Alpina Roadster S Supercharged - Photos

The stunning pictures in this gallery were photographed by Tom Antonis on the second trip to Norway, when we recollected the car. This time we travelled by car because I was planning to shoot a video of the supercharged Roadster S on location in Norway. It would be expensive and impractical to move around the video gear by plane and rental car. I invited my friend and fellow Z4 driver Tom to accompany me on the trip to Norway so he could drive the car while I was handling the camera. We left on Thursday November 13th 2008 for the 1100km drive to Uddevalla in Sweden, two hours away from Aremark.

The next day we headed off to ESS' secret countryside HQ (which actually is not difficult to find if you have been there once). We arrived a bit earlier than expected by Hans. The car was parked outside with some testing equipment still attached to it. We had a look at the engine bay, which looked very nice. After a bit of waiting Hans took the car for a final test of the lambda values and I sat down in the passenger seat. The cold start was rough, like it had always been due to the aggressive camshafts of the Alpina engine and the need to comply with emission regulations. I immediately noticed the car ran perfectly normal and very smooth at low speeds. The sound of the supercharger was barely noticeable. After the engine was warmed up, Hans launched the car uphill in second gear with very impressive acceleration.

After returning to the shop we hang around there and talked about all kinds of car things. Hans and Asbjorn are really cool guys and it's obvious they are very knowledgeable. We had a ride in a twinscrewed 520i automatic Asbjorn was working on. The performance of the car was very good 'considering it had no engine in it' (Asbjorn's words). Hans checked the fault codes of my Alpina B10 3.2 (there where vague German messages appearing on the display which I couldn't read because of pixel failures) and Asbjorn made use of this opportunity to read out the engine software of the B10. I had a look at the dyno graph for the first time and I was very impressed with the torque curve. I loved the way the engine built up power all the way to the redline at 7200rpm. The torque improvement at lower revs was good but to extract maximum power you still had to push it.

It was getting dark when I had my first test drive. I didn't push the car very hard because of the wet conditions but I was instantly impressed. The throttle response was very good and power delivery was just perfect. It's the closest you can get to a high revving engine without having one. We finally left ESS at 17.00 and drove to the hotel in the nearby city of Halden. We used the evening to shoot video at the car park of a shopping mall and the road nearby a very cool looking plant with lots of steam coming out of it. The next day we filmed on the road from Halden to Aremark untill sun was set, after which we packed our gear and headed for a hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden. I had loads of fun on the road to Gothenburg. The car was so incredibly fast, it was like a translocator in a shooting game. You shift down, push the throttle and the next moment you are in a different place. The engine felt powerful yet refined. If Alpina would still be making crazy fast cars like in the eighties this would be part of their lineup.

On Sunday we travelled home from Gothenburg. The roads in Sweden were just empty. No one was there, which made it difficult to obey the speed limits. When we arrived in Germany we joined the millions of Germans who for some reason had all decided on a massive migration movement from Hamburg to Osnabruck. I managed to do a few runs to 6800rpm (~280km/h). Everytime I pressed the throttle, I opened a gap of several hundred meters over Tom, who was behind me pushing the B10. The car moved so easily between 120 and 180km/h in sixth gear it was just incredible.