This is the story of Adrian Miles and the lovingly-restored BMW M3 E30 he drives around Los Angeles.
(Bloomberg) — Adrian Miles knows BMW. The Philadelphia native and executive at Nike’s Jordan Brand has owned more than 20 of them, from a BMW 1-Series and M3 when he lived in Europe to multiple 3-Series and X5s, three 2002s, and a 1M. But one is particularly special: the 1990 BMW M3 E30 that he bought in 2013. It’s one of the most recognizable BMW models on the road today.
A high-performance version of the BMW 3-Series, the BMW M3 E30 combined the sportiness of the race cars BMW was already making with the comforts of a sedan. The result was a practical yet thrilling daily driver. When it debuted at the 1985 Frankfurt auto show, it was an instant hit with critics—and soon after, with the public, which would grow familiar with its numerous wins in touring car races. The plucky M3 won the prestigious 24 Hours Nürburgring five times (1989 through 1992 and in 1994) and the Spa 24 Hours four times (1987, 1988, 1990 and 1992), often competing against cars with significantly larger, or even turbocharged, engines.
The first M3s boasted 200 horsepower wrought from a two-liter four-cylinder engine (in later years that power reached as much as 238 hp), a five-speed manual gearbox, and a slim body that weighed just 2,645 pounds. The body was light because the front and rear bumpers, side skirts, trunk lid and spoiler were all plastic, a novel choice at the time. Going flat-out, the initial M3s reached 62 mph in 6.7 seconds and boasted a top speed of 146 mph. They excelled on corners, Miles says, leaving any challengers far behind.
Since it launched, the M3 E30 has been a darling of pop culture, featuring prominently in such films as the Jay-Z- and Damon Dash-produced classic Paid in Full. Today, values range from $34,000 to $215,000, with the average hovering around $87,000, according to Classic.com.
In this installment of “How’d You Get That Car?” we explore how Miles fulfilled a childhood dream when he bought his M3 E30. It wasn’t an easy journey; he bought the car online, sight unseen, from a stranger in North Carolina and had never even driven an E30 before that. The first time he got behind the wheel, the car was so different from what he expected that he thought it was broken. It all changed when he moved west, Miles says.
Sometimes the car you love as a kid sticks with you forever. Here’s our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
So, Adrian, I know you’ve owned a lot of different cars, from Volkswagens to Porsches to Nissans to other BMWs. Why is the BMW M3 E30 so special?
It was like a first love, I would say. I know it sounds corny and cliche-ish, but when I was younger, a lot of folks who we looked up to had cool cars: old-school Bimmers and 944 Porsches. I’m from Philly, from the ‘hood or whatever, and the drug dealers used to have them. Everyone was freaking out over them. As kids growing up, we would see those guys and we were like, “Oh, I gotta understand that’s a cool car.”
But I never really fell in love with anything until I saw an E30. When I saw it, I felt it in my body. I was just like, “Someday, I’m gonna have one of those.” From there, it was something that I always aspired to.
Do you remember when you first saw one in real life?
There is a thing called the Greek Picnic. It’s a reunion for all the fraternities every year, where all the college fraternities gather in Fairmount Park—a large reunion for historically black fraternities and sororities. During the Greek picnic, everyone would come out. The whole park was just one big cookout, essentially a picnic where everyone would bring out their best, put on their best gear, and you would have people come up from all over the country to go to Fairmount Park, to a place called the Plateau.
Actually, it’s in one of Will Smith’s raps: “A place called the plateau is where everybody goes.” Everyone would go there and bring out their best cars. Some people went, obviously, to see girls. As kids, we would go, obviously, to see the girls, too, but then we would also go to see what kind of cars everyone was rolling up in. That’s where I saw the E30. From there I was just like, “I have to have that thing.”
Did anyone in your family come from a car background, or was this a love you discovered just for yourself?
Grandpa was a mechanic for the police force in Philly, so he used to work on old Impalas and Chevys—the Caprices—and he instilled that [affinity for cars] in us. He had a garage where he used to work on them. My brother and I, we used to sneak in there, go check them out, just tinker around.
But also, one of my teachers, my favorite one, he was Jamaican, and he loved BMW. He had an E21, and he put an Alpina front on it, which is why I do all my cars with front spoilers off of that influence. [Alpina is a Bavarian tuning company that specializes in making high-performance BMWs.]
So now it’s 2013, 2014. You’re all graduated and professional, and you’re still thinking about that E30.
Yeah. And the other thing was, I started to see that the E30s were rising in price because people had started to realize how special they were. So I was always hunting for one on AutoTrader or Craigslist or EBay.
One afternoon, I was on EBay, hunting. And one popped up. It was $19,000, it was rusted out. I saw the pictures, I was like, “Oh my God. But like, OK, $19,000.” I hadn’t seen any of the others at that price.
The car was in North Carolina. I was living in New York, and I thought, “Why would I have two cars in New York?” And the comments online, they were like, “Why would you pay that much? It’s rusted out.” But I’m just like, “Y’all don’t get it.”
I never even checked the car out. I just pressed go: “I’m buying it.”
Bold move!
At the time the car was actually green. British racing green. And rusted everywhere. The guy who sold it to me sent me a couple of pictures of it, then put it on a flatbed truck. I drove down to Philly to pick it up. My brother-in-law dropped me off.
It’s actually a funny story. I get into the M3, sight unseen, and I start to drive off—and literally, in my head, it felt like the car was broken. I was coming out of a BMW 1M at the time–you know how different a ‘90s version of a car feels compared to a modern car?
I’m driving in Philly from stop to stop, and was like, “Oh my gosh, I waited all my life to get this car and drive it, and literally the performance was like, ‘Oh damn, sorry.’” So I drove it back to the [auto] shop where I had it delivered and was like, “Yo, did you see anything? Did you hear anything?” And they were like, “Nah, nothing major.”
But I started doing research and people were like, “Dude, you gotta really drive it. You gotta really wring it out to get the power.” I was like, “All right, cool, I’m gonna do that.” But I never really did it on the East Coast because there wasn’t any place to really do that.
Oh, interesting. So not too much seat time in NYC, but then you bring it to LA, right?
When we moved out here, I shipped the car out. That was when I really got to drive it. The first time I took it on ACH [Angeles Crest Highway] it was so unreal. There’s nothing else like it—no way you can replicate what’s happening there.
Had you done a lot of work to it?
Once I got to LA, I had it all redone. With the exception of lowering it a little bit, I took it back to the original spec. I had it stripped down to bare metal on the exterior and then had it resprayed to the original colorway, which is diamantschwarz, or black. I got new shocks. I redid the suspension springs. They replaced the steering rack with an E36 [BMW 3-Series] steering rack, which I think really changes the way the thing drives—that was one of the really good improvements.
Actually, the first thing I did buy for the car, even before I got all that done, were the AC Schnitzer Type 2 wheels. After I bought the car, I went hunting for them because I knew they were going to be super hard to find. And I got the M-Tech 2 steering wheel. By the time it was all done, which was 2016 or 2017, the car had already appreciated like $30,000.
Wow, nice return. So these days, driving in LA, where is the car happiest?
Tight cornering. It’s a super momentum car, so if I’m dropping down into gear, it needs to be up there [revving] to 3 1/2, 4 [thousand rpm]. Medium to long corners, that’s where it’s happiest, but it really does well anywhere, except for A to B. It’s destroying everything except for in a short, straight line—or uphill, ha ha.
I do drive it a lot. It is a daily driver. I actually dropped my son off to school in it this morning.
What’s the reaction it gets when you drive it around town? Is it anything similar to how you felt when you saw one as a kid in Philly?
It’s one of those cars that you can encounter from the age of a toddler to an old person. Even with kids, they look at it and they know it’s cool, and I’m like, “Should they even be recognizing this?”
It’s just something that you can’t replicate—a certain design aesthetic. Everyone from every age level, every race, is just like, “Holy shit, that’s a great car.”
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