Description
By: James Taylor .
Alpina started out in the first half of the 1960s as the vision of one man, and forty years later that man's single-minded vision still dominates the company's activities. Burkard Bovensiepen has always insisted that nothing but the best will do — and the huge reputation that his Alpina cars have garnered around the world is testament to the essential rightness of that view.
Beginning with a home-produced bolt-on high-performance kit for BMW's new small saloon, the 1500, Alpina swiftly progressed to making other high-performance items for a broader range of BMWs. In the later 1960s, the company became actively involved in motor sport to help promote its products, and during that period built both a solid reputation with its customers and a good relationship with the BMW company, which produced Alpina's 'host' cars.
However, as Alpina expanded and began to sell its products more widely, the risk grew that enthusiasts would be able to buy the components to create `Alpina' cars that did not meet the parent company's own high standards. So Bovensiepen took a major decision: from 1978, Alpina would (by and large) stop selling performance components and would instead sell complete cars, carefully re-engineered in Alpina's own workshops.
The concept was a huge success and gradually custom-made interior fittings came to supplement the high-quality engineering that made Alpina BMWs quicker and, to many people, infinitely more satisfying than BMW's own high-performance Motor Sport machines.
Today, Alpina and BMW work closely together, catering for different niches within the car connoisseurs' market. They have collaborated on several projects, most notably the ground-breaking D10 Biturbo diesel model, and Alpina's future seems secure. The company's racing days may be over, but the latest products show that, after forty years in business, the Alpina marque has lost none of its cutting edge.
