Tuesday 9th December 2014

BMW M1 Procar: Time For Tea?

Only a simple onboard but you must see it. Or rather hear it

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Hopefully you've seen across PH social media that we have a BMW 1 M Coupe in at the moment. There will be a full PH Hero story on it in due course, plus a great deal more excitement about the car until then. It has rather captivated those who have driven it thus far.

On conventional naming strategy it should have been called M1 but of course that had been done previously. And how. This is not the place to detail the M1 story, instead to briefly celebrate the glorious Procar racers spawned from the road car. Using a 470hp version of the road car's straight-six, the M1 Procars raced in an F1 support series for 1979 and 1980.

Oh, that straight-six. The BMW M88 is pretty special in its road car installations but this racing version is something else again. Apparently it revs to 9,000rpm. The noise is divine. Fortunately this video is decent quality so you get the full effect. There's a case for this being the best straight-six noise in the world, in my humble opinion of course. See below for proof!

Vid here (headphones advised...).

 

 

[fatboy69]

Loving that noise so much.

All race cars should sound like that. Perfect.

[fatboy69]

When I worked for the Patrick Collection way back we had a white M1 road car which was registered XOX 1T.

We had some stunning cars - 288GTO, the worlds only complete collection of a road going version of every Group B car, as well as some ex- works rally cars, & a Daytona to name just a few.

Apart from the GTO & the Daytona the M1 was my number one choice when it came to the 'which car shall I go home in tonight' decision.

It was stunning to drive. An absolute joy whether you were sitting in traffic, crawling along at 15 MPH or driving briskly on the motorway.