Rare Rides: The 1979 BMW M1 - BMW Wants to Race, but Wait a Minute (Part II)
In our last Rare Ride entry we covered the difficult conception and birth of the BMW M1 at the hands of a financially faltering Lamborghini. In Part II, we talk about the second issue BMW faced, which would ultimately alter (and shorten) the M1’s life.
BMW wanted the M1 to participate in the Group 5 class of the World Sportscar Championship in 1979. The delays in the M1’s development, which we covered in Part I, meant the model was behind schedule in all ways.
In 1977, while the M1 was under development, the rules were changed for Group 5 entries. The new rules stated 400 examples of the vehicle needed to exist to meet Group 4 requirements, and then even more homologation requirements were layered on top of the production quota in order to qualify for Group 5.
James May did a quick summary of the M1 on Top Gear way back when, and you can watch the clip here with badly synched audio.
After all the struggle, it just wasn’t going to happen for the M1 the way BMW intended. So, upon learning of the new competition regulations, BMW’s Motorsport division changed tack. It created a single-model race series and called it the BMW M1 Procar Championship. Here, Formula One drivers competed against one another in identically modified M1 racing cars. The series ran for 1979 and 1980 before it was retired.
The M1 was retired around the same time. BMW finished the rest of the consumer models in 1981, and in total produced 453 M1s. Twenty of those were racing Procar versions. The example you’ve been eyeing as you read today is neither a regular consumer version, nor a Procar. It’s a hybrid Frankenstein.
A telephone call was made, an order sheet filled out. The customer: a Sheik from the nation of Qatar. The M1 came right out of the BMW factory in 1979, and headed straight for a custom garage in Hamburg, Germany. There, SGS Garage would set out to modify the standard consumer M1 into a procar-cum-luxury sports tourer.
The body was heavily modified, and a new paint scheme was applied featuring the BMW Racing livery.
The interior saw a luxury rework, plus a generous application of wood.
Lace alloys are here, and they’re deep-dish, color-keyed and doing their thing (which is winning).
A discrepancy arrives at this point in the story. Though the base car is from 1979, and the listing indicates the car was modified by SGS in 1980, the metal ID plate on the body carries a production date of January 1984. It would seem either the M1 sat around (perhaps unwanted in a showroom) for a while before being modified, or SGS took a very long few years to finish its modifications. I’m betting on the former.
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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When I contact the guy to make an offer I'm going to request a few dollars off. It looks like he curbed the rim in the close up shot.
So BMW essentially said "I am gonna get my own racing series, with blackjack and hookers (and BMW M1 cars)" But, seriously, "Procar"?