It was a long time before I could afford one of these cars, and in the intervening years, I owned lots of other Mercedes-Benzes, including a 450SEL 6.9. But unlike the 6.9, the2.3-16 is a focused driver's car, not just a cushy luxocruiser with a big engine. Compared with the modern Mercedes AMG muscle cars, the old sixteen-valve may be slow, but it's pleasantly devoid of electronic crap. It's more direct, more visceral, and infinitely more fun.
Finding the right 190E 2.3-16 took me six years--Mercedes sold only 1953 of them in the United States, and low-mileage, unmodified examples are practically nonexistent. I bought mine sight unseen while I was on vacation. It was all original, down to the ding-free, 38,000-mile factory paint, but it had been in a little bit of trouble: it turned up at a police auction in Pittsburgh, where it had been confiscated in a narcotics raid and then used by the police in prostitution stings.
I never found out why, but there was ketchup all over the interior, the paint was so dirty that it looked like charcoal, and the car needed a bit of mechanical TLC. But I bought it anyway. It took about a hundred hours of work to get my Benz back to its original splendor, but every time I drive it on a back road, I'm even more certain that it was worth it.
Prostitutes, cops, and ketchup? What an appropriately sordid history for a car that started the long-running German horsepower race--perhaps the biggest automotive barroom brawl of them all. JC
At 7000 rpm, the 2.3-liter four-cylinder in BMW's first-generation M3 screams loud enough to loosen your molars. Even with fresh engine and transmission mounts, tiny buzzes are everywhere; the whole car feels alive and fluid. At idle, a busy valvetrain whirr mixes with exhaust thrumm, and the combined noise floods your head with conflicting images: Machine shops. Construction sites. The pits at Monaco.
It is not, to paraphrase an old slogan, your father's BMW.
It's easy to believe that the 1986-91 BMW M3 was the response, the retort heard 'round the world, the all-encompassing answer to Mercedes' sixteen-valve stonker with the Cosworth heart of gold. But it wasn't, no matter how convenient the timing. The one-and-only four-cylinder M3 was conceived not in response to Mercedes' homologation special but as a carefully tailored, balls-to-the-wall reply to a rulebook. ...next page >>