Elina Lipilina “Didn’t have any real exposure to racing or rallying,” while growing up, but when she went to see a Formula Drift event at Sonoma Raceway in California about a decade ago, she was taken by the precision and beauty of the tandem slides and the idea of motorsport not always being confined to traditional circuit racing. That event set her on a mission towards motorsport, albeit of a different variety than the smoky sideways style of competitive drifting. The techniques to send a car down the course at an angle aren’t all that foreign between drifting and the much older discipline of rallying though, for Scandinavian flicks are an all but universal language.
She found her way to rallying soon enough, but didn’t have a means of actually competing until this 1971 BMW 2002 came across her screen. It had been more or less a static project since the mid-1990s at the time Elina found it on Craigslist, and it was being sold without its wheels, and needed plenty of attention to get rolling again, let alone racing across rough roads, gravel, and dirt with the occasional airborne stint.
After shorting the starter with some copper wire to hear it turn over, and then discovering the purported five-speed gearbox was in fact only a four-speed, Elina still went through with the sale and quickly set about stripping back the years of neglect in order to build the largely neglected car into a rally-spec machine in time to complete driver’s school. After a load of work, she qualified for her first rally with the reborn 2002, and she now regularly partakes in the sport with the American Rally Association and other sanctioning bodies. Bought, then built, this car is the result of Elina fostering a true bond with her BMW.
