Hey guys, thanks for welcoming me to E39source! I’ve been a YouTube subscriber for quite a while now, and actually met some of you at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix last summer. My name is Mike, and I’m 25 years old and live/work in West Chester, PA. I currently have two E39s: a 1997 528i, and a 2000 M5.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve held a strong interest in cars, though my parents accredit that to a toy school bus I had as a toddler. After I turned four, I would point to cars on the road and ask my dad what they were. His limited automotive knowledge meant that every SUV was a Jeep to me; everything else was a mishmash. Through clipping pictures of nice cars out of magazines, collecting Hot Wheels sized cars, and reading the undercarriage for the label, I started to form a vague understanding of what I was seeing on the road.
My story starts a little differently than others. It starts 13 years ago… with a different kind of BMW than the one that I now own. One that, in my opinion, is by far the finest thing to come from Germany in a very long time… The E30 M3. I owned that icon for 11 memorable years, and still marvel that I was fortunate enough to own something so pure in it’s DNA, something that rewarded your driver input, and never punished you when you got it wrong. But, as this is a post about the E39 M5 I now have, let’s fast forward to November, 2010.
My story with my E36 is one of passion, heartbreak, persistence, hard work, and courage. That may sound a bit like the makings of a shoddy Lifetime movie, but I promise you this will be more entertaining than that. In my mind, this article is going to sound like something from Dan Neil in the WSJ. Instead, it may come off a bit like something a 17 year-old wrote one day while playing hooky… and that’d be correct. The first time I saw the little E36 was about 3 years ago, I was 14. Somehow I looked passed all of its imperfections, and it sparked my interest in E36s. It’s a 1993 brillantrot 325iS that a good friend of ours bought from a broke Princeton student who knew nothing about cars. It was advertised on South Jersey Craigslist with a blown engine. After a good friend purchased it, he diagnosed the problem as being a damaged clutch fan. It was fixed, but never registered to be driven.
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