After all, BMW fans have always known this. The M3 is not the only version of the 3 Series E30 capable of putting a smile on the face of those who get behind the wheel in search of strong emotions. To have fun, and even a lot, you can easily “settle” with less noble 320iS, which also costs less. Equipped with a gritty two-liter four-cylinder with 192 HP electronic injection belonging to the BMW S14 engine family, which also included the M3 engine, it reaches 230 km / h and burns 0-100 in less than eight seconds. Numbers that, at the turn of the 80s and 90s, made it a bad customer even for sports cars with decidedly higher displacements and powers.
BMW put it on its price lists in the late 1980s, after that Italy and Portugal introduced a tax that penalized cars with engines of more than two liters. The propeller house bypassed the problem by achieving a total displacement of 1990 cc. We now come to the two-door model from 1990 that you see in the photographs accompanying the article. Imported to Canada from the United States, sports an elegant Diamond Schwarz livery and is equipped with the prized Kit estetico 1000 Tech 2. As soon as it arrived in Canada, the car underwent a meticulous restoration, with the replacement of many wear parts.
The car is now on sale in anonline auction on eBay which will end tomorrow evening. In the vehicle description, the seller specifies that the car has traveled 175,000 kilometers and which is almost completely original. A not insignificant aspect from a collector’s point of view and above all not obvious for a model that often gladly ended up in the hands of owners eager for even greater performance and, therefore, inclined to put their hands under the hood to squeeze a few more horsepower from the engine. The Bilstein springs and shock absorbers are not original and the stock exhaust has been replaced with a Supersprint system. The provisional offer is just over 25,000, but it is safe to bet that a fight to the upside will begin in the next few hours. From 1987 to 1990, BMW produced only 2,540 two-door 320 iS units, to which are added 1205 with four-door sedan body. Paradoxically, we are faced with a much rarer car than the M3, which in the E30 version was built in almost 19,000 units.
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