√Return to Sender: The remarkable story of Elvis Presley’s lost BMW 507

The story of the King of Rock’n’Roll’s ultra-rare BMW 507 that you won’t find in Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic, Elvis, currently in cinemas.

On 24 March, 1958, Elvis Aron Presley – already a global star of rock’n’roll – began his compulsory military service in the United States Army. Initially stationed at Fort Hood in Texas, Presley completed his training there before receiving his overseas posting.

On 1 October, 1958 Presley commenced his service at the U.S. Army base in Friedberg, West Germany. He was 23 years old, fresh-faced, famous and filthy rich.

But, barrack life wasn’t for Private Elvis Presley of the 1st Medium Tank Battalion, 32d Armor. Thanks to his lucrative music career, and unlike his fellow General Infantry soldiers, Presley could afford to live off base.

He chose the resort town of Bad Nauheim, a small hamlet around 30 minutes north of Frankfurt and about a 10 minute drive from the U.S. Army base, Ray Barracks in Friedberg. To get to work each day, Presley needed a set of wheels.

Presley visited a BMW dealer in Frankfurt and took a second-hand white BMW 507 for a spin. He was immediately smitten and decided to buy the car then and there.

Over the next 18 months, Presley drove it daily, between his home in Bad Nauheim – at Goethestrasse 14 – and the U.S. army base in Friedberg.

The car didn’t stay white for long, however, Presley having it resprayed in a racy red colour to deter the hordes of young women fans who often wrote messages of endearment in waxy lipstick on the pristine Feather White paint of his sportscar.

According to Ernst Pöpel, who undertook the paint work, Elvis wanted his car to be “Fire Engine Red”. After showing Presley a colour swatch book, they settled on a Porsche red. Years later, Pöpel remembered Elvis as a “very fine fellow”.

Now wearing U.S. military licence plates, Presley spent the next 18 months serving in the U.S. Army and tearing about the German countryside in his BMW 507.

When his active service ended on 2 March, 1960, he returned home to the United States to resume his career as a rock’n’roll star. And his BMW 507 came with him.

Back on home soil, Presley’s relationship with his German sportscar was short-lived. Just months after returning home, the car was traded-in at a New York Chrysler dealership. Knowing what he had on his hands, the dealer advertised the roadster as the ‘Elvis Car’ and put it on the lot for $US3500. It was snapped up by Tommy Charles, a radio disc jockey who also had a penchant for motor racing.

Charles did what oh-so-many hot-rodders do – he modified the BMW 507 to suit his own tastes and needs. And that meant out with the BMW 3.2-litre V8 and in its place a Chev V8 as well as a new gearbox and rear axle. But all that good ol’ American muscle didn’t fit in the svelte German sportscar, so the chassis had to be modified and cut to accommodate Yankee iron.

That seems sacrilege viewed through today’s lens where BMW 507s regularly sell for around $US2 million with a record price of $US5 million paid in 2018 for a 507 once owned by Formula One world champion John Surtees.

In 1960, however, the 507 was just a failed sportscar from BMW which had hoped to sell around 5000 of the pretty roadster every year.

Instead, thanks to production cost blowouts, BMW lost money on every 507 sold. So dire was the 507, it almost sent BMW broke with only an infusion of money from wealthy German industrialist Herbert Quandt saving the company from bankruptcy.

BMW stopped producing the 507 in 1960. Far from the projected 5000 sales annually, the Bavarian manufacturer had produced just 254 of the pretty roadster between 1956 and 1960, and thus inadvertently ensuring its iconic status today.

Back to Charles, who raced his 507 ‘Elvis Car’ for several years, offloading it in 1963 to an undisclosed buyer. It subsequently went through several changes of ownership before Jack Castor, a California-based aeronautical engineer, bought it in 1968. Each change of ownership dulled the connection to the King of Rock’n’Roll, any provenance to Presley fading, if not quite disappearing, to the mists of time.

Castor (pictured above with his BMW 507) used his 507 as a daily driver before retiring it in 1974, adding it to his collection of bicycles and cars housed in a pumpkin shed, where they awaited restoration.

The car enthusiast spent years researching his collection, including compiling an extensive dossier on the BMW 507. He also amassed a large number of parts for his planned restoration.

Castor was aware of the 507’s possible connection to Presley, thanks to the original American buyer having gleefully purchased the advertised ‘Elvis Car’ in New York back in 1960. But that remained hearsay, and without any documentary evidence, that connection remained speculation.

Then, in 2009, the now-retired Castor was leafing through a copy of Bimmer magazine where he came across an article, by automotive journalist Jackie Jouret, about the search for Presley’s missing 507.

Castor contacted Jouret, inviting her to inspect his 507 which he believed, although couldn’t be certain, had once been Elvis’s car.

The American-based Jouret visited Castor at his property at Half Moon Bay near San Francisco, where she was greeted by the sight of dusty and decrepit red BMW 507.

As she later recalled, “Jack had tied down its engine bonnet with ropes. It took some time until we actually got the engine compartment open and identified the stamped chassis number: 70079, the Holy Grail among BMW numbers.”

Still, it wasn’t enough to definitively declare the car as having once belonged to the King of Rock’n’Roll.

Back in Germany, BMW Group Classic, armed with a chassis number and anecdotal provenance of Castor’s BMW, set about trying to ascertain the real story of what it increasingly suspected, although still couldn’t confirm, might be Elvis Presley’s long lost ride.

BMW’s archivists started with the car Elvis bought in 1958, registration plate M-JX 800.

But, early photos taken of Elvis and his BMW show a car with U.S. Army issued military plates. And, as per regulations, those plates were changed annually, and that clouded the trail of evidence for researchers 56 years into the future.

With the car’s registration data buried in ancient U.S. military bureaucracy, the archival hunters at BMW Group Classic focussed their research on the one remaining and solid piece of evidence they had – 70079.

And this is what they found.

On 13 September, 1957, a Feather White BMW 507, chassis number 70079, rolled off the production line at Milbertshofen in Bavaria. It was immediately pressed into promotional service by BMW and took its place on the company’s stand at Frankfurt International Motor Show just a few days later.

Soon after, the automotive media got its hands on chassis 70079, the pretty roadster serving time on BMW’s test fleet.

Racing legend Hans Stuck (pictured, above with BMW 507 #70079), who had enjoyed success in the pre-war era of grand prix racing with Auto Union, then took possession of the car.

As a factory BMW driver and ambassador, Stuck took the 507 on a tour of Europe, presenting the white roadster at the London Motor Show in 1957, before driving on to Belgium where he made a presentation to King Baudouin, no doubt hopeful the handsome royal would add one to his private collection.

From Belgium, Stuck motored on to Italy to the Turin Motor Show where more promotional appearances awaited.

The Feather White 507 next made an appearance in the German feature film, Hula-Hopp Conny, before Stuck went back to doing what he loved best – racing.

Between May and August of 1958, Stuck, also known as the Bergmeister (King of the Mountains) contested several events in the European Hillclimb championship in his BMW 507 chassis 70079 (pictured below), winning several events in the GT Class.

By 1958, Stuck had switched to a more nimble and lighter BMW 700 for his hillclimbing campaign (and a successful switch at that, the German legend winning the 1960 German Hillclimb Championship at age 60).

Now retired from active service, in the autumn of 1958, the BMW-owned chassis 70079, found its way to a Frankfurt BMW dealership showroom awaiting a new owner.

Enter Private Elvis Presley.

But, still BMW’s archivists were reluctant to definitively declare this as the ‘Elvis Car’. They needed irrefutable proof linking Presley specifically to BMW 507 chassis number 70079. And buried deep inside their archives, they finally found it.

BMW’s researchers had uncovered an insurance policy, dating back to 1958, and issued to one ‘Elvis Aaron Presley’. The policy detailed that Presley’s insured car was indeed a white BMW 507 with chassis number 70079. The final piece of the puzzle had been found. Castor’s project car, found over 50 years later in a pumpkin shed in California, was once owned by the King of Rock’n’Roll.

Discussion between Castor and BMW Group Classic began in earnest. Castor, initially, wasn’t interested in selling his rare 507 to BMW. But after years of back-and-forth talk and negotiations with BMW’s restoration experts Klaus Kutscher and Axel Klinger-Köhnlein, he agreed to sell his pretty little roadster to BMW Group Classic with one proviso: that it be restored to its original condition.

An agreement was reached and in 2014 the car was ‘returned to sender’ in Munich, Germany along with the accumulation of spare parts Castor had stored over the decades of his ownership.

Back in Munich, the 507 enjoyed a brief moment in the spotlight, the ‘Elvis’ BMW 507 – lost and found’ exhibition wowing the public briefly before 70079 made its way to BMW Group Classic’s workshop, where the painstaking restoration began under the eyes of Klaus Kutscher and Axel Klinger-Köhnlein.

Kutcher, the Group’s expert in vehicle restoration was ecstatic. “For decades, the car was untraceable, and the original VIN number was not even known – and now I have it right in front of me.”

But the enormity of the task ahead for Kutcher, who had called the car “high-class scrap”, was also daunting. With just 254 BMW 507s having ever been produced, genuine parts for the restoration project were non-existent.

The team started the painstaking process of entirely disassembling the car, taking an inventory of parts that remained, those that had been lost to time, what could be restored and what needed to be replaced entirely.

Big ticket items like the doors, the bonnet and much of the body work remained original. The hand-crafted aluminium body was separated from the steel chassis and floor assembly.

The floor was stripped of its paint in an acid bath while the aluminium body work enjoyed a gentler alkaline bath, bringing both back to bare metal and highlighting how much corrosion had eaten away at the chassis and floor. A phosphoric-based acid rust remover did much of the heavy lifting removing the dreaded automotive cancer, but not everything could be salvaged. And that meant that many of the 507’s components needed to be manufactured from scratch.

Here, the team remained faithful to the original, using both modern techniques and traditional craftmanship to closely maintain 70079’s originality as much as possible. Elements like a new instrument panel was cast from the original’s while the leather seats were recreated to match the precise pattern, based on photos from 1957 and ’58.

After stripping the seats, it was determined the steel sub-frame could be restored and retained, making the team’s task a little easier. It took days of work on the seats alone, with coconut-based felting sewed onto the frames by hand, before being covered in linen and then white leather that closely matched the original’s grain.

Components, like the door handles and window winders were beyond salvation. And with just 254 BMW 507’s ever made, spare parts were a little thin on the ground. To solve this problem, the Classic team used modern 3D scanning and printing techniques to recreate perfect facsimiles. Other parts like rubber seals needed to be recreated from scratch.

But the biggest challenge facing the restoration team came in the shape of the drivetrain. There wasn’t one, the Chev V8 installed by Charles long gone as was the original BMW 3.2-litre V8. So too the gearbox while the rear axle was not the original, BMW calling it a “replacement t part of unknown origin”.

Worse still, the subframe assemble in the engine bay was showing the ravages of Charles’ earlier hot-rodding, with sections cut away to accommodate the Chev V8 and its Borg-Warner transmission.

A new subframe was built and grafted onto the chassis and floor, ready to accept a new BMW 3.2-litre V8, carefully constructed and assembled from spare parts, a conglomeration of old and new components. BMW claims it was good for 110kW, as per the original’s specification.

When it came to restoring 70079 back to its original hue of Feather White paint, the restoration team eschewed modern techniques, instead adopting period correct painting methods to ensure the 507 looked as close to the original’s as possible. According to BMW, using 60-year old techniques meant the newly resprayed 507 would avoid “excessive colour brilliance”, something “considered desirable nowadays but is inappropriate for classic cars”.

Finally, after two years of exacting restoration work, BMW 507 chassis number 70079 made its public debut in 2016 at Concours d’Elegance at Pebble Beach in California.

“The opportunity to bring back the BMW 507 owned by the King of Rock’n’Roll to us here in Munich for purposes of restoration in accordance with the wishes of the previous owner, Jack Castor, was a dream come true for all those involved,” said Ulrich Knieps, the head of BMW Classic Group.

“This was an exceptionally fascinating project. The outcome is not simply a source of great pride to us. Jack would undoubtedly have been delighted by the outcome.”

Sadly, Castor never got to see the finished car, passing away in November, 2014, aged 77. But, Castor’s legacy lives on with BMW 507 chassis 70079 restored as close to original as when Private Elvis Aaron Presley first picked it up from a BMW dealer in Frankfurt almost 60 years ago.

Exactly as he wanted it.