The BMW M1 is almost universally admired today for its good looks and surprising performance. But in almost every other way, it was, in its day, a failure for BMW and the reasons why help explain why the M brand behaves the way it does now.
In a new video from Hagerty, Jason Cammisa tracks the history of the M1, a car that was so mired in controversy that it failed to meet almost every target set for it. That story starts with the M brand, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
As BMW was only too happy to remind the world, its history started with the enormously successful 3.0 CSL. A luxury car retrofitted for racing, its success was a bit of a quandary for the automaker, because it was so expensive to build.
BMW M, therefore, decided to make a new racecar from the ground up, under the logic that it would be easier to add luxury to a racecar than to take it out. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done, because the rules set by the racing series it wanted to enter required that weight limits be set by the cars on the road, whether or not the racecar was designed first.
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That meant that, in order to have a successful racecar, BMW couldn’t base it on a luxury car. The brand didn’t want to sell a racecar for the road, so it instead turned to BMW M GmbH, which was, at the time, a separate company.
Thus, it could produce a racecar, sell it to the public as the contemporary equivalent of a supercar, and not worry about confusing BMW buyers. And journalists loved the result. Widely praised for its impressive performance and its excellent build quality, the car looked like a winner.
Except that, to become a winner on the track, BMW would have to build 400 to satisfy homologation requirements. Because of an extremely complicated development process, though, BMW was only able to actually make 200 a year, meaning that the racecar for the road wasn’t really a racecar.
And although BMW eventually found a workaround, all of that complication meant that the car was inordinately expensive, featured awkward seating, didn’t have power steering, and wasn’t as comfortable as a luxury vehicle.
That made it tough to sell, and the automaker only ever ended up making 399 M1s, which it had to discount by the end of the production cycle in order to get customers to buy them. It was, in short, a financial disaster.
But the engine that powered the M1 did eventually make its way into a sedan, and that led eventually to the M3, and over time, to the M lineup we know today, which has put its badges on nearly every car BMW sells. No longer strictly a motorsport company, the brand learned, through expensive mistakes, that people don’t want a racecar for the road. They want a road car with a little bit of racecar added on top.