Simply The Best

H&R SPRING BUILDS WHAT MIGHT BE THE FINEST E30 ON THE PLANET.

- Bradley Brownell

The car you see here is more than simply a cult classic. Much like hearing a particular song or watching a specific film from your childhood, this BMW e30 318 is exists as a tangerine temporal shout. The first note, the opening scene, or this delightfully zingy four-cylinder firing up; each can transport you through time to re-fire those dormant synapses. As one of the most desirable e30 models, the 1991-only 318 is stands as the archetype for weight distribution and driving enjoyment. This one, however, is beyond the ideal. This car is a time machine.

The German engineers behind new BMW cars spend each day attempting to outdo what has been done the day before, striving for more and better. You can see that BMW has been working under this assumption for decades, continually making its 3-series bigger, faster, and more capable. It has been this way since the Neue Klasse, and shows no sign of stopping. But what if, instead of reinventing the model every few years, the company had worked harder to perfect what it had built in the e30 generation? How good would that car be? In this revisionist Bimmer history timeline, H&R’s creation might be the car BMW would have built.

Understand that this isn’t the Back to the Future DeLorean, programmable for the ’50s, or for the future, no. This e30 can give you just a glimpse of an earlier moment in your own life. Driving this car, you’re a teenager again, when keys symbolized freedom. Twist that key in this car’s ignition and you’re transported back to the thoughts and feelings you had in the 1990s. Those moments in the past are representative of a thousand similar misremembered rose-tinted moments.