Notable BMW 328s

Three cars made up the 328's first season. After the Tourist Trophy of September 1936, Denis Jenkinson wrote, 85001 and 85002 went back to Munich as works cars and 85003 went to AFN at Isleworth, the importer of the Frazer Nash-BMW 328.

85001 carried Ernst Henne to the 328's first win, at the Nürburgring on 14 June 1936, and a fortnight later Henne and Kohlrausch retired it at Montlhéry. H. J. Aldington had it for a race at Munich in August, B. Bira drove it to 7th place at Ards, and after Henne crashed it at the 1937 Eifelrennen it went to Donington, where Aldington finished 8th in it in the 1937 Tourist Trophy.

85002 ran at Montlhéry for Fritz Roth and Kautz and retired. At Ards it was Fane's car, 3rd overall and the two-litre class winner, and on 13 June 1937 he won the Eifelrennen's unsupercharged two-litre race in it, entered by BMW. In the Tourist Trophy that September its back axle broke.

85003 retired at Montlhéry with Aldington and Fane and finished 9th at Ards with Aldington. AFN showed it, white by then, at Earls Court that October, and in April 1937 it was the car S. C. H. Davis drove for an hour at Brooklands. Richard Seaman raced it to 21st in the 1938 Tourist Trophy, and Aldington retired it at Hamburg on 7 May 1939; he entered it for the Eifelrennen a fortnight later, but it did not arrive.⁠source 1​source 2​source 4​source 5

Le Mans in June 1937 drew three 328s. BMW entered 85031 for Fritz Roth and Uli Richter, AFN a second works car for Aldington and Fane, and David Murray his own Frazer Nash-BMW, 85035, for himself and Pat Fairfield. 85031 and Murray's car were both caught in the multiple accident on lap 8 in which Fairfield was killed; Roth escaped. Aldington and Fane went out after 43 laps with trouble in the timing gear. Bira then took 85031 to 3rd place and the two-litre class win in the 1937 Tourist Trophy, entered by AFN; Richter and Werneck drove it to 11th in the 1938 Mille Miglia, and Bira raced it again in the 1938 Tourist Trophy, finishing 22nd. Racingsportscars gives no chassis for the two works roadsters that finished 7th and 9th at Le Mans in 1939.

In Germany the NSKK entered several 328s at Hamburg in 1938 and 1939, and racingsportscars gives chassis numbers for these and for other cars raced in 1937–39:⁠source 6​source 7​source 8​source 9​source 1​source 2

Two sources give one chassis number to two cars in this register. Racingsportscars gives 85032 to the car Fane drove to 8th place and the two-litre class win in the 1938 Mille Miglia, with W. James beside him, a standard-bodied works car entered in Frazer Nash's name; it gives the same number to the roadster Hans Wencher and Scholtz drove to 6th in 1940. BMW's own account of the rebuild, quoted on BMW 328 Mille Miglia, agrees. That roadster is the Bügelfalte, and the same page tells how it was made.

It now belongs to a private owner in Italy. At the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este on 17 May 2026 it won Class B, "Future Couture: Dressed For Speed, 1928-1939", and then the Trofeo BMW Group as Best of Show; BMW's list of results dates it 1937.⁠source 1​source 9​source 10​source 11​source 12​source 13

Besides the two coupés and 85032, BMW's team at Brescia on 28 April 1940 had two more roadsters, whose story, and the claims about which BMW keeps and which went to England in 1945, are on BMW 328 Mille Miglia. Racingsportscars' chassis column has one of them, 85464, winning the sports-car race for cars of up to 2.5 litres at Croft on 9 September 1950, and racing at Charterhall in May 1952.⁠source 12​source 1

The Kamm coupé carries the number 85287 in racingsportscars' results: with a question mark for the 1940 Mille Miglia, where Count Giovanni Lurani and Franco Cortese retired it, and without one at Hockenheim on 11 May 1947, Karl Kling's win for Ernst Loof. What became of the car, and BMW Classic's reconstruction of 2010, are on BMW 328 Mille Miglia.⁠source 1​source 12​source 14

Chassis 85368, under Carrozzeria Touring's body number 2312, is the one car in this register with a page of its own: the Touring coupé's page tells its races and its years in North America.⁠source 3

BMW Classic's data sheet dates this Touring-bodied roadster's chassis to 1937 and its body to 1941. The war, BMW wrote, ended all further motor sport with German entries, and the sheet names no driver for the car.⁠source 15

Several of the numbered cars raced again after 1945, most of them in Germany. Racingsportscars first gives 85073 to Alex von Falkenhausen at Hamburg in 1939, with a question mark, and then without one from 1946: it is the car of his wins in the sports-car class for 1.5 litres in 1947, at Hockenheim on 11 May, the day of Kling's win in the Kamm coupé, and at Hamburg on 31 August. Paul Greifzu took 85052, the car he had raced since 1937, to 5th place at Dessau on 4 September 1949, and Walter Schlüter raced 85132 into the same year, when Huschke von Hanstein also drove it, at Cologne in October, and retired.

Farther afield, 85136 is the car in which Frank Pratt won the 1948 Australian Grand Prix at Point Cook, entered as L. F. Pratt, and the Touring coupé raced in the United States from 1949.⁠source 1​source 7

In 2011 BMW Classic had five 328s of its own and wrote a data sheet for each: a standard roadster built in 1937, a Mille Miglia roadster, the Touring coupé, the Berlin–Rome roadster and the reconstruction of the Kamm coupé.

The Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum in Philadelphia shows the 1937 roadster whose delivery to the Netherlands in 1938 the history records. By the museum's account it spent the war hidden under hay in a farmyard, and it is shown unrestored, with about 16,000 km (10,000 miles) on it. Other 328s were on show at the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, in March 2025 and at automobile welt eisenach in January 2017.⁠source 16​source 17​source 18​source 15​source 19​source 20