History
The BMW M1 in the past
History
The BMW M1 in the past
The History section of our website summarizes the history of the BMW M1 in the past:
At Stories it’s about the origin of the idea, the concept and the contemporary witnesses who accompanied the M1
In the PROCAR area, we take a close look at the motorsport aspect of the BMW M1. We not only tell the stories about our own PROCAR racing series, but also about the M1 in Le Mans, Group 4 and Group 5 events and the M1 Artcar …
In the STREETCAR area you will find reports on the road version of the M1 with lots of photos and extensive documentation on the production of the M1.
In the Technology section you will find the technical data for the BMW-M1 versions ‘Streetcar’ and ‘PROCAR’ in the sections Technical Design, Crash Tests and Technical Data.
The Story of the M1
The story of the BMW M1
We report on the development of the idea, the concept and the contemporary witnesses who accompanied the M1.
The history of the M1 begins at the beginning of January 1972 with a phone call from the then BMW sales director Bob Lutz to Jochen Neerpasch, who had been a successful racing director at Ford in Cologne since 1969 …
Many greats in motorsport have accompanied the M1 in its creation and in its active racing car career. Some of them can be seen here and we have also prepared one or the other brief profile for you.
The
PROCAR-Series
More interesting pages on the subject PROCAR
The BMW M1 Streetcar
The Street Version of the BMW M1
The M1 is one of the rare examples of an automobile, where the race version has been the model for the road version. During the Geneva Motorshow in Spring 1977 rumours roaming around for quite some time were finally confirmed. BMW worked on a new car which was sure to be something very special.
Technics
for Streetcar and Procar
A technical perspective on the BMW M1
The development of the BMW M1 was driven by aspects related to a potentially successfull racing career. The road version was the spin-off. Nevertheless it was considered important to conform with the “Allgemeine Betriebserlaubnis” (ABE), the German regulation defining the requirements for a car to be allowed generally on German roads. This was the only way to avoid the exhaustive and expensive “Einzelabnahmen” – an admission for the road on an individual basis to be passed for each single car. The ABE also required crash tests. Thanks to that requirement, the M1 features a crash-optimised front section.
