http://www.axos.nl/retrorace/temp/BMW328-Team-MM-1940-1.jpg
"After the Allied occupation in May 1945 the car appeared again and was soon confiscated by US officers. On a trip with the car one of them loses control and so it ends up in a ditch where its driver simply leaves it behind. Former BMW engineer Claus von Rücker, who now runs the airplane engine plant at Allach under allied control, learns of this accident by chance. He recognizes the true value of the car (which was already painted in US olive green colour) and salvages it. After some official estimation he is finally able to bring the car into his own property.
Von Rücker starts to repair the damaged car on his own and in doing so he is able to bring the car to the first German race after the war, the Ruhestein hillclimb, where it is driven by his friend, the racing driver Hermann Lang. And Lang is even able to win this very first race. A little later Claus von Rücker emigrates to Canada and takes the Mille Miglia Coupe with him, where he sells it soon after to New York photographer and racing driver Robert Grier, who has it painted red and uses it - fitted with big bumpers - in normal traffic and in some hill climbs..."
And this leads us to a picture we already know:
which shows Hermann Holbein at the Ruhestein in 1946. And yes, clearly - same place, same time!
And suddenly all fits together, the registration plate, the different bodywork, the strange surroundings and I have no doubts any more, that the picture shows the Mille Miglia winner driven by would-still-be-reigning-if-he-had-ever-been-the-rightful European Champion
Lang at the Ruhestein in 1946. And the different front is simply the result of von Rückert´s repairs. Cool! 
oday I found an article written by Ian Young in "Thoroughbred & Classic Cars" (this is the wonderful sonorous export title of the magazine known as "Classic Cars" in its home market) and published in the July 1996 issue ("Casualty of War", p. 84-89):
quote:He mentions also an article from October 1945 in which Sir Roy Fedden quotes BMW Chief Engineer Dr Fritz Fiedler talking about the prototype of an entirely new 2-litre sports model, also hidden on a farm near Salzburg, but this could have been a prototype of the 328 successor "318" whose lines were very similar to the 1940 Mille Miglia roadsters.
The car (...) is a BMW 328 Roadster bodied by the Milanese coachbuilder Touring in 1940/41. It is not one of the Mille Miglia cars but the connections are obvious from first glance. Its history is uncertain even to BMW, although it is known to be one of three standard 328 roadsters 'acquired' by the Third Reich's Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahr Korps (NSKK) - the Nazi sporting propaganda movement - in early 1938. The NSKK's plan, according to BMW historians, was to run three lightweight cars - similar to the successful Mille Miglia machines already under development at BMW - that would compete against the works BMW team in international long-distance events such as the Mille Miglia and the Rome-Berlin race. Its motive - to beat the BMW factory entries - seems a curious one but the fact remains that three standard 328s were driven to Milan in autumn of 1940, a few months after BMW had finished first, third, fifth and sixth in that year's Mille Miglia.
(...) The same principles were therefore employed on the three NSKK cars: aerodynamic panels moulded out of Duralumin and layered on to a tubular light-alloy framework - the total weight of which was just 80 kg. Each car weighed a mere 644 kg. (...) According to figures from Touring, they had a drag coefficient of just 0.25 - compared to the Mille Miglia cars' 0.29. (...)
The rebodied trio returned to Germany in the spring of 1941 and were entered in that year's Rome-Berlin race; but this was as far as they got. Wartime events took over and the race was cancelled. Having never even turned a wheel in competition, the cars were apparently hidden on a farm near Salzburg. Not surprisingly, it is in trying to trace their movements after the war that difficulties are encountered. (...)
Little is known of the NSKK cars, however, and reports from nearer the time introduce more, not less, confusion. According to an article in a July 1948 edition of The Motor by Laurence Pomeroy, there were never as many as three cars built.
quote:
The theory that there may have only been one Touring-bodied car from that period is blown apart, though, by the fact that all three were photographed together on their journey back from Touring to Munich. (...)
Touring-bodied car number one was modified after the war into a Formula 2 racing car and campaigned as a 'BMW Special' by a Heidelberg-based driver named Rovelli. It appears in an article in The Autocar by Gordon Wilkins, dated July 1948. According to BMW, Rovelli's car - distinguished by its bonnet intake and lack of a central bonnet strip - was sold to an American buyer in the Fifties and disappeared without trace.
The fate of car number two, in short, is unknown. It disappeared without trace either during or after the war. Number three, however, somehow found its way back to BMW's Munich factory, where it gathered dust and was occasionally brought out for demonstration runs. It was erroneously thought to be one of the famous five Mille Miglia cars entered by the factory, until Classic Car's founding editor Michael Bowler identified it as one of the NSKK Touring-bodied cars... (...)
The fact that we are able to have a go in it now is entirely due to the enthusiasm of Christian Eich, who has spent the last two years reviving BMW's heritage through the company's newest department, Mobile Tradition. The surviving member of the trio has been comprehensively and faithfully restored to its original state by the Wurzburg restorer Helmut Feierabend and arrives back at BMW late one Friday evening in early May.
The text is accompanied by some colour pictures of the restored car (with the registration "M - MF 328", as the "H" plates weren't yet introduced), a panel about the five 328 which competed in the 1940 Mille Miglia and four black-and-white pictures, two of them showing the cars "snapped on the way back from Milan, spring 1941". The vehicle in the third picture looks exactly like the Daetwyler car and the caption says "One of the Touring trio, probably Rovelli's, on test". The fourth picture shows a car with monoposto body, but with headlights and mudguards, and is captioned "Rovelli's car was cut up and modified for Formula 2".
Rovelli - Heidelberg-based? Was Rovelli's car modified for Formula 2 or (and?) sold to an American buyer? I think we have now more questions than before this article. Has anybody access to the Gordon Wilkins article of 1948?
But one point is interesting: Despite being heavily modified, the Assenheimer car at the start of the German GP Sports Car race 1950 has a central bonnet strip - in contrast to the Daetwyler car, the car pictured on test and the Rovelli car in Piacenza 1947.
So we can continue to guess: either all original cars are lost and the "restored" car is a replica (see post by Michael Müller on 03-Dec-02 08:07) or the BMW car is original, the Assenheimer car went to USA (but its trace is lost), the Rovelli car was sold to and/or driven by Willy Daetwyler, converted to Formula 2 and finally sold to USA (where its trace is lost too) or ...
Kind regards
Michael
http://forums.autosport.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51073&highlight=piacenza
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