Frazer Nash/BMW 319

[dean1057]

Great write up and story Jeremy, I love anything like this.
Keep the info coming.

[jeremyg]

Great write up and story Jeremy, I love anything like this.
Keep the info coming.

So we arrived back from Germany on the Thursday before Easter, and the transporter driver Nick Bagnall said he’d try and deliver the Frazer Nash/BMW to our house on the next Tuesday.

A shout out here to the transport company MyCarImport who are based at Castle Donington and their driver Nick Bagnall.



As soon as we knew we’d need to be in Germany the next week I’d googled around to find a company to get the car home and through customs, and up came MyCarImport. I phoned them and asked if they could meet me and pick up this special old car next Wednesday in Greven, North Germany, expecting a lot of sucking of teeth, but Steven the office guy said ‘Yes. I’m pretty confident we can do that’.

They gave me the driver’s name Nick Bagnall, and within hours of calling Steven I got a phone call from Nick from St Tropez, introducing himself. This gave me huge confidence. Nick criss crosses Europe, picking up and dropping off cool cars all over the place. Once you’ve loaded all the car details on to the MyCarImport portal, they take care of everything, picking up, taking through customs, doing all the paperwork, storing if necessary and delivering to your door.

And to track the transporter, you get a live link, and as I found out, constant calls and updates from Nick on the road so you can pinpoint to the minute his arrival time. And of course you can track your vehicle once loaded and on through customs etc..




And this is Nick as he turned his transporter off the main road to come up to deliver the Frazer Nash to our house. I’d recommend MyCarImport to anyone!

[jeremyg]

The customs process had apparently gone without a hitch, and the only time plans had to be altered was when Nick found that, as anticipated, the big transporter wouldn’t fit through our gates.






He’d wanted to bring it on a smaller transporter, but he’d had a number of late orders for other cars to collect so on arrival he pulled up in the road and we unloaded the Frazer Nash BMW straight into the road and pushed it up the drive.





And there she was. Repatriated.




Back home in the UK, after some 50 years away, getting a loving and faithful restoration in the hands of Wolfgang Schründher, a great BMW collector and restorer, the man who’d always thought he’d return her to the UK, but sadly didn’t live to see the process through. I certainly wish that I’d met him..

[neilbardsley]

Yes nice (and the house too)

Sent from my 22011119UY using Tapatalk

[jeremyg]

But of course the car still wasn’t registered with its original number. And having the original number was really important to me for so many reasons.




I wanted to buy back this car because it was my father’s. All the pictures of the car that I have show it as ASC131 - and the number is tied to the chassis number which ends in 131.




And ASC is a Scottish number - and that’s where the car started its journey, in Scotland in the ownership of actor and car enthusiast Elliot Playfair. And one of the best pictures of is when he hill climbed it at Bo’Ness in 1938.

Even the advertisement from which my father bought the car shows that it’s surely the Frazer Nash/BNW with the ASC number.




I’d also discovered that after my father owned it, ASC131 went into the ownership of the influential Editor of Motor Magazine, Charles Bulmer.
He changed the colour scheme slightly, painting the top of the bonnet black, but it retained the all important reg number.


And of course the number also confirms the competition history of the car - shown here competing in the Exeter Trial.

To get the number we had to get the recommendation of Mark Garfitt, Technical Officer of the BMW Historic Owners Club and one of the most active and knowledgable owners of a 319 Type 55.




Mark came to check over the car, together with Frazer Nash archivist Mike Sythes (who’d first told me that the car was in Germany), and I was a little nervous lest there should be unanticipated discrepancies of some type. They went all through it, every aspect. They were lovely, and even adjusted the clutch for us!






Mark then sat and filled in his recommendation that he’d passed the vehicle in his section on the DVLA form C765 - Application to Register a Vehicle Under its Original Registration Number. And we were then one step closer.



We could also supply additional authenticated evidence, and that for me was to become one of the most intriguing parts of the whole process.

[sladey]

Looking forward to hearing it run