars.

Who would have predicted a body that started life as the humdrum 2000 CS in the late ’60s would end up a five-time European Touring Car Championship winner?

Third-party triumphs

It’s true, though: the CSL owes its existence to the BMW 2000 CS – or, rather, the people who took it to the race track. With BMW officially out of motorsport, it fell to private parties to prepare the machine for racing – and prepare it they did.

Alpina’s 2800 CS chalked up two outright wins in international events in 1970, before Dieter Quester’s 2800 CS beat a pair of Ford Capris at Zandvoort in 1971.

Prayers answered

By then, the ageing 2800 CS had been replaced on the production lines by the new BMW 3.0 CS – and creation of a lightweight version was under way. 

The pleas of the racing tuners had been heard: 1000 examples of the 3.0 CSL would be built to qualify the lighter coupé for Group 2 of the European Touring Car Championship.

Barely there

It was the 1971 Geneva Motor Show at which the roadgoing CSL broke cover – and it certainly deserved its moniker: the featherweight machine was 180kg lighter than the standard CS. 

How? All its opening panels were stamped out of aluminium and the steel panels – wings, nose and roof – were thinner to save even more weight.

Trimmed down all round

And the diet didn’t end there: the rear side windows were acrylic, while the ’screens were made from a thinner laminate. There was no front bumper at all, and the rear one was a black polyester moulding weighing just 2.5kg. 

There was also less sound deadening, thinner carpets, scant rust protection, and even the boot lock and bonnet-latch mechanisms were banished in the name of shedding pounds.

Shedding every last pound

It almost goes without saying that the power steering and electric windows went. The plastic rear quarter-windows were even fixed in place to save on the weight of the hinges.

Inside, the headliner was black to reduce reflections (there was no air-conditioning, obviously) and the hefty reclining front seats were replaced by a pair of lightweight and sporty buckets.

Less is better

Out, too, went the huge, thin-rimmed steering wheel which critics had always despised on the E9, replaced by a much smaller three-spoke number. 

As for the courtesy light, that was replaced by a rally map-reading light on the dashboard, and there was no sign of the famous BMW toolkit mounted in the bootlid. Or the boot carpet.

Delightful details

What you did get with the CSL was a set of 7in-wide Alpina alloy wheels with chrome wheelarch extensions, as well as black stripes running the length of the car’s beltline, with the ‘3.0 CSL’ moniker cut out of the stripe on the front wings. Cool.

With the slats of the ‘kidney’ grille and faux wing vents painted matt black, early CSLs came in a special range of distinctive colours, too: Colorado (orange), Golf (yellow), Inka (gold) and Verona (red).

Same under the hood

Mechanically, though – besides a few tweaks to the springs and camber – the CSL was otherwise a stock 3.0 CS, sharing the same 3-litre M30 straight-six motor, equipped with twin carburettors and good for 180bhp.

Claimed top speed was 132mph – theoretically no better than the CS – but with a 0-60mph time of 7.2 seconds.

Time to go direct

BMW’s sales chief Bob Lutz soon identified that injection would suit the CSL better than the carburettor setup – if not for the track, then certainly for the road. And that’s where he needed to sell 1000 CSLs.

The result? Of the 1200 or so built by BMW, just 169 were fitted with carburettors – the rest, bored out to 3003cc, carried Bosch fuel injection, including all 500 of the right-hand-drive cars shipped to the UK.

Testing the waters

On reflection, the carburettor-equipped CSLs look like a pre-production dry run for the lightweight coupé project, with BMW on the cusp of relaunching its factory motorsport team.

Of those 169, it’s believed that 21 were bought by Alpina, Schnitzer and some of the other privateer teams to convert into racers, while the remainder went into the normal BMW dealer network in Europe – leaving them perhaps the rarest of all CSLs today.

Orange you jealous?

The car pictured is chassis 2211723, the 85th of those 169 early cars. It was sold new to an Italian wine merchant for DM30,000 (about £7500 – or £94,000 in today’s money).

Finished in 002 Colorado orange, it’s had a pretty cushy 46 years. With so many CSLs modified over time, originality today is key and 2211723 – still wearing its original paintwork – enjoys the bonus of never having seen rust, a rare experience for an E9 coupé (Karmann shells were notorious for the stuff).

Stored then restored

It lived with its first owner in the Asti region of Italy until the early ’90s, continuously kept in dry storage. Come 2009, current custodian Barney Halse got to hear of the car. Although he’s been driving, restoring and selling CSLs all his adult life, he had never seen a carburetted car until he went to look at this one.

Once he’d secured the CSL, Halse sent it to BMW Classic in Munich for recommissioning, with instructions to keep it as original as possible.

Purity of form

“Even they were excited,” he recalls. “They’d never seen a carburetted CSL before, either.” 

With refurbished brakes, fresh rubber all round and its Bilstein dampers rebuilt, it’s now a specimen example of the CSL in its purest form, and the pride of Halse’s small but very discerning collection of classic BMWs.

Time to shine

Today, this carb CSL is a rarity that E9 aficionados would kill for – but at the time these homologation specials were tricky things to pitch to a buying public who didn’t really care about racing: they were more expensive, less robust and less comfortable than the standard model. 

Perhaps it’s only as a collector’s item that we can see the true significance of these early ‘pure’ CSLs. But, while the equally fabled M1 was the first official BMW Motorsport car, it was the carburetted CSL that started the story. And for that we salute it.