The "M" in BMW M used to stand for Motorsport.
Today, M makes sport packages for front-wheel drive 2-Series Grand Corollas (gasp!) and it's
this car's fault. You thought the quickest way to burn cash was to go racing? No! The fastest way to
bankrupt yourself is to spend a fortune developing a race car that's not allowed to go racing. The
M1 may look like a road car but it's not. This is a race car and on the automotive hierarchy of
financial disasters, the M1 is certainly among, well, the prettiest. But it fell out of the
tragedy tree and hit every branch on the way down: a multiple contract recession, bankruptcy,
receivership, intellectual property theft, misappropriation of funds, bribery, chlamydia,
and a midnight raid to steal a bunch of cars out of a warehouse while everyone was
distracted by an auto show. Chlamydia? [Music] BMW's M is a very different thing now than it
was at the beginning. The biggest difference being that Motorsport had nothing to do with cars
that could be driven on the road. Motorsports. That's it. Done. M was founded in 1972
at the instigation of Bob Lutz who we now know as the granddaddy
of countless enthusiast cars. Maximum Bob was BMW's head of sales
and marketing and was a big fan of using racing as a way of building
an automotive brand's reputation. Many BMWs went racing but much of it wasn't
officially sanctioned and there was no central organization to manage all of it. Lutz fixed
this by approaching an ex-Le Mans racer named Jochen Neerspach and they created a racing
subsidiary — not a department within BMW, and that is a key point. BMW's Motorsport
company would be called BMW Motorsport company... with limited liability. Oh my God those
clever Germans, they're so creative! M's first order of business would be to officially
support racing endeavors and the results came quickly with Motorsport, and therefore BMW,
winning both the manufacturer and drivers titles in the 1973 European Touring Car Championship
using the 3.0 CSL. Things were looking good, but making a competitive race car out of the big,
fat CSL was costing a fortune. So Motorsports started to consider building a purpose-built
racing car from the ground up. Would it be a Group 4 racer to compete against extensively modified
production cars? ...or an insane Group 5 touring car to compete against purpose-built race cars
like the Porsche 935? ...or would it be a Formula One car? ...Or perhaps all three!? Motorsport
realized that touring car races based on roadgoing cars the public could buy could actually pull in
more viewers than Formula One — when Formula One drivers were involved in those touring car races.
So it would be a collab! ...and Motorsport could kill 3 birds with just one engine: BMW would make
a V-8 for Formula One for other teams to race, and then it would take that V8 and put it in
sports cars and touring cars for Motorsports to race and then to maximize the marketing impact
of all of that Motorsport activity. They would take the touring car and make a road car out
of it and sell that directly to the public. Bam! Maximum Impact! BMW chose Lamborghini
to carry out the development and Engineering of the car itself strange on the surface
because Lamborghini didn't make race cars, only road cars, but Lamborghini
had Giampaolo Dallara, who was, don't forget, a race car designer first and
foremost, having brought mid-engine race car design to the road for the first time ever with
the Miura. And so BMW signed a contract with Lamborghini to develop the German company's
new flagship:the mid-engined E26 BMW 9-series and then BMW immediately canceled the contract,
because they realized the Formula One engine would be too expensive and the car would be too heavy.
See, FIA regulations pegged the minimum weight of the touring car based on the road going version.
Big, heavy luxurious cars like a 9-series would wind up becoming big, heavy, uncompetitive race
cars. Cars that are BMWs needed to be luxurious but cars that were made by a new company called
BMW Motorsport company didn't, and so BMW signed a new contract with a Lamborghini for the E26/1:
a square-section tubular steel, space-framed, mid-engine, fiberglass-bodied race car that used
the 24-valve straight-6 from the CSL Touring Cars. There would be three versions: a Group 4 race car
that makes 470 horsepower a Group 5 race car that makes an outrageous 850 turbocharged horsepower,
and then of course the road car, which unlike almost every other car ever made, would be created
out of the race car and not the other way around. The race cars would be painted white with M's
now trademark three color livery — and I bet you didn't know where that came from. See,
shortly after its formation, M was working on a sponsorship deal with Texaco, so it took the
blue and white from the BMW logo (themselves taken from the Bavarian flag) and it combined them with
a stripe in Texaco red. Red white and blue aren't exactly Germanic so they overlapped the Bavarian
blue and Texaco red to make the third color, Purple! The Texaco sponsorship deal fell through,
but the M colors remain to this day. The M1's looks came from a 1972 concept car called the
Turbo designed in-house at BMW by Paul Bracq. BMW then hired Giorgetto Giugiaro to develop the Turbo
into a car that could actually be produced. He had his work cut out for him especially in concealing
the tall engine. See in other applications, BMW's engines were slanted over at 30 degrees. That put
the exhaust directly underneath the cylinder head and under sustained racing conditions, the heat
cooked the head. So for the M1, BMW took the M88 engine and mounted it perfectly vertically.
That's tall, and it was up to Giugiaro to hide that and make the whole thing look pretty. And I
think he did a pretty spectacular job don't you? Just six months after signing the contract
Lamborghini completed its engineering work on the E26 and to the complete satisfaction of
BMW's board. Now all the car needed was a name: the street car couldn't be called the BMW 935i
because that implied luxury car flagship, and the number 935 was taken by the Porsche 935, which was
the reigning racing car champion of the world. And besides, this was not a BMW, it was a Motorsport
car and Motorsport's first car so... M1. I think I just figured out how they named
this thing Motorsports first car... M... 1. M three weeks later, BMW terminated the contract
with Lamborghini again — this time because suppliers wouldn't work with Lamborghini because
Lamborghini was out of money. Lamborghini was out of money for the most amazing reason imaginable:
it had misappropriated funds from both the E26 project and a loan from the Italian government
given so that it could develop an off-road vehicle for the U.S military. In the process of
doing that, it copied another company's work, got caught, got sued, had to throw it all
out and start over wasting even more money! For the record, the original stolen work
eventually became the HUMMWV. Lamborghini's actual own work became the LM002 and I am
completely off on a tangent that's a whole 'nother episode. But to make things worse, Lamborghini
had possession of the parts, prototypes, and tooling for the M1, and its striking
workers wouldn't release any of it to BMW. So BMW did exactly what anyone would do:
they showed up in the middle of the night with a bunch of trucks broke into the Lamborghini
factory and stole back all of their stuff [Music] I am required by international law to point out
that BMW was the rightful owner and stole nothing but merely reclaimed its own property. Whatever.
Next up: a scramble to pick up the pieces and get the M1 into production. To keep the engineering
side going, BMW hired Ital Engineering, formed by a bunch of ex-Lamborghini engineers who
had been working on the car before the bankruptcy. A company called TIR made the fiberglass body,
another named Marchese made the enormously strong 428 pound tubular frame. ItalDesign,
Giugiaro's company, agreed to help too, sourcing and assembling the entire interior.
And then German coach Builder Baur installed the BMW engine and ZF transaxle when it all
finally arrived in Stuttgart of all places. It had a lot of BMW badges on it but this was
not a BMW! This was a BMW Motorsport. Look, it says it right there: BMW Motorsport. Or over
their BMW Motorsport GmbH München, West Germany. The engine made 277 horsepower from an
independent-throttle-body 3.5- liter, dry-sump straight-six that meant serious speed
in a car that weighed just 3 100 pounds. It was just as quick as the 12-cylinder rockets from
Lamborghini and Ferrari: the Countach and 512BB. Road tests were full of praise for everything
— from its performance to its civilized nature, which is all the more impressive given this was
designed primarily as a race car. But ironically, it's in racing where the real problems were: FIA
homologation rules required BMW build 400 of these for the street. Until that happens, there would be
no racing. Unfortunately, BMW's revised scattered production plan meant they could only build
200 a year. That meant that for two full years, BMW was stuck trying to sell a road version of
a race car that wasn't allowed to go racing. The interim solution was to create an entirely
new racing series just for the M1 — and I mean literally just for the M1. Single-marque racing
series are tiresome but this one had a twist: ProCar, as the series was called, would happen
at Formula One races, and it would pit privateer touring-car drivers against Formula One drivers.
Now that's a collab! At each of eight races per season, the top five Formula One drivers from
Friday's practice would race Factory-owned M1s against privateers racing their own M1s.
And to make sure everybody took it seriously, the prize money flowed like champagne. M even
paid a bonus for every lap that a privateer led a Formula One driver — and you thought Squid
Games was Bloody! The Group 4 cars used the same engine as the street car, with just a bunch
of tiny tweaks — and they made 470 horsepower at a screaming 9000 RPM. With just 2200 pounds
to deal with, they hit 60 in four seconds they were perfectly reliable — remember the M1 had
been engineered to withstand the stresses of 850 turbocharged horsepower for group 5 racing
which never happened. And one of the reasons why was that the streetgoing M1 was a really hard
sell. It might have been quiet inside at speed, but it was still designed to be a race car
and that meant things like no power steering. Like many mid-engined Italian supercars, the
front wheel is where your body wants to be, and so the steering wheel is seriously offset to
the right and at a diagonal. And yet the pedals are so much further offset that even the clutch
pedal is to the right of the steering column. This thing is crooked... just like the Italians who
engineered it! It was also very very expensive: BMW originally intended to sell the M1 for 100,000
Deutsche marks, which was Countach money. But thanks ironically to Lamborghini's Financial
Fiasco, production got way more expensive. So the price bumped to 113,000 until BMW couldn't
sell them and had to Discount the M1 to 90 grand. And even then BMW was only ever able to sell 399
road cars. That's half as many as it wanted to, and a quarter as many as it intended to produce
when it thought of this as a 935i flagship. In other words, the M1 was — despite its good
looks, its supercar provenance, its spectacular performance, good build quality, and universal
praise — a failure. After shoehorning this same engine into the 5-series just for Scheiße und
Giggles, M's next big project was the E30 M3, which became the winningest touring car ever —
and yet was an incredibly hard sell to buyers. From here on out you can trace The Descent of M
from truly a Motorsports subsidiary to the street car department that today puts its badges on every
car that BMW makes. The reason why is simple: people don't actually want to drive a race car
on the road. What the people want is cars with a hint of Motorsport... and all it takes is
some extra power here, a spoiler over there, and a couple M Badges... and then people open
their wallets and pay through the nose for nothing more than a glorified sport package! It's
brilliant! Don't forget: BMW isn't in business to make cars. BMW is in business to make money. And
even though the only car that Motorsport ever built from the ground up was a financial disaster,
Motorsport's actual Motorsport activity elevated the letter M to such astronomical Heights that
the money still rains down from it today. [Music] Finally! There's that bribe
money I've been waiting for.
Thanks as always Jason and your team! Even when I’m not passionate about your pick going in, it’s hard not to keep up with your enthusiasm.
Hagerty giving Cammisa a solid budget and crew resulted in some of the best car YouTube content.
Cammisa needs to be on Top Gear
I was pretty young when this came out and loved it immediately.
I can't tell if BMW copied a Pantera, a DeLorean, or a Fiero. Or all 3 lol.
That inline-6 sounds great.
The two BMW logos on the rear look so weird.
Never knew much about the history of the M1. What an interesting episode.
An Italian car. Nice.
This was absolutely fantastic. I'm going to watch more of these videos. There is so much great info. Loved it.