A few months back I had dinner with the bosses at Alpina, the amiable Burkhard Bovensiepen and his beguilingly unhinged son Andy. We talked about all sort of things - from the price of wine to the state of the world economy - but most of all we talked about cars. And at one point we spoke for some while about the specific joys, or otherwise, of runflat tyres. The Bovensiepens absolutely hate runflat tyres, "because they're heavy, expensive and destroy the ride quality of any car the wretched things are attached to", or so claims Bovensiepen Jnr. Which is why Alpina resolutely refuses to fit them to any of its cars, and why Alpinas in turn tend to ride more comfortably than their equivalents from the BMW factory, 60km or so down the autobahn in Munich.
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