The 3.0 CSL had topped my want list since I was a schoolboy. I had admired the looks of E9 coupes in my dad’s car magazines in the early 1970s, and when the motor racing successes came along and the CSL homologation special emerged, I knew it was the car for me. In contrast to the Triumph Heralds and VW Beetles that I helped my dad maintain, the CSL, with its fuel injection, Scheel racing seats, black stripes, and bright wheel arch extensions, seemed incredibly exotic.

Sadly, it would be another forty years until I was in a position to seriously contemplate owning a CSL, but eventually, the search began. Many cars were viewed, but they were either too expensive, too corroded, missing key original parts, or lacking provenance. In most cases, it was a combination of all these problems! 

In April 2015, I saw an advert for a Verona Red City Pack car for sale through Munich Legends. It was in good condition with excellent provenance and priced within my budget. Two days later, my son and I drove 450 miles from Edinburgh to Sussex to inspect it. Although I could see that “OMB 929L” would ultimately require some bodywork attention, it looked like a car that could be slowly improved on and kept for many years. The history file showed the recent removal of both subframes for a complete suspension and brake overhaul, which was encouraging. Unfortunately, a detailed inspection by the Munich Legends workshop revealed a problem with the engine – low compression on two cylinders! We agreed on a complete mechanical engine rebuild by Munich Legends as part of the deal, who delivered the car a couple of months later in a mechanically sound and very useable condition.

For the first two years, I mainly tidied the car and attended to minor mechanical improvements, using it for car shows and driving out into the Highlands. One memorable trip took me from Edinburgh, setting off before sunrise to meet car club friends 120 miles away in Glencoe.   As I swept along deserted roads through Tyndrum, over Rannoch Moor and on to Glencoe, I began to appreciate what an accomplished car the CSL is.  With its torquey engine, light weight, beautiful balance, and reassuring brakes, the car was a total pleasure to drive.  Later that day, we continued as a group along the fantastic roads past Fort William and on to Mallaig. Even in the company of some expensive modern sports cars, our trusty CSL more than held its own with its low weight and nimble handling, proving a real advantage on the twists and turns.

In 2017, we moved back to Hampshire, and I started a rolling programme of improvements to the car.  First was the design and installation of a bespoke rear roll cage by Robinson Race Cars, which is completely removable to maintain originality. It provides much greater stiffness to the rear of the shell and hopefully improves safety in the event of a rollover accident. Mounting points on the rear cage allowed the installation of Schroth Auto-control three-point harnesses, which have electrically controlled inertia reel mechanisms enabling the occupants to move around in the car but will lock the instant there are any sudden movements of the vehicle. A sympathetic rebuild of the Scheel seats, keeping the original cover materials but improving the stuffing and webbing, made for a much more pleasant driving position.

By 2020, just as COVID was starting to bite, I was itching to improve the car’s body, particularly the sills, which felt solid but had obviously been replaced at some point and suffered from poor alignment and some crude-looking welding. I started to research the subject and realised that the structure on an E9 CSL needs to be treated with great care because of the lack of a full B-pillar; the very slender roof structure and thin panels mean that the body depends on the sills and inner wings for much of its torsional rigidity. The bodyshell can quickly become misaligned if the complex sill structures are cut out and replaced without using jigs to maintain alignment, and this is a common cause of the E9s we see with inconsistent door gaps and poor panel alignment. I was lucky to find Brookland Cars Ltd, to do the work. They are based at the Brooklands Museum site and specialise in classic AC cars for road and competition work. Due to the COVID lockdowns, they had some spare capacity on their normally busy body alignment jigs, as fewer racing Cobras were being raced and crashed!

Work started with installing the car on the jig and establishing the correct alignment with the doors still in place. The jig was locked, doors removed, and extra bracing was installed to maintain alignment before removing the left side outer sill. Perhaps not surprisingly, this revealed that the inner sills were in poor condition and the car needed total replacement of the complex multi-layer sill structures, along with the floor just inboard of the sills, the bottom of the A-Post, and the bottom of the truncated B-Posts. The artisans of Brooklands completed this to a very high standard on the left, and then the process was repeated on the right. Having completed the sills, we decided to go further, replacing the inner and outer rear wheel arches on both sides, removing both front wings, and replacing or repairing the inner wing structures.  All the steelwork was done beautifully so that it looked like it was fresh from the factory, and the final step of the process was to re-skin the doors and ensure that panel alignments were spot on.

After the car had been painted, it returned home for me to start a long process of sorting out the electricals, reinstalling the interior trim, and conducting a proper recommissioning. My most difficult challenge was the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection system, which appeared to have deteriorated whilst the car was off the road, leaving the engine running quite roughly and lacking power.  I tried all the obvious easy fixes and even consulted a specialist in these engines, but to no avail. Early in my career, I had worked as a fuel injection development engineer on Lucas systems, so I felt like I really ought to be able to sort it out myself. I decided the only solution was to remove the injection and induction systems from the car entirely, then strip down, clean, recalibrate as necessary, and rebuild. As the work progressed, I found that the fuel injectors themselves were in quite a poor state and needed cleaning and recalibrating, the throttle body assembly had multiple issues, as did the complex electro-mechanical cold-start system. I’m pleased to report that after reassembly, the engine started on the first attempt, ran smoothly, and after some fine-tuning, the car drove beautifully.

The car was off the road for almost three years while the body was being repaired and returned to a high standard. Without a doubt, it was worth the wait, and I now have the CSL I always dreamt of. It’s a pleasure to own and attracts admiring comments wherever it goes. May this continue for many years to come.

The icing on the cake was winning the Judges Choice National Car award at the OktoberFest 2024.