BMW i8 GTR Could Be The M1 Successor We’ve Been Waiting For

BMW hasn’t done a (conventional) mid-engined supercar since the M1. But this comes pretty darn close.

It looks like an i8 – and that’s the idea. But it’s actually a purpose-built silhouette racer, built around an entirely custom chassis. At its heart sits a 4.0-liter naturally aspirated V8 kicking out some 540 horsepower (402 kW), instead of the hybrid turbo triple found in the road-going i8 (where it currently produces 369 hp/275 kW). That comes up close to twice the power of the street car.

The result, as our friends at Motor1 point out, is what its constructor calls the i8 GTR, with the engine from the Z4 GTE sitting low in the middle of the tube frame. A French firm called Solution F helped develop it for the Hamofa Motor Sport team that will field it in the Belcar series. The national GT racing championship competes in Belgium on tracks like Spa and Zolder – two historic homes of the Belgian Grand Prix.

The vehicle weighs just 2,425 pounds (1,100 kilograms), which is nearly a thousand points (440 kg) lighter than the production i8 it’s cloaked to emulate. And with other competition-spec components, it ought to run circles around BMW’s flagship hybrid – which itself is hardly a slouch, hitting 62 mph (100 km/h) in 4.4 seconds and topping out at an electronically limited 155 mph (250 km/h).

What’s more is that the team plans an even more potent upgrade to bring it up closer to 600 hp (447 kW). You can check it out in the pair of videos below, but we can’t help but wonder how a machine like this would do as a road car.