BMW M1 - the Munich Masterpiece (with a little help from Lamborghini!) | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

hello and welcome to another tyrells classic workshop this time around we're focusing on a bit of a gem from the 1970s a car that uh was a joint effort to the point where it's sort of a miracle it's here at all really because every turn it was thwarted and that car is the bmw m1 now bmw in the mid-1970s were looking at porsche very jealously because they were winning a lot of group 5 races with their 935 and so bmw decided they wanted a bit of the action too they were making loads of money with sales of the three and five series the six and seven series were about to come on stream all very very good drivers cars front engine rear wheel drive they called them at the time the ultimate driving machine and you know they could lay claim to being what some of the most enjoyable cars to drive on the road because they were the classic front engine rear wheel drive layout of course most cars nowadays are front wheel drive or even four-wheel drive but things were very different then and the joy of that is that you can balance the car on the throttle and it all just drives really nicely but bmw broke the mould with this they realized that if they wanted to go racing to try and get into group five and win it against their arch rival porsche by this time they wanted to start with a clean sheet so they came up with the fact that first of all the car had to be mid-engined and up until the i8 this is the only mid-engined bmw ever built uh quite restoring really but they stuck to that recipe of front engine rear wheel drive so much obviously it changed over the years but by this time it that was it that was all they had and they decided to concept this car around that uh it had to be a racing car if it was going to win races so they went to lamborghini in santagota bologna in italy and they had a word with the brilliant gian paolo de lara and other people at lamborghini and he designed the chassis for this mid-engine car it's sort of conceptually halfway between a miura and a countach chassis it's box sections but it's also got bits of space frame in it as well it's quite an interesting hot pot but it works boy does it work and bmw came up with the m88 one 24 valve twin cam straight six engine using the standard cast iron uh big block of the biggest straight six engines the three liter 3.3 3.5 and the whole thing came together or didn't because lamborghini came up with the design giorgitto giugiaro designed the body and it was all done in the sort of santagata area in northern italy apart from the engine and gearbox the gearbox is a zf standard zf transaxle and things started to go wrong when when cracks started to appear in lamborghini because lamborghini were in terrible financial trouble in the late 70s they were being rescued by the local municipality financially and they could barely just about make countaches and silhouettes and uracos at that time they were really fighting for survival so lamborghini saw this as a lifeline to extra cash problem was it was sort of almost too little too late at the time before the company got restructured and taken over in the late 70s and early 80s but bmw didn't know that so it sort of all started to fall apart gianparlo de lara as i say designed a fabulous chassis for it very much along racing lines that beautiful twin cam four valve cylinder straight six sat in the middle and italian styled body and what ended up happening was um the chassis were built by marchese very famous chassis builder in italy they built the chassis for the miura and the countach and lots of other italian cars at that time and then the fiberglass body was bonded over the top of it at another location 10 kilometers away from the lamborghini factory some ex-lamborghini employees and then the car went to germany for trimming and final fettling and to have the engine etcetera put in i mean it was just it was a logistical they probably did more miles traveling around europe than some of them did in the first two years of their lives on the road but we are where we are as i say then then what happened was the rules changed because group five which bmw uh set out to race in ceased to exist in that form so then they had to change the card to group four i mean it was just like working on quicksand the whole project to homologate the car to make it suitable for racing they had to make 400 of them for road use they ended up making just over 450 and some of those were racing cars for a one make series that they did with these cars which was very successful in 1979 i think nikki lowder won the 1979 m1 series if i'm not mistaken but this car is a really fabulous example of the m1 it's one owner from six months old it had one owner from new to six months old and then the gentleman that we're repairing it for now has had it since it was six months old right through to now the car has never been restored it's been very much kept up to speed mechanically and every last belt hose fitting pipe has been kept it comes with the car still but the car is absolutely original all the paint works original and what could be cooler than a set of original bmw motorsport stripes which are slightly worn through with polish doesn't get much cooler than that really this particular car has only done 20 000 kilometers from new 12 and a half thousand miles it's not running on all six cylinders it's got a petrol leak so it's come in for a few bits and bobs and hopefully we're going to turn this car into something that works properly again and really well um the yeah it's it's interesting because the first time i worked on a drove an m1 was in the early 90s it was an orange car they're all left-hand drive no right-hand drive cars for the uk or anywhere else and i wasn't ever fantastically impressed with the styling it looked a bit clunky and i thought it's only a three and a half liter engine straight six and the first time i drove one back then 27 28 years ago now i was blown away by it some cars really disappoint me when i drive them i've had this great big build up oh this you know i'm really looking forward to this and they're a crushing disappointment and others i've sort of sidelined and written off in a way and then you drive them and they just come to life and they completely surprise you and this falls into the latter category it's quite an interesting mishmash of italian and german technology but all the switchgear all the interior is very functional it's very mainline production bmw they just raided the the parts bins off the production line for a lot of the the fixtures and fittings but it's just it's a really interesting curio it's fitted with kugelfischer fuel injection which started out as a lot of mechanical injection systems did being based on a diesel system but it works really well it's got the individual throttle bodies which every self-respecting boy racer must have on their car these days well hello this had it in 1977 and it needed it so it's a really really good bit of kit it's not particularly heavy it's under 1300 kilos fiberglass body there are a couple of quirks about this car which are quite whimsical or quite interesting or unusual first one is and i don't know even how many bmw m1 drivers or owners knew that you could do this but you've got a tiny little catch here and if you release that you've got an access panel into this area here for all the electrical and mechanical gubbins that's under there quite funny really and the second thing is it's got two badges on the back bmw are obviously very proud of this car so they put a bmw badge on the left and a bmw badge on the right just in case you didn't know i would particularly like to make special mention of something that i've been uh sent by dirk motz from constantine vice this beautiful watch obviously some people have commented and noticed my trusty old rolex submariner that i've had for the last 35 years but this is a beautiful piece and he actually he's made the face out of recycled lamborghini espada a car very close to my heart so i do just want to say a huge thank you to dirk i look forward to wearing that very much well the cars come in for a petrol leak from the fuel injection pipes which we're going to have to get also it's running on five cylinders not six and i know from experience that these engines actually eat spark plugs if they're started and shunted round and stopped again so i'm going to find out very easily with this the days of doing this on the exhaust manifolds fortunately have long since gone and we can just use one of these wizzy little temperature gauges to see which which exhaust manifold stem coming out of the cylinder head is coolest it is only one cylinder down so it'll be really easy to identify and then i'm going to change the plugs anyway because uh they're precious metal plugs in these cars iridium or gold palladium or platinum or whatever but they they just don't last if unless the car is started driven and warmed up as of course its makers intended it to be and anything other than that and the insulation of spark plugs just breaks down and they actually short out before the spark that gets to the the business end of the plug at the end the electrodes just a combination of unburnt fuel and things causing problems on the end of the plug so we're going to do that we'll see if we can get hold of some fuel injection hoses and then hopefully the car car's going to be on the way to being right we've started the engine up now i'm just going to look at all the exhaust outlets and it's very easy to see which one is not running it is only down on one cylinder these are all about 250 degrees celsius running out of cylinders here okay there it is number one 45 degrees c all the others are much much hotter than that so that's easy peasy it's just fun to find out which pot it is we'll put a new set of plugs in it and there's no reason why it shouldn't be back on to six pots then then we start the business of changing the fuel injection pipes and setting the engine up well fortunately the fuel injection pipes even though they've only made 400 of these cars or there are thereabouts bmw remarkably had a set of injector pipes in stock for the car it's uh it's just a series of six flexible plastic pipes high pressure pipes with connections on the end and there we are 500 pounds plus that thank you very much but it's just amazing what are the car manufacturer would have parts like this in stock for a 1970s car that they only made 400 off incredible all we need to do now is work out how they go in what order so that we get them right but yeah we'll fit these and hopefully get the engine back into life on all six pots and running beautifully well having got the right fuel injection pipes marcus has now been fitting the right pipes but not necessarily in the right order no i just we've fitted them according to fire order they follow exactly the routine to the old one so we'll bleed the system out we'll start the engine and hopefully it'll be leak-free we've then got to tune the engine balance the air intakes and there we are we should have a sweet bmwm one well the grill is an obvious example of bmw's less is more philosophy this beautiful kidney grill arrangement at the front a philosophy that they still adhere to today the less is more grill design but it really does set this car off beautifully and as i mentioned this is the original paintwork from 1978 it's a little bit crazed in places but still beautifully original and reflects this cars 20 000 kilometers from new we've put a new set of plugs in now she is back on six pots which is great before we put the air filter and trunking back on i'm going to balance the inlet tracts to make sure that the engine is idling these engines do watch the idle in spite of their sort of relatively high tech for a road car used at the time such as four valves per cylinder and fuel injection and not common in the 1970s particularly they do still idle quite smoothly so i'm going to make sure that that's doing that then we can put it all back together and then we'll take it out on the road and give it a run [Music] foreign [Music] well we've got this far fuel injection pipes are on systems bled out uh i've been along all the uh the throttles and synchronized all those mixtures set so um i'm going to just try my little party trick it's a bit ambitious on an engine like this because this is a fairly highly tuned engine it's got a reasonably high specific output for a 1970s engine it's about 78 brake horsepower liter um 3.5 liter engine 273 brake horsepower but we'll see we'll try i'm quite happy with the way it's tuned in actually so we're going to start it up and i'll see if i can balance a pound coin on the engine just get it settled down carefully avoiding the throttles so we don't lose the coin in the engine yes there we are oh not bad for 1970s technology yes the important thing i can't over stress it enough really with all these cars is to make sure they are thoroughly warmed through before uh before you start driving them in any way other than gently just get everything moving get everything warm through don't let it idle at very low revs on your driveway because that kills the internals of the engine as well just warm it up if you mustered about 1500 rpm something like that but um this car is now lovely we've got uh plenty of oil pressure oil temperatures about a third of a way up the scale cooling system is good and yeah the car is is riding very well considering this started life as a as a racing car which was detuned for the road it's very very comfortable there's not much room in here that has to be said i wouldn't like to wear a crash helmet as well uh but um yeah it's uh the steering's lovely and direct brakes are good you only have to touch the throttle and it picks up as you'd imagine with itbs as they're called these days individual throttle bodies uh no self-respecting tuned forward should be without one these days but in the 1970s very few road cars had individual throttle bodies yeah it's just uh it drives like a 20 000 kilometer car a 12 000 mile car gearbox is dead easy clutch isn't particularly heavy uh it's uh it's really user friendly as i mentioned earlier the switch gear in this is very utilitarian it's out of a bmw three or five series or seven series of the period or six the whole range they all use the same switches but they're a bit billy basic for a uh a supercar but they do the job and they carry on doing the job um but yeah it's uh it's coming together well of course this isn't really what this car was built for just tinkering around like this it was built for uh being driven and i'm just making sure because it's this is the first time i've driven this car that it's actually behaving itself and i've got enough confidence in it to uh to drive it reasonably quickly but so far so good i have to say it's also remarkably refined this car uh i mean i'm just speaking at sort of normal normal voice levels here and uh i can actually hear myself think which is more than you can in some cars yeah it's uh it's all together good the first time i worked on a drone bmw m1 it was an orange one and that was about 1993 so uh i have worked on a few but apparently there's only two that are currently road registered and street legal in the uk at the moment this car isn't from the uk um but uh and they were all made left-hand drive so that was it but um it just absolutely inspires confident it's like a little pussycat this car the ride is super smooth for a uh a high performance road car i mean 280 brake horsepower and 160 odd miles an hour seems laughable now but in the day this was right up there uh with um maybe not the likes of the ferrari boxer or the lamborghini countach but uh certainly close to 911 turbo performance for sure and the engine is pulling cleanly from low revs which as i keep saying is always a good sign that um that the engine is in fine fatal yeah it's uh it's all good it's the bmw really did a good job of uh making this a road car turning it from a group five racing car into a road car and ended up selling uh 450 ish of them it's got electric windows which which still work perfectly quite quick for a 1970s car air conditioning all the creature comforts really that uh that a car should have a luxury car should have even then clutch is light gearbox it's a zf gearbox in this which is a really sweet gear change considering it has to go around the engine and the gearboxes at the back um yeah it's it's just a very good overall package i'm just starting to pick the speed up a bit now on not as much the speed but the engine load and revs bring it gently to life and uh all good it's very very happy that engine really is remarkably smooth uh very tractable uh just for mischief i'll take it down to very low revs that's 30 kilometers an hour about uh in fact it's 25 kilometers an hour which is about 18 miles an hour i'm in third gear there and the engine is doing 1400 rpm and it's still very very smooth just open the throttle a bit and she's off no hesitation no lumpiness no objections that fuel injection is doing its job just beautifully it was very expensive the kugelfischer injection which uh obviously bmw wanted max performance and the reason they put the kugelfischer injection on was because it was first of all a racing engine but they decided to keep it for the road the later electronic injection systems the algeotronic as it was called that was starting to come in at that time was cheaper to make in fact bmw used it on their their later big sixes and uh yeah it's uh it works very well when it's right again it's not the cleanest system either the exhaust emissions weren't fantastic from it but um yeah i think it's time to open the taps and take it for a blast oh yes wow it may only be 280 brake horsepower but that is just glorious what a noise as well ah yes almost addictive that uh i could quite see you needing your regular fix of bmw m1 should be available on the nhs uh yeah what a wonderful wonderful thing but i have to say uh the bmw m1 i always had downdoes not a fantastic car until i drove one first of all in 1992-93 i couldn't believe how well it handled it just handles fantastically well again it's uh john paula delara the genius uh gentleman that is john paula de la obviously designed and developed the chassis for bmw for this car while he was working at um in consultation with lamborghini and um it is a it is an italian it's an italian job the uh the chassis of this car and boy is it sublime it just handles beautifully beautiful uh mid-engined weight distribution all the weight in the middle where it should be low polar moment of inertia no big weight at the front or the back just a fantastically balanced car and it amazed me when i first drove one of these when i first worked on one just how beautiful they are to drive it really is a fabulous car i can see why they're so collectible and in a way why they are so uh cherished and and valuable um it really is just a car that you could you could go touring in it's not just um a car for a two-hour fix it really is just amazing i'm just gonna take it around some of these bends and just have a bit of fun with it because uh it's just just really really really saying come on come on beautifully balanced fantastic precision it goes exactly where you point it ah just wonderful there's no snap off oversteer you can do what you like with them and they stay planted on the road which is just fantastic um you know there's a lot of cars of course the porsche 911 is known for it and the back end can uh go on them i mean the mercedes 300 sl gull wing the rear suspension um was whilst it was independent i.e each wheel was not suspension was not directly connected to the other per se and it did it did lead to the wheels adopting some very very strange angles in relation to the road which meant you didn't have the full tire contact patch and that could happen very quickly just if the car changed attitude in a fraction of a second um all of a sudden you instead of the car being the tyre being perpendicular to the road it was um off with uh with positive camber which is not good news but this car oh just wonderful uh it's uh it's got properly sorted suspension with decent geometry always keeps the tires in perfect contact with the road for its era and the result is just fun fun fun [Music] uh it's quite an interesting mix this car because of course it's german german-funded german-inspired german engine german gearbox but the rest of it is largely italian and uh it's an interesting meld of uh italian handling and german firepower and it's sort of all the controls are were designed using bmw components they're all very easily full to hand here the heater controls the air conditioning even the radio dare i say it everything just is very much i mean bmw were going through there starting to go through their wrap around dash phase at this period with the six series and the seven series but this isn't wrap around but it's just very ergonomically right um there's no there's no um as goes with the fact that it was a first and foremost a functional race car um it's all very very uh organically uh easy to operate uh quite remarkable really but you've got that wonderful italian chassis underneath it all which is a great combination it's almost like an audi period lamborghini um the aventador or the the huracan it's a similar sort of concept really uh where you have audi infrastructure uh to a certain extent an influence through the lamborghini range and yeah it um it's not unpleasant you you could uh drive this car quite a long way and have confidence in it i would be quite happy to to drive this car a long distance now it just feels bulletproof um which is uh which is brilliant and i'd feel as though the cut the seats reasonably comfy the interior is a bit cramped but um i'd feel reasonably confident that i'd get out the other end um still having a pair of arms and legs that i can actually use under back yeah it's great absolutely wonderful love this car [Music] [Applause] well that concludes another tyrell's classic workshop video hope you've enjoyed it if you have please like please share please subscribe and we'll be back with something else soon you

Channel: Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Views: 202,702

Rating: 4.9752655 out of 5

Keywords: Iain Tyrrell, Tyrrell's Classic Workshop, Classic Car Expert, Classic Car Restoration, Classic Car Insights, Classic Cars Cheshire, Lamborghini, BMW, M1, Race Car, Homologation, Gian Paolo Dallara, Motorsport, Giorgetto Giugiaro, 3.5L M88 6 Cylinder Engine, Kugelfischer-Bosch mechanical fuel injection, Paul Rosche, ZF Manual Transmission Gearbox

Id: qizbfQKlCIw

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dyonisos911]

That man could give a lecture about cauliflower gardens and I would probably enjoy it

[u/TappedOut182]

I was lucky enough to see an M1 in person a few years back in Hennarot. Photos and videos do not do these cars justice. They were always “meh” and then I saw one in person. They are breathtaking.

[u/Clareth_GIF]

This workshop is like a showroom of a dealership, with all the absolute gems it has in it.

[u/LasVegasWasFun]

Gotta wait til 23:00 before he drives it harder

[u/_galaga_]

When I was a kid the M1 was the first BMW I became aware of, I loved the shape, and I thought all BMWs were like this. I had no idea it was such an outlier for the brand at the time. That set me up for a bit of confusion through the rest of the '80s and beyond as the M3 came out and all the various 3s, 5s, 6s, 7s, etc. since then that were front engined/RWD "normal" looking cars. I've been secretly hoping BMW revive the M1 at some point since the '80s but no dice.