Tom Hawley has a warning for anyone thinking of buying an original BMW M3 to park at cars and coffee: the car deserves to be driven hard, and he has little patience for owners who treat it as a prop for explaining its significance to strangers. He holds strong views on this, and on most things, which is part of how he ended up with an audience.
Hawley is the co-founder of Azura Financial, one of Australia's larger mortgage broking firms, and a ranked Top 30 broker nationally. To the nearly 40,000 people who follow him on Instagram, he is also the broker who explains, without varnish, why their money buys less than it did five years ago. He posts about RBA rate decisions and the federal budget with the same matter-of-factness he brings to the 993 in his garage. The following grew because he doesn't dress any of it up.
The garage holds two of the most admired driver's cars ever built - a verdict shared by most people who write about cars for a living, not only by the man who owns them.
Hawley came up the way a lot of ambitious Sydneysiders do: an economics degree at the University of Sydney, a master's in finance and accounting at UTS, then into stockbroking and funds management. A friend steered him toward mortgage broking, and he stayed.
"It was a chance thing," he says. "But once I was in, I never looked back."
In 2016 he and his brother Ben founded Azura out of Double Bay. The firm now runs to more than 40 staff and sits regularly among the country's Top 10 brokerages, though Hawley still answers his own phone. Clients describe him in much the same terms as he’d describe his cars - fast, and good at doing what he says he’ll do.
The part that separates him from the standard finance professional happens after hours, on a feed given over to plain-English macro: inflation, geopolitics, the budget. His line on inflation - "your coffee isn't worth more than it was ten years ago, your money is just worth less today" - travels because it sounds like something a person would actually say.
The cars run on the same instinct. He buys them because he has decided, after years of study, that they are the right answer to a question he has been turning over most of his life.
The 993 came first, as it was always going to. For the kind of enthusiast who researches for years before the money arrives, the last air-cooled 911 is where the conversation starts.
Hawley's is a 1997 993 Carrera S in Arctic Silver - wide-body, meaning it carries the broader rear haunches of the Turbo without the forced induction, along with the visual authority that comes with them. It is also a manual, one of fewer than 30 such cars imported to Australia. He recites the figures the way you talk about something you've known for years. "Ninety-five came to Australia. They only made them in 1997. Less than 30 are manual."
The numbers matter to him because of what the car represents. The 993 was Porsche's last air-cooled 911, the end of a line that ran back to 1963. The water-cooled 996 that followed in 1998 closed the chapter, and everything built before it took on the weight of a final example. Hawley's sits in a Double Bay garage with one outstanding grievance: the steering wheel, which he considers ugly and intends to replace.
The BMW came second, and getting it required a decision.
The E30 M3 had been on his list since well before he could afford one, which is the usual story with this car. Built in 1988, never officially sold in Australia, imported privately and left-hand drive, it runs a four-cylinder engine developed for motorsport and wears the boxed arches that give it a stance the regular E30 lacks. It also drives in a way that lands it, repeatedly, at the top of greatest-driver's-car lists.
When the right example surfaced, Hawley moved quickly. To do it, he sold a couple of Rolexes.
The watches were serious assets, a couple of gold Daytona’s most collectors hold onto. He let them go because the car was harder to replace. What he bought was a 1988 model in excellent order. "It only takes a couple of years of neglect for an old car to go bad," he says. "Luckily this one has been cared for."
His favourite detail is the boxed arches. What he rates most highly, though, is invisible in photographs - the way the car drives, the directness, the absence of anything between the road and his hands. "Everything about it is absolutely perfect," he says. "The leather, the size, the way it handles. It's considered the best driving car of all time."
He allows one flaw. "It rattles. These old cars rattle." On the street, the E30 draws more attention than the 993, which, when you hear it cruise down Bay St, is not surprising.
Each car has a job. The 993 absorbs daily life - traffic, errands around the eastern suburbs, the sort of use that would wear out a more precious machine within a week. "If I want to go for a normal drive in everyday traffic," he says, "this thing ticks every box." The M3 is for the days he wants to drive hard. "If I want to thrash the absolute balls of it, I'll take the M3 all day. You cannot beat that car as a driver's car."
The wish list runs on from there. Next is a 997 GT3, which Hawley rates as the finest car Porsche has made. After that, a Ferrari 355. The list is long and the garage is finite, which he regards as a good problem to have.
The thread through all of it is the same one that built the business and the audience. He sold the Rolexes because the watches could be replaced and the car could not. He hunted down one of the few manual 993s in the country because he already knew what he wanted and saw no reason to compromise. He drives both cars hard, on purpose, with full knowledge of what they are.
He knew what he was after, and he held out for it.
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