An Homage to the Future – BMW Homage

“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 out 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.

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.

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 1970’s, 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 Stuggart.

BMW endowed the E26 with a 3.5 liter inline 6-cylinder engine. Code-named M88, the engine featured a new 24-valve aluminum head with two chain-driven camshafts, dry sump lubrication, and Kugelfisher-Bosh 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 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, the first BMW to utilize retractable headlamps and the only one to ever wear two BMW emblems on its tail.

Unfortunately, the rules for sport racing cars changed before the M1 could win back BMW’s honor, rendering it obsolete right out of the gate. Moreover, the car’s steep price (a cool $50,000, which was twice the price of then current BMW’s 7 series 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-eyes 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 and says “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.