Two weekends ago was Indigenous Peoples Weekend here in Massachusetts and in Vermont, and that allowed Maire Anne and I to engage in one of our most treasured activities—an annual visit to Manchester, Vermont to see our dear friends Jon and Eileen. I worked with Jon for over 20 years in my engineering job doing unexploded ordnance detection, and Maire Anne and I played in a band with him for even longer. Whenever we see them, it’s a weekend of food, wine, scotch, music, and Vermont fall festivities.
Of course, it’s also an opportunity to let one of the fun cars have a mini road trip. The 300-mile round-trip to Manchester is a small sliver of the mileage to and from The Vintage in Asheville, and the radius on my towing policy is big enough that, if anything breaks on the car, I can just get it flat-bedded home, so the preparation and packing don’t need to reach anywhere near the level of insanity that it does for The Vintage.
So really, the only question was: Which car do we take this year? In the past, the Bavaria, the E9, Sharkie, and Hampton have all made the run up to Manchester. Who would get the nod in 2026?
As it happened, this year my garage was full of red cars. The ’73 3.0CSi is always there in the garage; I never keep it in my outlying storage in Monson. Likewise, the ’69 Lotus Elan +2 that I bought two years ago is still very much the apple of my eye, and like the E9, hasn’t had a stint in storage like the other cars. But the third garage space was temporarily occupied by the FrankenThirty, my salvage-titled back 2/3 of a 1988 325is and front 1/3 and motor from an ’87 325e. The FrankenThirty had a triumphant drive to The Vintage in 2025, but had seen little use since. I’d brought it back from Monson in July to have it around as the knock-around park-it-anywhere-but-also-air-conditioned classic that it is.
It was a sea of red in the garage when I was fixing the FrankenThirty’s horn a few weeks ago.
Really, it wasn’t a difficult choice—it was driven by the weather. If zero rain was predicted, the nod would go to the E9, as it’s always a joy to let her strut her stuff. If the weather was just a bit iffy, I’d relish taking the Lotus Elan +2 on its first sort-of road trip and thumbing my nose at the Lucas gods. But if biblical levels of rain were going to be served up, I’d let the FrankenThirty take the soaking.
As the weekend approached, it looked rainy enough that the E9 was off the table. I really wanted to take the Elan +2, but I needed to be honest with myself that, despite my having largely sorted out its quirks, the drive wasn’t quite inside the 300-miles-with-Maire-Anne-in-the-car envelope, even considering my Hagerty 250-mile towing radius. After all, a breakdown would still throw a wrench—ha!—into the weekend. Plus, my darling incredibly tolerant wife has said that the Elan isn’t an easy car for her to get in and out of, and the throaty exhaust and the smell of oil and unburned hydrocarbons aren’t exactly her cup of tea.
So, the FrankenThirty it was.
The E9 and the Elan +2 definitely presented the meatier posteriors, but it was the square-butted E30 that stepped up to the plate.
I write a lot about “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a car, particularly a vintage car, on a road trip (fuel delivery, ignition, charging, cooling, belts, clutch hydraulics, and you should check your ball joints because you lose control of the car if they break). When I bought the FrankenThirty two years ago, I did a budget sort-out—timing belt, water pump and hoses, a used radiator without fan smush marks, belts, and changing the fuel filter and any cracked fuel lines, but didn’t replace things that weren’t broken. The only issue I had on the 2000-mile trip to The Vintage was higher-than-expected oil consumption, like a quart every 500 miles. Fortunately, the oil level sensor and the indicator light on the service panel work flawlessly, coming on when the level is just above the lower mark on the dipstick. The low-coolant light also comes on, but it’s flakey, so I’ve trained myself to pay attention to the former, ignore the latter, and watch the temperature gauge as I do on every BMW I’ve ever owned.
Since The Vintage, the only real work I’d done on the E30 was replacing the alternator. But because the drive to Manchester is short, I simply topped off the oil, checked the belt tension, crawled under it, verified that I saw no coolant leaks, threw a quart bottle plus a spare fan belt and a crank sensor into the trunk, and called it good enough. No floor jack, no jack stands, no gallon of antifreeze. (I did bring one unusual yet crucial part. When I resurrected the car, the top of the hose from the reservoir to the clutch master cylinder was split and leaking, so I cut it off and spliced in a short section using a 1/4-inch 90-degree barbed plastic fitting. Just in case it broke, I brought a spare and a pint of brake fluid.)
I did, though, have one concern. When I bought the FrankenThirty, in addition to misjudging the salvage-car issue, I missed the fact that the cowl, fan, and heater box were packed with mouse nests. I did a pretty thorough cleaning (I removed the heater and evaporator cores and cleaned the heater box in situ without removing it, and pulled the fan and cleaned the cowl area), but Maire Anne has an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell, and to state the obvious, I didn’t want to put her in a car for three hours if it made her gag. I raised this to her prior to the trip, and she left the matter to my judgement. Oh the pressure! While test-driving the car, I found that there was no smell with the vents open, and just the smallest hint of eau de rodent with the a/c on, but with the heat on, it was pretty noticeable. I took the car for a 40-ish mile drive with the heat blasting and the windows down to try to cook off whatever was bringing the funk, and hoped for the best.
On Saturday morning, Maire Anne and I headed northwest. One of the quirks about driving from Boston to Vermont is that, unless you’re heading up to Burlington on I-89 or going somewhere that’s right on the VT-NH border where I-91 runs, most of the route is on small roads, so the 150-mile drive to Manchester takes the same three hours that the 225-mile drive up to Burlington does. But with the foliage exploding, we certainly weren’t complaining. The drive up was flawless.
Yum.
If you recall, days after I bought the FrankenThirty, I discovered that, when the car was rebuilt from its salvage event in 1992, instead of having the 168-hp M20B25 engine that a 325is should have, the 121-hp M20B27 ETA engine from the donor car was installed. I was furious with myself for not having noticed this during the perhaps 45-second test drive I took in a rainy muddy parking lot—it would’ve been obvious had I just looked at the tach and seen its 5000-rpm redline. But because the car still has the 325is’ 3.73 differential instead of the 325e’s 2.93 tall-geared diff, it moves right out when you step on it, especially in comparison with a 2002. Yet with the 5-speed, it’s happy on the highway. Plus, because I put a set of gold basketweaves originally off an E30 ‘vert on the car, I just laugh every time I look at it, imagining some Ivy League whelp calling it “the Beamer.”
Yo. The 1980s called. They want their red paint, gold wheels, and drugs back.
The following day, rain threatened, but allowed us to get a hike in. That night, the skies opened, and in the morning, the FrankenThirty was coated with Vermont leafy goodness.
As U2 sang, you’ve been all over, and it’s been all over you. And no, the license plate isn’t a vanity plate; it’s just Massachusetts’ one-number-three-letter-two-number system.
Fine meals were eaten, single-malt scotch was consumed, music was played, and the two-day visit with dear friends was over too quickly. The drive home began under overcast skies, and when we climbed out of Manchester on Rt 30 that runs under the shadow of Bromley Mountain, the visibility suddenly dropped to about a hundred feet. Fortunately it cleared quickly, and the rest of the drive home was as flawless as the drive up. My only ding on the drip is that, due to holiday traffic, I didn’t get to toss the car a little on Vermont’s lovely roads, but I don’t exactly carve corners when Maire Anne’s with me anyway.
From this…
…to this in about ten miles.
Other than using most of my proactively-filled quart of oil, the only issue was that the front suspension shimmies a bit on braking. When I resurrected the car, I replaced both lower control arms but cheaped out and reused the “lollypop” bushings, then discovered this shimmying on the trip to The Vintage and ordered bushings. But that was 18 months ago, and I completely forgot about installing them. They’re in the garage somewhere. I’ll try to remember to get them in before the next trip in the car, whenever that is.
And the mouse smell? We never needed to turn on the heat, so I dodged that smelly bullet.
I’m never going to sell my 2002s, the E9, and the Lotus to become a hard-core E30 fan boy, but I totally get why these cars have such a raving fan base. Crisp handling, lots of torque, quieter and with better climate control than a 2002… even a booged-up example like mine shines on road trips.
FrankenThirty, you’re still bringing the joy.
Especially those wheels :^)
(For the poignant story of what else I see when I look at the gold basketweaves, read this.)
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.
