C676 XDX
1985 BMW 528i
Bought: April 2002 for £650, 149,000 miles
Sold: July 2002 for £900, 154,000 miles

Most folks buy a (new) BMW to make a statement about image, but when the age of the car hits double figures, the statement it makes for the owner isn't quite so great. Drug dealer is the usual one (although if you're a dealer and you're smoking about in a 20 year old Beemer, you're obviously not making enough profit). As a result, these beautiful pieces of quality German engineering are no longer being kept in the manner they are accustomed (mind you, as a BMW dealer charges £85 just to clean your windscreen, it's fair enough). Most owners pick one up for a song, drop the suspension, put on big wheels and a bodykit, chrome the wheelarches, fit the biggest stereo they can, then go cruising. Voila! A straight-six ghettoblaster. Until a relatively minor (but essential) widget packs up that you can only buy from BMW for £867, so they scrap it and start again.

So it's important to avoid one that's had "the rude boy treatment", but good cars are getting hard to find. I was lucky enough to get this one from an enthusiast in Bristol via the BMW Car Club website. A full service history, almost everything working and no major rust clinched the deal.

This was a seriously fun motor. With 184bhp on tap and a manual gearbox, car magazines of the time reckoned on just over 7 seconds to 60mph and then on to a top speed of 135mph. I don't know about that but I do know that at traffic lights it would see off most things in a huge cloud of tyre smoke. This hilarity lasted for about a week until I realised that a 528i will only do 25mpg if you drive it really gently (15mpg if you nail it) and tyres for the original metric wheels cost about £180 each. Whoops.

While it was great fun to drive in the dry, I was better off taking the bus in the wet, because the car wouldn't travel in a straight line for more than 30 seconds. Rear wheel drive can be fun, but not when the car is facing oncoming traffic on a motorway slip road. No wonder the seats were brown - so were my trousers after that episode.

Still, everyone loved it, as you could get five people in it comfortably, it had electric everything, the engine sounded gorgeous, and best of all a previous owner had fitted an airhorn that sounded just like the one on that Lamborghini from The Cannonball Run. Awesome.

In the end, because I got a job in the Channel Islands, I had to sell it. A bloke from New Zealand bit my arm off (and bought the car), and every so often rings me up to tell me how well it's going. Why oh why did I sell it?

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