This car is not scheduled to go into series production," insists BMW’s automotive design director, Adrian van Hooydonk. Standing before this Liquid-Orange dream machine with the look of cultivated indifference that has become his signature style, the Dutch-born designer adds, "The goal of this concept study is really celebrating our rich heritage and showing how BMW wants to work with that tradition."

Hunkered on the gravel driveway, before the grand façade of the Hotel Villa d’Este on Italy’s Lake Como, the M1 Homage arrived as the star of this year’s Concorso d’Eleganza. First held in 1929, the event draws some of the world’s most rare and perfectly preserved vintage automobiles, along with a handful of contemporary concept cars, for two days of convivial rivalry. Notes van Hooydonk, "The Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este has always been a competition between car designers. Studios in the past used to design a study especially for this Concorso, and we wanted to revive that."

As the only mid-engine BMW production car, the M1 is exotic even by exotic-car standards. It was created to make BMW competitive again in Group 4 Grand Touring Car and Group 5 Sports Car racing in Europe, the successor to the 3.0 CSL sports-racing car, now well past its prime and routinely sucking the exhaust of Porsche’s slant-nose 935. Work on "Project E26" commenced in secret—and haste—during 1976. The car was to be the first entirely unique model from BMW’s four-year-old Motorsport GmbH racing subsidiary.

"Before the M1, BMW Motorsport had modified BMW road cars for racing, but never developed a car from the ground up," explains Dave Buchko, BMW’s motorsport and heritage communications specialist. "The M1 was their first, and technically their only road car, because subsequent M models were all based on existing production BMWs."

Resource- and time-strapped, BMW reluctantly entrusted the engineering and fabrication of E26’s tube-steel chassis to Lamborghini, which would also assemble the 400 street-legal cars required for racing homologation. Unfortunately, Lamborghini was running on empty in the late 1970s, thanks largely to the oil crisis. In 1978, the company declared bankruptcy after producing only a handful of E26 prototypes.

BMW’s Motorsport team regrouped and—following a raid on the Lamborghini factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese to steal back the E26’s bodywork molds before the company’s receiver sold them for scrap—divvied up the car’s production duties between three companies: Marchesi would craft the Lamborghini-designed chassis in Modena, ItalDesign would fit the fiberglass body panels in Turin, and Baur would install the mechanical components and interior pieces in Stuttgart.

BMW endowed the E26 with a 3.5-liter in-line 6-cylinder engine. Code-named M88, the engine featured a new 24-valve aluminum head with two chain-driven camshafts, dry sump lubrication, and Kugelfischer-Bosch indirect injection. In street tune, it produced 273 hp, sufficient to launch the car’s 3,100 pounds to 60 mph in about 5.5 seconds—on its way to a 165-mph top speed. In Group 4 tune, the engine belted out some 470 hp and for Group 5 competition, it carried a turbocharged 3.2-liter straight six producing a truly startling 850 hp.BMW unveiled the E26—christened "M1"—at the Paris Motor Show in October 1978, and the car began series production the following year. Designer Giorgetto Giugiaro drew extensively from Paul Bracq’s 1972 Turbo concept in styling the M1 (see sidebar), the first BMW to utilize retractable headlamps and the only one to ever wear two BMW emblems on its tail.

Unfortunately, the rules for sports-racing cars changed before the M1 could win back BMW’s lost honor, rendering it obsolete right out of the gate. Moreover, the car’s steep price—a cool 100,000 Deutschmarks (roughly $50,000, or about twice the price of BMW’s then-new 7-series flagship sedan) made it a hard sell in Europe, despite its impressive performance and stylish shape. Seemingly undaunted, BMW initiated an ambitious one-make ProCar series for the Group 4 M1 during 1979 and 1980. The effort proved futile. By July 1981, with a scant 456 examples built (400 of them road cars), the M1 concluded its run.

All that is forgotten now. The years have purified the M1; memories of the struggles and disappointments of its creation, brief life, and abrupt demise have long since faded away, and what remains is an automotive triumph. To his great credit, van Hooydonk has not merely mined the Bracq and Giugiaro designs for visual nostalgia. This is no dewy-eyed pastiche; it is a fiercely compelling, wholly modern shape that even without its famous moniker would capture the eye and quicken the pulse.

Amid artful nods to the old car (finely sculpted wheels that riff on the original Campagnolo alloys, for instance), the Homage is awash in current—and, likely, future—BMW styling cues. Van Hooydonk points to the hood’s leading edge: "The original M1 had pop-up headlamps, and that we would not do for safety reasons. But we can actually make the headlamps come out of this very narrow slot. With LED technology, that would be possible."

From nose to tail, the Homage is a landscape of taut, organic forms and razor-fine edges. "Sharp lines belong to BMW design because they are an expression of engineering precision," van Hooydonk says. His hand follows the crisp perimeter of the roofline rearward as it defines a recessed air inlet and, further back, the shut line of the engine cover. "You see, all the lines pick up speed toward the rear," he explains. "The rear view is important; it is what people would see when they are being overtaken by this car."

The M1 Homage unveiled at Villa d’Este has no interior fitments or power train components, and BMW won’t even humor us with speculation regarding the latter. It seems likely, however, that a hypothetical production version would employ the V-10 engine from the M5, perhaps enlarged from 5 to 5.5 liters and reinvigorated by a pair of turbochargers. Such a car would square off neatly with the forthcoming twin-turbo V-10-powered Audi R8 and the SLR McLaren successor from Mercedes-Benz, the SLC.

BMW, www.bmwusa.com
Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, www.concorsodeleganzavilladeste.com

Origin of the Species
The great Giorgetto Giugiaro’s automotive designs—cars as wildly divergent as the 1966 De Tomaso Mangusta and the 1974 Volkswagen Golf—have never come up short on originality, but there’s no denying that the maestro’s sensational wedge shape for the production M1 owes much to an earlier (and even more radical) supercar. Penned by BMW’s chief stylist Paul Bracq, a Frenchman whose earlier projects included France’s TGV high-speed locomotive and the seminal 1963 Mercedes-Benz 600 limousine), the BMW Turbo prototype debuted at the Munich Summer Olympic Games in 1972 (the same year Giugiaro unveiled the Lotus Esprit at the Turin Motor Show). A rolling showcase of advanced technology and cutting-edge aesthetic sensibility, the two-seat Turbo (far right in the photo below) featured gullwing doors, skirted rear wheels, and a driver-centric cockpit jam-packed with futuristic, aircraft-inspired instrumentation. A mid-mounted 2-liter turbocharged 4-cylinder engine produced 280 hp, sufficient to enable a 165-mph top speed. The fully drivable Turbo concept also incorporated an array of innovative safety features, including an integrated roll-cage, deformable foam-filled bumpers, a collapsible steering column, and a radar-based collision avoidance system.