There are about 450 BMW M1s in the world. Most are red, white, or black. A handful are gryy. And exactly one has the cognac brown cloth-and-leather interior that everyone at the factory apparently thought was hideous. That car was at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este 2026. And it has a story.
The Color Nobody Ordered
When BMW offered the M1 to customers in the late 1970s, grey was on the options list. So was the brown interior. Nobody ordered either. According to Tom Plucinsky, Head of BMW Group Classic USA, the color combination sat unsold in a showroom until someone at the company decided the car had to go somewhere. The man who took it was Jochen Neerpasch, then head of BMW Motorsport, who was largely responsible for the M1 existing in the first place. He has since told multiple people he wishes he never sold it.
The current owner, a Munich-based collector who also has a 507 and a 3.0 CSL Batmobile, bought it at auction after a stranger chapter: a Chinese collector had kept the car in a private Hong Kong museum until a dispute with Chinese authorities forced him to liquidate the entire collection. The M1 ended up back in Munich. He bought it knowing it was a one-of-one spec. It was his second M1 — he’d previously owned a blue one.
Why The M1 Aas Built At All
The M1 was a homologation car. BMW needed a mid-engine platform it could develop into a competitive Group 4 and Group 5 racer, and the E9 CSL was getting too expensive to campaign. Converting a CSL for racing cost around 500,000 Deutschmarks in 1973. The M1’s street price was 150,000 DM, and you could turn it into a race car for about 50,000 more. The math was simple enough.
The development was not. Lamborghini was contracted to build the bodies, hit financial trouble, and the tooling had to be quietly extracted before creditors could claim it. Neerpasch, asked about this today, apparently just nods. The full story has never been told publicly. The work was eventually finished by Baur in Stuttgart.
The engine that ended up in the car was the M88 inline-six, chosen over a V12 partly because a longer car handles worse. In street form it made around 277 horsepower. In Group 4 race trim, 470. With turbocharging, certain race versions reached 1,000 hp from a 3.5-liter six, which is not a number anyone was taking for granted in 1979.
The Pro Car Series Saved It
By the time the M1 was ready to race, the Group 4 and Group 5 regulations it was built for had effectively moved on. BMW had a fleet of race cars and no series to run them in. The solution was the Procar Championship, run on Formula 1 weekends in 1979 and 1980, where the top five F1 qualifiers raced identical M1s against a grid of paid privateers. Niki Lauda won the first championship. It was televised. It put the car on the map in a way that a mid-pack Group 5 result never would have.
The M1 at Villa d’Este this year has Neerpasch’s signature on the engine bay. The original delivery paperwork is still with the car. The owner drives it.
