1992 Alpina B12 5.0 E31, one of 97

This 1992 Alpina B12 5.0 is finished in Alpina Blue over grey leather on the twenty spoke Alpina wheels, and is offered from Bryanston by bryanston_b12, about this seller, its third owner and the keeper of the car for sixteen years. It is built on the E31 8 Series with the 5.0 litre V12 to Alpina specification, driving through the six speed manual, and shows 108,600km. Alpina built 97 of them.

The mechanical file is the strongest part of the lot. Fuel pumps and lines in 2017, a clutch, pressure plate and rear main seal in 2020 with the gearbox out, the entire cooling system including a recored radiator in 2023, and a pre-sale service in June covering both banks with the fuel filters and both engine management units read and printed. On a V12 with two of everything, a file that says which bank was done is worth more than a file that says the car was serviced.

One question went unanswered, and the reason given is unusual enough to be worth reading in full in the transcript. Asked to publish the Alpina production number from the console plaque, the seller declined, saying that publishing the number of a car from a run of 97 is an invitation to have it cloned onto another E31, which he says has happened to Alpinas before. He has published a photograph of the plaque with the number obscured, and has offered to give the number to Alpina directly, or to a bidder who registers with Kept, for verification.

The room is not obliged to accept that reasoning and the decline stands as a decline either way. What a bidder is left with is a car whose specification and history are documented in detail and whose single identifying number is withheld on an argument about fraud. The other flaws stated are slow pop up headlamp motors, air conditioning that is poor at idle, a cracked driver's bolster seam, a repaired kerb strike on the front left wheel and a relaid deco stripe on the right rear quarter.

Alpina is not a tuner in the sense the word is usually used. It is a manufacturer in its own right under German law, with its own type approval, its own vehicle identification numbers and its own warranty, building complete cars on BMW bodies with reworked engines, its own suspension and gearing, and the deco stripes and twenty spoke wheels that make one recognisable across a car park.

The B12 5.0 was built on the E31 8 Series between 1990 and 1994 and 97 were made. Alpina reworked the M70 V12, revised the management and the exhaust, fitted its own suspension and, on the cars ordered that way, put a six speed manual behind a V12, which is a combination BMW itself never sold in this shape and which is the reason the manual cars are the ones collectors chase.

Every Alpina carries a production number on a console plaque, and the factory keeps the build record against it. That number is the identity of the car and it is also, on a run this small, the thing a cloner most wants. Alpina will confirm a car's build to an enquirer, which makes the number both the proof and the risk, and this listing is a working example of an owner deciding which of those two he cares about more.