This car, Lot 84, sold for $1,105,260 (€1,015,584), including buyer’s premium, at Artcurial’s Paris, FRA auction on February 2, 2024.
Despite its current reputation as a luxury and performance heavyweight, over the years, BMW has made a few moderately serious blunders. The good news is that history has made several of those blunders into collectible icons. The BMW 507 is a great example. Built to compete with Mercedes’ 300SL, it was an abject failure — beautiful, but too expensive and slow to generate any real sales, BMW eventually had to walk away from it. The M1 is another example.
The best laid plans…
BMW had great Pre-World War II success with its 328 and motorcycles, but it lacked any kind of post-war racing tradition. In the late 1960s a few independent performance shops such as Alpina and Schnitzer took to building race cars based on the 2002 and 3.0 CS models, and their success led BMW headquarters to start thinking that winning races could embellish its brand image.
Into the early ’70s, BMW increasingly worked with those shops, and in 1972 Jochen Neerpasch was hired by Bob Lutz to create a separate division to establish a direct corporate involvement, named BMW Motorsports. In 1973–74, BMW’s 3.0 CSLs were the car to beat in European Touring Car racing and FIA Group 5, but the writing was on the wall. If BMW wanted to continue to be a serious force in racing, it needed to create a mid-engine racer. It would be BMW Motorsports’ first fully developed car, hence named M1.
Born in 1975, the M1 was conceived to be the basis for a killer “silhouette” racer using BMW’s 3.5-liter straight-6. FIA rules for the Manufacturer’s Championship Groups 4 and 5 required a production of 400 “homologation special” production cars that could then be modified into serious track weapons. BMW had a bit of a problem: Although it had the design, the money and the desire, it didn’t have the manufacturing capacity to build the car. Casting around, BMW teamed up with Lamborghini to build its cars. However, Lamborghini turned out to be a complete mess, and the original 1977 production deadline came and went with just a few prototypes built. Then Lamborghini went bankrupt in mid-1978, so BMW had to start over.
The solution ended up with one company building the frames, another the fiberglass bodywork, and yet another putting those and the interior together, then sending the “chassis-in-white” to BMW for final assembly. It worked, but time, tide and racing wait for no man. By the time the M1 was an operable car in 1979, the rules had changed, and it was hopelessly outclassed as an FIA Championship racer. Porsche’s 935 racers were untouchable; the M1 was too little, too late, a lost cause.
Circus sideshow
In an effort to salvage the situation, Neerpasch arranged a racing series called Procar that would support Formula 1 races. In it, the top five F1 qualifiers in a grand prix would be given identical M1s to race against 15 privately entered cars for trophies and prize money. Think of this as sort of an exotic, pro-am Spec Miata event. It proved successful for the 1979 and ’80 seasons — a good show with the top cars acquiring sweat stains from famous drivers such as Andretti, Lauda, Fittipaldi and the like.
The series ended after 1980, but both Procar and street M1s converted to race spec found a home in U.S. IMSA racing through the mid-1980s. They were never really competitive there but provided an inexpensive, reliable way for amateur racers to fill up the back of the grids.
Don’t get me wrong, M1s are wonderful cars to drive, and the racing versions are fast and great fun, but they couldn’t truly compete, except against each other. Maybe if M1s had shown up in 1975 it would be different, but they didn’t. Add 40 years of perspective and nostalgia, and both the street and racing M1s are quite collectible. With the racing cars, there is a serious range of value between the bottom dwellers and the ultimate desirables, which we need to discuss.
A fair deal
As with any other collectible racing car, the value depends on a number of basic factors: Original team car with important livery, provenance, results history and restoration are prime among them. There were 54 M1s originally prepared as racers, plus at least a few (like our subject car) that were built up as racers from used or wrecked street cars. It is important to understand that BMW itself only built a few of them. Most of the Procar racers were built by Britain’s Project Four Racing (led by Ron Dennis) or Italian constructor Osella.
The value range for M1 racers is huge — from around $3.5 million for the best of the best (championship winning, iconic livery, famous drivers, wildly original and correct), to roughly $800,000–$1,000,000 for the purely weapons-grade examples.
This brings us to our subject car. All that is apparently known about its origins is that it was an orange road car from Italy, brought to the U.S. and made into an IMSA racer by Walker Brown Racing, a minor West Coast team. It didn’t start racing until three years after the real Procars had finished their run, and though it is an honest, real racer, competing in many events over three years, it never did more than fill out the middle-to-back of the grids. It is worth noting that this car sold in Paris, and Europeans notoriously don’t care about U.S. racing history.
It looks like a well-turned-out piece of kit, though, with all the right bits well restored to be a fully legal FIA vintage racer. It clearly has run important events in Europe over the past years, including the Le Mans Classic and five years of the Tour Auto, so there is little reason to doubt that it can continue to be a fun toy. It is essential to remember that “toy” is the operative term here. There is little collectible value. It is not road-registered; the BMW factory livery is inappropriate, if anyone cared; even the chassis number stamping is a bit dicey. But it looks, goes, and sounds like one worth twice the money. If that is what you want and understand what it is, then it was fairly bought. ♦
(Introductory description courtesy of Artcurial.)
