Ultimate Planing Machine

The 328 Roadster helped to make BMW famous, but a hydroplane powered by the same motor was left to gather dust in a shed for half-a-century. Until now...

- Gérald Guétat

With his long and bushy beard, Rolf Gersch looks like a gold digger from a Jack London novel. Even wilder in appearance is his hydroplane Berlin III which, compared with the BMW 328 Roadster sitting next to it on the banks of the River Rhine in Mainz, looks like a coffin built to house an engine. The car still looks modern, homogenous from every angle, while the boat is an unthinkable dragster powered by the same two-litre unit, short pipes firing at the sky from an engine lying nose-up like a vintage fighter plane on the runway. Rolf delivers a few memories as a warning, memories that stretch back to a meeting with the boat’s first owner, pharmaceutical heir Jürgen Baginski, who commissioned the boat in 1950: “It’s not an easy boat to drive. When I first drove her, the engine fired right away, and I got on the plane quickly. At the end of the first stretch going into a turn, she almost flipped.” This from a man well-attuned to the difficulties of these craft, which were often built from drawings and tradition without any real testing.

On jumping into the boat’s cockpit, there is none of the softness and leather of the car. Instrumentation compared to the car is spartan: rev counter, battery charge, water temp and oil pressure. On the right, facing the potential co-pilot or passenger, is a set of chronometers for time trials. The cooling system, common to most boats of this sort, takes water directly from the running surface of the lake, where it is sent to a tank which is clearly visible near the engine compartment wall. In car and boat, the oil feeding system is the same; no dry sump but the usual oil pan. The only difference here is a stronger oil pump on the boat to improve oil circulation with the engine tilted up, a necessity to accommodate the angle of the propshaft going from engine to propeller.