In 1984, as Maire Anne and I began preparing to leave our stint in Austin and return home to Boston to get married, I began looking for a big-bumpered 2002 that would survive Boston’s demolition-derby traffic. I found a rust-free air-conditioned ’75 and christened it Bertha, as with those bumpers, it was anything but dainty. Bertha came back to Boston with us that August. On Labor Day Weekend, Maire Anne and I drove the shaving-cream-and-tin-cans-adorned 2002 off from our wedding.
Bertha in her nuptial duds.
Bertha was my daily driver for my first few years back in Boston, but I gradually transformed it into a drivers-school-capable vehicle with just about every go-fast part that was sold new through Roundel magazine and available used through the local publication The WantADvertiser. I found a rotted ’71 dual-Weber-equipped 2002ti parts car, rebuilt its engine with 10:1 pistons and an Iskendarian 300-degree cam, and swapped it into Bertha, along with the ti struts, big calipers, and brake booster (the same as in the tii). A Koni suspension went in, as did a Getrag 245 5-speed, an ultra-rare Metric Mechanic bracket to hold it in place, Recaro front and rear seats in that “orange Spectrum” fabric, an Alpine/ADS sound system, Cibie Oscar driving lights, even a Wink mirror. In addition to the car doing track duty, Maire Anne and I took it on a last pre-children road trip up to Nova Scotia in the fall of 1987. I have great memories of driving it on the twisty roller-coaster road that runs along Cape Breton.
Bertha on the Digby ferry.
“I’m lookin’ at the world through a windshield.” (actually out the side window)
In 1988, my good friend Alex was getting married, and was readying his 2002 so he and his soon-to-be-bride could take a big western road trip in it to national parks. When his car didn’t look like it would be ready in time, I offered to loan them Bertha as a wedding present. Alex didn’t think it was necessary, but Heidi gently prodded him to take the car, as it had air conditioning. They did, and loved using it so much that they joked about not wanting to give it back.
The combination of my starting a family, wanting to keep Bertha off the road in the winter, and also owning my ’73 E9 3.0CSi made me make the difficult decision to offer the car to Alex. It took a while, but the loan evolved into a purchase. Unfortunately, it proved to be a dark turn in the car’s fortunes. Due to construction on Alex’s house, he needed to park the car on Boston streets. It got stolen, recovered, and stolen again. When it was recovered a second time, it ran horribly, with Alex suspecting engine damage. He rolled it into his neighbor’s garage. Time did what time does, and the car sat there for 26 years.
I’d regularly ask Alex if he’d sell it back to me, but unfinished projects can be painful for people, and whenever I’d raise the issue, it seemed like I was stabbing him. But in 2018, he decided that it was time. Foolishly on my part, we came to an agreement without me looking at it. When I opened up his neighbor’s garage door, I came face-to-face with this:
Yikes! (The unusual patina on the hood turned out to be due to batts of insulation that had fallen onto it and were a vector for humidity coming off a nearby pond.)
Undeterred, I began extracting the car from its tomb. An extra-degree-of-difficulty factor was that the garage was an unusual rear-facing door in the basement of his neighbor’s house, the driveway access to which had been cut off in the intervening 26 years by a fence. So the only way to get the car out was to get it running and drive it into the backyard and then up the narrow gap between it and Alex’s house. I spent a week going over there every day, cleaning the fuel system, getting the damaged engine to run on three cylinders, and making the clutch hydraulics functional. The video of me driving the car out can be seen here.
You see the problem.
But just because I got the car running well enough to drag its sorry ass out of the yard doesn’t mean that it didn’t still need everything. I pulled the head off and replaced the damaged valve, refreshed the brakes and cooling system, and gave the driveshaft a new giubo and center support bearing. A noisy differential was swapped out for one of unknown provenance that had been sitting in my backyard for 30 years. As the car no longer needed to do commuting-traffic duties, I even gave it a facelift in the form of a small-bumper conversion. And with an eye to driving the car down to The Vintage in Asheville in 2019, I revived the long-dead air conditioning (I’d already installed a Sanden rotary-style compressor back in 1985, but for the R134a retrofit, it still needed the big parallel-flow condenser and hard-blowing Spal fan).
In May 2019, the car made it down to The Vintage and back. What’s more, it received the full-gonzo-Paul-Wegweiser treatment, adorned with bananas, Mardi Gras beads, window decals, and a gorilla mask staring up at me from the console.
What? If someone leaves a gorilla mask in your ratty 2002, you’re NOT going to wear it when you drive onto The Vintage event field in Hot Sprints? (photo by Brad Day)
I wrote about all this—the car’s history, its long dormancy, its resurrection, the trip to and from The Vintage—in a series of BimmerLife pieces, and then in my book Resurrecting Bertha. At the end of the book, I cheerfully concluded “I then drove Bertha out to Fitchburg [where I used to store cars], and was instantly reminded how dangerously fun the car is when she’s not hauling 500 pounds of tools and books. Part of Bertha’s ethos and my emotional bond with the car is that she can’t be Jessie from Toy Story—abandoned, locked away for decades, then rescued but still terrified of being put back into storage. As I parked Bertha in one of the garage spaces in Fitchburg and rolled the door down, I decided to quit worrying about it. She’ll never be abandoned again. I know that now. She’s just too much fun. This is not a car that made it home from The Vintage by the skin of its teeth. This is a car that’s at the beginning of her new adventures.”
So… about that.
Bertha (left, obviously) post-Vintage in storage in Fitchburg.
There’s a wonderful scene in Field of Dreams where Kevin Costner is talking with Burt Lancaster (“Moonlight Graham”). Reflecting on his only inning as a professional ball player, Graham says “Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.” The “new adventures” in Bertha never materialized. Maire Anne and I talked about recreating our trip to Cape Breton, but we never did. I drove the car back and forth to Fitchburg a few times as part of the regular exercise/swap routine, but on one of the trips, it died due to a fuel delivery issue. I wrote about it in the December 2019 Roundel column “Bertha Throws a Hissy Fit.” Having owned over 40 2002s, it was the only time I’ve ever had one die and had to have it towed home (I’ll freely admit that the combination of falling dark and cold, not having a spare electric fuel pump with me, and dwindling charge on my cell phone tipped the decision toward making the call while it still had the juice). Replacing the pump seemed to fix it, but when I exercised the car while it was out at Fitchburg, it happened again. I replaced the pressure regulator that sits between the Weber 40DCOEs, and that seemed to sate it. I lost the Fitchburg spaces and the car came back to Newton in late 2021 while I scrambled to find other storage. It went out to the new storage in Monson MA in early 2022.
Left to right: Me, Alex briefly with Bertha, and my Vintage and MidAmerica 02Fest road trip companion Bob Sawtelle as we prepare to float the armada out to Monson. Photo by Maire Anne Diamond, who drove the clownshoe.
I think Alex was enjoying himself.
Bertha settles in for the nap in her new digs.
To be clear, I didn’t abandon Bertha in the Monson warehouse. The car was always registered, insured, and inspected, and I exercised it regularly, as I did with all the cars there when I went out there to swap one. But once it was out there, it never came back home. She had become Jessie in Toy Story. And during one of those 20-minute keep-it-exercised runs down to the Connecticut border and back last year, the car ran poorly, feeling like it either still had a fuel restriction issue or was running on less than four cylinders. And then, when I was out there last spring, I noticed that the brake fluid level was down to the take-off point for the clutch master, indicating that there was a leak in the clutch hydraulics.
Sigh.
On the one hand, I tell people not to read too much into my selling the Bavaria, selling the Euro 635CSi, and winding down my Roundel column. I’m fine. I’m not sick or dying and looking to “simplify my estate” for my “heirs” (which I put in imaged air quotes because I think of “estates” and “heirs” as things that rich people have). But as I’m entering my Wheatina-and-prune-eating years, I am more cognizant of limits, be they time, space, money, or physical activity. If I’m not driving cars, maybe it’s time to sell them. That’s what happened with the Bavaria and Sharkie, and I don’t regret moving them on. Perhaps it’s time to do that with Bertha.
So, last week, I ran the Lotus Europa out to Monson, and in a replay of what I did with the 3.0CSi before abandoning a road trip in it, filled up Bertha’s brake fluid reservoir, stomped on the pedal hard a dozen times, didn’t see any fluid loss in the reservoir or any on the ground, jump-started the car (its battery was completely flatlined from sitting), took it for a short drive while pounding on the pedal, still didn’t see any fluid loss, and elected to go for it. Well, sort of—I elected to drive to the nearest Walmart to replace the battery (the 2002ti braking system means that it takes one of those tiny group 26R batteries, which Walmart mercifully sells for $78). The brakes and clutch felt fine, and once the car was warmed up, I felt none of the ignition or fuel restriction issues that concerned me during a recent exercise drive. So then I went for it. And the car seemed quite happy doing so. Well, other than no heat, no blower fan, the heater box leaking cold air past the flaps, a loud rumble on both turning and slowing down that could just be the exhaust but could also be a bad rear end, and really disconcerting detent-like feeling in the steering on taking tight left turns. But still very much Bertha—fast, loud, snotty, and proud.
Yup. Happy. Hand-painted roundel/banana courtesy of Paul Wegweiser. Why? Because insanity, creativity, and friendship are beautiful things.
So she’s back, offsetting the presence of the shiny red E9 and Lotus Elan +2 in the garage and bringing down the property values. I have more history with this car than any other I own, and I owe it some attention. We’ll see whether that manifests itself as repairs and deep-into-winter unsalted-road driving, or I decide that finding another owner is a better destiny for the car. But Bertha-whose-middle-name-must-be-Jessie will be happy that I’m playing with her again.
Like Jessie, Bertha sure looks happy to be out of the attic.
—Rob Siegel
