Let’s start with the picture, which is certainly worth this article’s 1878 words.
(Photograph copyright Hubert Schriebl, all rights reserved)
To answer the questions many of you are asking:
- The bride probably weights a hundred pounds soaking wet.
- No, I didn’t.
- No, I haven’t.
- Yes, in a New York minute. I mean, look at their faces.
Let me back up. I’ve known my friend John since high school, and his wife, Elizabeth, since college. They are my most special friends. We and Maire Anne were all at UMass Amherst together. For those of you who have read my first book or seen one of my presentations, in the photo where there are four people standing in front of “the band bus” (the blue half-size International school bus I maintained for the band I was in), John and Elizabeth are the two standing on the left. A few years later, I was best man at their wedding, then John was best man when I married Maire Anne.
So, yeah. Those kinds of friends.
(For extra credit, on my left is my friend Chris, who, about five years ago, called me up out of the blue and said, “Rob! I just wound up with a 1992 Mercedes wagon for next to nothing, and drove it at 85 on the highway, and now I understand the whole German car thing!” But that’s another story.)
John and Elizabeth’s oldest daughter Jess was engaged to marry her beau, Lincoln. I’d been told that both Lincoln and his parents are BMW people and CCA members, with the requisite stack of Roundels in their bathrooms. When Maire Anne and I began planning to go to Lincoln’s and Jess’ wedding in south-central Vermont, the three-hour drive, combined with Lincoln’s BMW interest, conspired to have us take a “fun” car.
It was clearly the 3.0CSi’s turn.
It had seen very little road time since the Great Drenching Event of 2013, when I drove it to the Vintage in Winston-Salem, and during the 800-mile trek, hit 500 miles of torrential, unrelenting rain. One tries to keep vintage cars dry, especially cars like an E9 that rust if you so much as look at them with a moist thought on your mind. A little rain is one thing, but that much soaking used up my entire 30-year allocation of road-trip moisture in one whack. Ever since, I’ve been afraid to drive the car to any event where the distance and the duration make it so that I can’t rely on the weather forecast.
As the wedding approached, so did Tropical Storm Hermine, which made the forecast uncertain—but in the morning, it looked like, at worst, the drive back might be cloudy and windy. So I loaded up the E9’s trunk with a minimal but appropriate number of tools (meaning floor jack, jack stands, and a plastic bin into which I threw the multimeter, assorted wires and connectors, a crimping tool, a half-inch ratchet wrench and sockets, a quarter-inch ratchet wrench and sockets, 8-mm, 10-mm, 13-mm, 14-mm, 17-mm, and 19-mm box-end wrenches, screwdrivers, Vise Grips, belts, a spare fuel pump: actually, quite a bit less than the full-on assortment for an assault on the Vintage), and under flawless September skies, we headed north.
The only hiccups on the drive had to do with a few minor electrical issues. I noticed that the directionals and wipers weren’t working. And things plugged into the cigarette lighter socket didn’t work, either. Maire Anne looked inside the lighter socket and said, to my surprise, “There’s a dime in there.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s a dime in the lighter socket.”
“You mean there’s a piece of metal the size of a dime?”
“No,” she said. “It’s an actual Roosevelt dime.”
“Are you sure?”
We then argued, to the extent that we ever argue about anything, about why I didn’t believe her that there was a dime in the lighter socket, with me pleading—in vain—that it was a reasonable question for me to ask, because there are little round pieces of metal, like the plugs knocked out of electrical outlet boxes you see littering construction sites, lying about in the universe that could be mistaken for mintage. It was a losing argument. I gave up just in time. She forgave me. We have a very good marriage.
Pro tip: Next time your wife says, “There’s a dime in the cigarette lighter,” believe her.
We drove until the batteries ran down in both the GPS and my cell phone, at which point we really needed the cigarette lighter socket in order to get to the wedding (ah, our reliance on things digital!). When we stopped, I was about to pull the fuse for the lighter socket when I noticed that it was already blown. Oh, I thought, that makes sense—the dime in the socket already shorted and blew the fuse. Might was well just reach in there and yank the dime out.
I tried to pry it out with a screwdriver, and quickly learned that, in fact, the fuse that blew was not the lighter fuse; it was the fuse for the directionals and wipers. How did I know? Well, the smoke and sizzle that emanated from the lighter socket when I stuck the metal screwdriver in and tried to pry out the dime were pretty good clues. Should’ve listened to that Reagan fellow—trust yet verify and all. (Seriously, this was stupid, I was lucky, and my cred as author of an electrical book is in serious jeopardy.)
With the lighter, directionals, and wipers all magically repaired by the removal of one dime and the insertion of one fuse, we were back on the road. We arrived at the hotel in Manchester Vermont, but got a late start to the wedding due to a comedy of events including us following Elizabeth’s brother, who, it turned out, did not actually know the way.
The wedding was at Lincoln’s parents’ house. We were the last to arrive. John glowered at me from where he and Elizabeth prepared to walk Jess down the mowed aisle through the field and said, mostly good-naturedly, “We’re waiting for you!” Ah, what are old friends for, right?
We parked the beautiful red E9 along with the other cars in a fenced-in horse corral, then walked the 200 yards or so to where the ceremony was being held in a mowed area on an upward slope in the corner of the property where a small stage had been constructed so the wedding party could stand on a level surface. I realized that, from that elevated vantage point, our late arrival in the red E9 and our slow trek across the field were both painfully obvious.
A few minutes later, the wedding party walked out. It was a lovely elemental ceremony. The bride was almost electrifying in her beauty, Lincoln absolutely beaming.
In a short window of availability before the wedding party was whisked away for photographs, I caught Lincoln’s ear. “There’s a red 3.0CSi in the field with the keys in it,” I said.
“I know,” he laughed. “I saw it. It was pretty obvious.”
He initially didn’t understand what I was trying to tell him. “I left the key in it for you,” I said. “If you and Jess want to use the car for a photo shoot, or if you just want to take it for a drive, go ahead. I know you’re going to be insanely busy, so I don’t think you’ll take me up on this offer, but it is a real offer nonetheless.” Lincoln smiled just as he and Jess were waylaid for wedding pictures.
As Maire Anne and I walked back to the barn where the reception was, I noticed that there was a red E30 in the parking area, with the plate YETI” I wondered whose it was. I didn’t think it was Lincoln’s; I recalled him driving an E46 ZHP.
About an hour later, Lincoln found me. “Jess and I would like to take you up on your gracious offer,” he said. “Do you mind if we take the car a little way up the road to do a shoot with the photographer?”
“I wish you would,” I said. “I can’t wait to see the way Jess’ white lace looks against the Signal Red paint.”
I think he took me a little too literally, but I didn’t know that at the time.
Lincoln returned the key to me about 30 minutes later, still beaming, telling me that he did take it up to 4,000 rpm once just to hear the M30 sing, and effusively thanking me. I made him promise to send me pictures.
The rest of the reception was delightful; hanging out with our old friends John and Elizabeth and their family, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, was a joy that reminded us of the important things in life.
The next morning, the forecast of clouds and wind from Tropical Storm Hermine proved inaccurate; Maire Anne and I drove the E9 home through near-flawless September weather. A few days later, the photographer sent me the photo above. That’s the photographer’s cropped version, highlighting the happy couple. Here is the uncropped one, which, in terms of showing both the people and the car, I like even more. Jess’ feet off the ground make her look even more swept away:
(Photograph copyright Hubert Schriebl, all rights reserved)
I later learned that the photographer, Hubert Schriebl, is the guy who owns the E30 with the YETI plate, and has another E30 as well. So he’s one of the tribe. I’m glad that he went for the shot, and I’m sure he carefully assessed the risk to the car.
In truth, a few days after we got back, I did look at the paint. It’s fine. There is nothing I can see in the fenders or hood that strikes me as new or stands out in any way.
But even if there were, it wouldn’t really change anything. The E9 is far from flawless. It’s a driver. It was painted 28 years ago. It looks great when the sun hits it, but the paint has any number of small chips in it. It’s a car. It’s a thing—and an imperfect thing at that. I love the car, but it doesn’t smile at me the way the kids in the photo do.
How cool is it that, with so much history with me and Jess’ parents, and with Lincoln and his family being longtime BMW fans, that my car got to play with them like this?
In a New York minute.—Rob Siegel
Rob’s first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and his new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, are available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, ECS Tuning, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.
