BEHIND CLOSED JOORS

A new book gets unfiltered access to BMW Design’s cutting room floor. These are the projects that could have been...

- STEPHEN DOBIE

"A FULL-FAT DRIVING EXPERIENCE AS A GATEWAY TO BRING YOUNGER BUYERS INTO THE BMW WORLD."

It’s quite a billing, and a production version of the BMW 2K2 could have been quite the car. The idea is deliciously simple, however closely it nudges tweeness: rekindling the 2002, arguably BMW’s most revered classic, for the year 2002. A cheaper, lither car to provide an entry point into propellor-badged ownership but without skimping on thrills.

“The car would weigh under 1,000kg and provide BMW performance for a fresh audience,” muses Steve Saxty, author of the new BMW Behind the Scenes book trilogy and one of only a tiny handful of people to see the 2K2 up close since its late Nineties tour of the BMW board. “There’d be no radio, the idea being that its owners would only stick a different one in anyway. Save cost for the customer so you can give them all the guts of an E46 3-Series coupe in a simpler package.”

It sounds an utter riot, and so it proved in testing. Yes, the silver car in the top left of the opposite page is a fully running prototype, not a smartly sliced piece of clay capable of trundling no quicker than walking pace. Designer Ralf Langmeier, a crucial player in the 2K2 story and now a senior figure at Rolls-Royce, remembers testing it at BMW’s Aschheim test track. “We all sat there, with fire extinguishers in our laps, and off we went, benchmarking it against a high torque BMW 330 diesel. The 2K2 had a lowered differential ratio, so it really took off and it beat the 3-Series right up to 180kph [112mph].”