Interview With Professor Fritz Indra
THE PROFESSOR… The turbocharged engine in Alpina’s E12 B7 turbo was a milestone in German engine history. Newly appointed as Alpina’s Head of Engine Development, Fritz Indra took the BMW M30 3.0-litre straight six petrol engine and extracted more power by adding, amongst other additions, a KKK turbocharger which made the Alpina E12 B7 turbo the fastest 4-door saloon car in the world when launched at the 1978 Frankfurt IAA Motor Show… Words: Alpina/Jeff Heywood. Photographs: Alpina Archive/Jeff Heywood. Professor Indra, let’s start with your career at Alpina: In 1971, you decided to leave the bright lights of Vienna for the tranquillity of Buchloe in south-west Bavaria. You were working as a university assistant at the Vienna University of Technology, yet joined Alpina as the Head of Development. How did that come about? www.bmwcarclubgb.uk
“First of all, I knew very early on that I wanted to be an engineer. While I was still in primary school, at the age of 10, I laid out my career plans in minute detail in an essay. Incidentally, I misspelled the word “doctorate” so badly that you couldn’t even see it for red pen. But that’s exactly what happened: after graduating as an engineer, I had
the good fortune to be accepted as a university assistant in Vienna, where I was able to do my doctorate. There was nothing happening in Austria back then. There was no BMW plant in Steyr yet or anywhere else for wholehearted petrol engineers like me. To keep my head above water as a university assistant, I had four or five part-time jobs. One of these was writing articles for the Austrian car magazine Autorevue. In 1971, they asked me to write an article about a certain Burkard Bovensiepen. So I travelled to Germany for an appointment, and Gert Hack was also there. At that time, he was on the executive board of Alpina and of course he’ll be well known to many as a journalist for Auto Motor und BMW Car Club Magazine June 2020
35
