Old Alpina, New Chapter
We took a 20-year-old Alpina B5 from Poznań to Munich, then on with BMW Classic across the Alps to Lake Como, just as the brand that built it opens a whole new chapter. We went to find out what is left of the old Alpina, and where its heart beats today.
Poznań, early morning
My Alpina turned twenty this year. At the same time, an era ended: since the beginning of 2026, the rights to the Alpina brand belong to BMW Group.
The real destination was Como and the Concorso d'Eleganza. But the road quickly turned out to be just as important. The B5 is not an ordinary 5 Series, after all. It was born in Buchloe, in a family-run manufactory tied to BMW for decades, yet always following its own path.
We left Poznań before dawn. Ahead of us lay about 1,300 kilometres to Cernobbio, and almost three thousand in total. So Kamil and I did the only sensible thing: we set a course for Bavaria and went.
No limits
Germany only really begins when the crossed-out speed limit sign appears. The autobahn opens up, the right foot sinks a little deeper, and the car remembers what it was built for.
That is when what Alpina did to the base BMW starts to shine. The hand-assembled H1 engine, based on the N62, received, among other things, a forged crankshaft, Mahle pistons and a centrifugal supercharger built to Alpina's own specification. The result is 500 hp and 700 Nm.
Alpina never focused solely on attacking corners at any cost. It was more about a very particular blend of comfort and speed. Above all, though, it was about the way the car delivers its torque: smoothly, without sudden jolts and without unnecessary drama.
The supercharger wakes gently, and the kilometres stop counting. Alpina always took a different road from BMW M. Quieter. With better manners. As if it had nothing to prove to anyone.
We drive wrapped in something like a cocoon of Lavalina leather. Soft, quiet, fast. After several hours we climb out without the feeling that we have just crossed half of Europe.
Behind the scenes
We arrived in Munich on Wednesday. The next morning we were due to set off with the official BMW Classic drive to Como. That was the plan from the start.
What we had not planned was a visit to the BMW Group Classic archive, open only to invited guests. We managed to get in and take a few photos. The BMW Classic team did not throw us out. Quite the opposite, we ended up in a long conversation.
Inside, time stops. Rows of cars you normally only see in books: the road-going E46 M3 GTR, prototypes rarely shown in public, a whole row of racing legends.
Suddenly it stopped being abstract that two stories which had run side by side for decades, a large corporation from Munich and a small manufactory from Buchloe, were now about to run differently. I stood in a vault of the past, knowing I was on my way to see the future.
Past Buchloe
The road south out of Munich runs along the autobahn that passes Buchloe. We did not stop. And I think it was better that way.
It was almost certainly on these very stretches that the E60 B5 was fine-tuned. The car had returned to the roads where it was created. That was when a thought first crossed my mind that kept coming back all week: maybe the early 2000s were the peak of motoring. Or maybe it is just nostalgia.
Snow on the Splügen Pass
Then came the mountains, and typical mountain weather: impossible to predict.
We had met Jakub, owner of a beautiful BMW 528i E12 from Poland, and his family by chance in Munich the day before. Two Polish classics, a thousand kilometres from home.
The convoy was meant to go via St. Moritz and the Maloja Pass, but heavy snow had fallen there and BMW changed the route. Kamil and I did not want to give up the mountains entirely, though. So we peeled off towards the Splügen Pass.
On the climb the snow barely dusted the road. A narrow, winding ribbon of tarmac, white on both sides, clouds hanging low over the road. Half an hour after us, a proper blizzard swept across the same pass. We made it just in time.
In conditions like these you understand what this car was about. The B5 does not strain, does not fight and does not try to be sharper than it needs to be. It is competent in a way that today feels almost old-fashioned.
A warm cabin, calm responses, gold pinstripes dusted with snow. And a twenty-year-old car that, in those conditions, never felt like a museum piece.
Along the lake
The descent from the mountains is gradual. The Splügen drops away in switchbacks, the snow gives way, and then, suddenly, there is the lake.
Everything changes at Como. A world of rock, cold and cloud turns into palm trees, villas and water. We drove along the lake all the way to Cernobbio. The closer we got, the more classics, people and cameras. We rolled straight into the middle of Como Car Week.
Old guard, new guard
Como that weekend was bursting at the seams with several parallel worlds.
On one side, the Concorso d'Eleganza: pre-war bodies tailored to measure, blazers, distance and elegance from another age. On the other, far more open events around Villa Erba, HFMSTRS, Ultrace and FuoriConcorso.
On Saturday, my B5 was the only car from Poland at Wheels & Weisswürscht: Amici e Automobili, organised by HFMSTRS in collaboration with BMW Classic. Friday evening belonged to an event put together with Ultrace. Hanging over all of it was this year's FuoriConcorso theme, KraftMeister: a celebration of German engineering, old and new.
It is hard to imagine a better backdrop for our route. It was in exactly this setting that BMW unveiled the Vision BMW Alpina, the first full portrait of what the brand is meant to be from now on.
My twenty-year-old B5 stood a few hundred metres from its own future, on the same lake.
Heritage or future
But this story has a second layer. The Bovensiepen family did not put down their tools. They started again, under their own name, still in Buchloe.
First came the Zagato, based on the M4, shown at Como a year earlier. In the paddock, people said it was only a warm-up and that something bigger was on the way.
Two roads. One heritage. A badge on one side, a bloodline on the other.
What's next
We came home through the mountains. First the Maloja Pass, then the Engadin valley, a stretch of Austria and the foot of the Zugspitze. From there we went back to Munich, and then straight on to Poland.
It was a journey about continuity. About what makes Alpina Alpina, and where its heart really beats today.
Does it live in the name that BMW took over and presented to the world as the Vision Alpina on the shores of Como? Or rather in the hands of the people who still build cars in Buchloe, only under their own name? Back then, by the lake, I did not know the answer.
Epilogue
A few weeks after we got back, Bovensiepen answered that question in its own way, by showing a second car: the 05 GT. The spiritual successor to the B5, based on the M5 Touring this time, with bodywork elements designed by Frank Stephenson and a system output of up to 800 hp. It would have been called the B5, if that name still belonged to the family who created it.
The longer I think about it, the less important it seems to me which of the two roads turns out to be closer to the spirit of the old marque: the Bovensiepens in Buchloe, or BMW at Como.
Whatever the answer, Alpina lives on. In garages and in collections of earlier models, but above all on the road. These cars should not be kept under covers. They should be driven, without a glance at the mileage.
That is exactly what they were made for.
Words: Dawid Grausch
Photography: Kamil Koźlarek
*This article was originally written for EVO Magazine Polska.