BMW 328 History

BMW was a Munich company with a factory in Thuringia. Its head office and aero-engine works were in Munich; its cars came from Eisenach, where BMW had bought a vehicle works in 1928 under Franz Josef Popp, the chairman of its board from 1922 to 1942.

BMW's own account places the car's early development elsewhere. In 1934, it says, it "gathered together its vehicle development activities under the watchful eye of Fritz Fiedler in Eisenach", a team only 20 strong at first, and moved the car development department to Munich in 1937. By BMW's account, then, the 328 was conceived at Eisenach; by Jenkinson's, in Munich.⁠source 5​source 6​source 1

BMW traces the line back to the 303 of 1933, the car that, it says, introduced its principle of lightweight construction, and Jenkinson to "the design concepts laid down in 1932 by Fritz Fiedler and Rudolf Schleicher". The sports cars came in 1934. BMW showed a prototype sports roadster beside its 315 saloon (sedan) at the Berlin Motor Show, in May 1934 by BMW's date, and sold the 315/1 from that summer: a small six in a two-seater with flared wings (fenders) and covered rear wheels, on a welded frame of steel tubes, with a transverse leaf spring and wishbones at the front and a live axle at the back.

A team of 315/1s won its class in the International Alpine Trial that year, BMW says; Jenkinson first gave that success to the 319, then printed his readers' correction. Late in 1934 came the 319/1, the same car outwardly but for a vent in the bonnet (hood), with a larger six and three bigger downdraught carburettors. Neither sold widely: BMW says 230 315/1s were completed by mid-1935, and 178 319/1s in 1934–36.

The 328 was developed from the 319/1. Jenkinson described the chassis engineers "honing the basic 319 car, improving the brakes, the shock-absorbing, the gearbox and the rear axle", and BMW says the new car "differed significantly in both its exterior appearance and under the skin". The layout stayed; the brakes became hydraulic, the engine took a new head and the body was new.⁠source 1​source 7​source 6​source 8

Every reliable source read names two men: Fritz Fiedler for the chassis and Rudolf Schleicher for the engine. Fiedler's frame, which BMW says it patented, had two round tubes converging like an A from the rear wheels to the front, joined by rectangular cross-members. Schleicher's task was the engine's breathing, which Jenkinson says limited its power. His answer was a new aluminium-alloy head on the 326's cast-iron block: valves inclined in a vee over hemispherical chambers, upright inlet ports for three downdraught carburettors, and a single camshaft in the block that reached the far row of valves through short pushrods across the head.

BMW adds a third name. Wilhelm Kaiser, a body engineer who arrived at Eisenach on 1 October 1936, drew the production body, working from the prototypes, in a form that BMW says could be built without elaborate tooling.

BMW is modest about its own car: put together "in double-quick time with minimal use of materials and manpower", "neither overly innovative for its time nor particularly powerful", its strength "the coherence of the overall concept". After the first races, it says, Fiedler and Schleicher set up a racing department so that what the cars learned would reach the production car. On 1 September 1938 BMW founded a design department, "Künstlerische Gestaltung" (artistic design), under Fiedler; there, by BMW's account, the Kamm coupé's body was made under Wilhelm Meyerhuber's stewardship, and he carried its streamlined shape over to the Mille Miglia roadsters of 1940.⁠source 6​source 1

The car Ernst Henne drove at the Eifelrennen was a prototype: chassis 85001, painted white, with no doors, a low windscreen (windshield) and, BMW says, a pair of slim kidney-shaped intakes like those of the 326 shown at Berlin that spring. He won the unsupercharged two-litre sports-car race over five laps of the Nürburgring by about three minutes, at an average of 101.6 km/h (63.1 mph), from what BMW says were four 319/1s and the rest of a class it puts at seven cars. BMW adds 250,000 spectators and a lap record for sports cars; the name "Baumuster 328", it says, appeared in none of the race reports.

Three prototypes ran that summer: 85001, 85002 and 85003, the last with right-hand drive. At the sports-car Grand Prix at Montlhéry on 28 June all three retired, two with engine-mounting trouble and one with a broken oil pipe. At the Tourist Trophy at Ards on 5 September, run as the Frazer Nash-BMW team, they finished 3rd, 7th and 9th overall and filled the first three places in the two-litre class. BMW 328 Racing History tells those races.⁠source 2​source 9​source 10​source 1​source 6

The 328 was offered for sale in Britain before Germany. At the London Motor Show at Earls Court in October 1936 AFN Ltd showed the prototype 85003, now painted white, with delivery promised early in 1937; Motor Sport thought it "probably the most strikingly displayed" sports car of the show. German buyers first saw the production car at the Berlin Motor Show in February 1937. Jenkinson had dated that show to the autumn of 1936, and a month later printed the correction, on Anthony Blight's evidence.

The Berlin car, chassis 85004, was built to the production specification of the roadster, with doors, a folding screen and the spare wheel in its tail. BMW advertised it as a "powerful everyday car for travel and sport".

Customers waited. BMW says the first cars were not delivered until late April 1937, that the three prototypes went on taking turns to win races in the meantime, and that the 200th car reached its owner in the spring of 1938. The price new in Germany and in Britain is in the specifications; the British price was, Jenkinson wrote of 1938, "slightly more than the price of an average London semidetached house!"⁠source 6​source 8​source 11​source 1​source 12

Every 328 was built at Eisenach. How many were built the sources do not agree, and none says what its total counts: chassis numbers issued, cars completed or cars delivered, or whether the racing cars of 1940 are among them. The specifications lead with BMW's figure, from its archive record, and give the others beside it. Jenkinson gave a reason for caution: the chassis numbers ran to 85464, with some numbers skipped and others used twice.

BMW's 2011 data sheet says most of the cars had the standard roadster body, and that the rest were given racing bodies or bodies built to customers' orders. Production ended with the war. Jenkinson wrote that the car was built at Eisenach "during 1937, 1938 and up to August 1939, when war caused BMW to make other things"; BMW's archive record dates the model 1936 to 1940, and BMW writes that its cars were produced "up to 1940".⁠source 6​source 13​source 1​source 14

Britain is the market abroad that the record covers best. H. J. Aldington's AFN Ltd agreed with BMW at the end of 1934 to sell its cars in Britain, and fitted them with Frazer Nash-BMW badges; Bill Boddy wrote in Aldington's obituary that the BMW reached Isleworth in 1935 under that name. The 328 followed from 1937, with right-hand drive. The Frazer Nash-BMW 328 page tells the British cars' story: how many came, how they differed and what the British press made of them.

Elsewhere the evidence comes car by car. The Simeone Foundation's 1937 roadster, by BMW's factory archives as the museum cites them, was delivered to the Dutch BMW importer in Rotterdam on 13 February 1938, in the ivory white it still wears. And private owners raced 328s across Europe before the war: at Zandvoort in June 1939 three Dutch drivers took the first three places in the two-litre class, and privately run 328s raced in Belgium, Switzerland, Romania and Finland.⁠source 15​source 16​source 17​source 18​source 19​source 9

In Britain the 328's rivals can be priced. Motor Sport printed a buyers' list each October, and in the lists of 1937 and 1938 the Frazer Nash-BMW 328 cost more than the SS 100, the HRG and the Triumph Dolomite, and less than the Aston Martin Speed Model and the Alfa Romeo 6C 2300 B. Its own price is in the specifications.

The SS 100 was the cheap way to the same speed: in August 1939 Motor Sport called the 3½-litre the cheapest car of its pace ever sold off a production line, and turned straight to the BMW.

On the track its class rivals were the Aston Martin Speed Model, Adler's streamlined saloons and, in Italy, the Alfa Romeos, and BMW 328 Racing History sets the results side by side.⁠source 20​source 21​source 22​source 2​source 23

The German press, BMW says, was not told the car was coming, and the race reports of June 1936 praised Henne's drive without naming the car. BMW quotes one of them in translation.

In Britain the early verdicts are Motor Sport's. On AFN's stand at Earls Court in 1936 the car "presents food for thought", because a push-rod engine "developing not excessive power" gave it its speed: "Good output low down and thus an ability to pull a high top-gear ratio is the clue." In October 1937 the magazine judged the Frazer Nash-BMW more a fast touring car than a sports car, and reliable for it; in February 1938 it wrote of "The wonderful Type 328 Frazer-Nash-B.M.W,, possessed of perhaps the highest allround performance in relation to engine capacity of any push-rod production sports-car". In August 1940, in wartime, Cecil Clutton went further: "To Germany it has fallen to build the most advanced of all sports-cars, the B.M.W." The British road tests are on the Frazer Nash-BMW 328 page.⁠source 1​source 11​source 20​source 24​source 25

War ended the works team as well as the car. In German races of 1938 and 1939 several works cars were entered in the name of the NSKK, and BMW itself describes Prince Max zu Schaumburg-Lippe, who drove the coupé at Le Mans in 1939, as "the NSKK (National Socialist Motoring Corps) team's leading driver". "The political situation meant that only a handful of races took place in 1939 and 1940," BMW writes. The last of them for the works cars was the Mille Miglia of 28 April 1940, run on a closed circuit from Brescia; Motor Sport's report that June noted that a German car had won it while Germany was fighting a major war. Early in 1941, BMW says, its racing division was disbanded, and its director, Ernst Loof, and most of his staff were sent by the Luftwaffe to an aero-engine repair shop in Paris.

In Britain AFN lost its supplier. "That the source of supply of this wonderful car is the country with which we are at war is very bad luck on the Aldingtons' part," Motor Sport wrote in November 1940. The works team's last seasons are on BMW 328 Racing History.⁠source 9​source 1​source 3​source 26​source 27​source 28

Eisenach built cars again after the war, saloons like those in the gate photograph above and later EMWs, but no source read records a 328 built there after 1945. The racing cars scattered. In 1945 Aldington brought one of the 1940 Mille Miglia roadsters to England, and BMW's own account has the three roadsters turning up after the war in Russia, England and America. The Touring coupé, BMW says, went to Canada at the end of 1947, and it raced in American events from 1949 to 1952 before BMW acquired it in 2002. The Kamm coupé won once more: Karl Kling drove it to victory at Hockenheim on 11 May 1947, entered by Loof, and it was scrapped after an accident in the early 1950s.

Fritz Fiedler ended the war in Munich, in the American zone, by the Frazer Nash Archives' account, and in 1947 joined AFN, which lent him to Bristol as a consultant on its Type 400. By then Aldington, working with the Bristol Aeroplane Company, had brought BMW's drawings and engines from Munich, and Bristol's first engine on the 328's pattern had run, by its own historians' account, in May 1946. BMW 328 Engine follows it from there.⁠source 17​source 29​source 27​source 9​source 30​source 15​source 4

The 328 had no direct successor. Production stopped with the war, and BMW built its next sports two-seater only in the 1950s.

BMW names one inheritance of its own: the nine-counterweight crankshafts of the 1940 race engines, whose experience, it says, went into the engine of the post-war 501. In Britain the line ran through the engine. The Bristol 400, which began leaving the factory in 1947, used Bristol's development of the 328's six, and Bristol supplied the same engine to the post-war Frazer Nashes, for which, the Frazer Nash Archives say, the 1940 roadster Aldington had brought back was the inspiration. "The post-war Frazer Nash appeared, clearly developed from the 328 model, with engine by Bristol from the original 328 BMW design," Jenkinson wrote. In Germany, as he put it, "many 328 BMWs had been given a new lease of competition life by small tuning establishments, such as AFM and Veritas".⁠source 7​source 1​source 4​source 17​source 12

BMW calls the 328 "the most successful sports car of the 1930s on the racing scene". Its birthdays have been kept since at least 1986, when Jenkinson reported "numerous gatherings" in Germany for its fiftieth. For the 75th, in May 2011, BMW published a long account of the car and unveiled the BMW 328 Hommage at the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este.

At the same Concorso in May 2026 the Best of Show went to the "Bügelfalte": chassis 85032, rebodied in Munich in the autumn of 1939 and 6th in the Mille Miglia of 1940, honoured almost 90 years after Henne's first win.⁠source 1​source 6​source 31​source 3​source 32