Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Smokey's 15 Minutes of Fame!

Back at the end of last year, I was contacted by Marsen Karlsson from BMW Headquarters in Munich. He indicated that he works with the BMW Magazine magazine, and that they were interested in including my Baur in the new IPad version of the magazine. He asked me to take some pictures, which my son Harry Jr. did, send them a brief story of the car, and, in addition, Marsen interviewed me via Skype.

Well, a few months have passed, and I did not remember about this until my son asked me last night about it. I don't have an IPad, but he does, so I asked him to check. Sure enough, there it was!!

It is on the 1/12 edition of BMW Magazine, and you can download it for free to your Ipad. My son took a few screen shots of part of the article, and here they are:







Needless to say, I am stoked!!!

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

New Heart for the Baur

As I have mentioned before, the Baur's engine is tired, and smokes quite a bit, although it doesn't miss a beat. Well, I acquired a few weeks ago a used engine, which was previously on a friend's E30. He installed a newer M52 in his car and offered me the M20 at a good price.

The engine is essentially a 1988 2.7 Super ETA with 325i fuel injection and computer. I have done some research and apparently all I need is a cam with longer duration to make it a strong, torquey engine. Hopefully I will be able to have significantly higher power and torque than my car's current M20B20, at a reasonable cost. Plans are to install it some time during the Summer months, so I'll post here any progress.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Non-BMW Cars We Love

Although I have been a BMW fan and owner for over 30 years, I do like other cars. Here are some of them:

Volvo 122/Amazon (this is a quite rare convertible, but I love all body styles)
Volvo 122 S convertable 2

Ferrari 250 GT Lusso Berlinetta (IMHO the most beautiful car ever)
1964 Ferrari 250 GT Lusso - Top

Pontiac G8 GXP (Pontiac's last hurrah....)
2009 Pontiac G8 GXP

Mazda 1500/1800 (Our family's first car when we were growing up)
Mazda 1500 Sedan 02

I hope you find them interesting. I'll post more of these sporadically.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

BMW 2002 Racing in Puerto Rico in the 1970's

A few months ago my friend Ivan Pelegrina shared some photos of BMW's racing in our island back in the 70's, participating both in road races and in rallys.

Here's a 2002 in one of the cane fields:



The rest of Ivan's cool pics can be seen here:



Cool stuff!