How Many BMW M1 Were Made

Bell's total is the commonest, and others repeat it. The US National Historic Vehicle Register's entry on the Warhol car gives it for 1979 to 1981, with the same road-car figure as BMW's, and the buying guide Motor Sport published in 2021 splits it into road cars, racing cars and a prototype. Two writers in Motor Sport in 2008 printed a higher total. Richard Heseltine, that March, put it in years that stop before the last cars were finished:

Adam Cooper gave the same figure that October for "road and racing cars" over 1978–81, and Honest John Classics gives a total one higher again, with no breakdown. The writers of the period were rounder. Walton, in April 1981, wrote of the 400 cars that FISA had authenticated for racing; in 1984 M.L.C. put it at "only 450 examples" in the same magazine that March, and A.H. at "just over 400" in December. Group 4, in BMW's account of the rule, called for 400 cars built within 2 years, and FISA's 400 were the cars that met it.

The Register sorts its serials by kind, and counting its rows gives the classes below. The road cars carry a second number, "Serie" 1 upwards, each number used once and none missing. The racing cars are marked PROCAR, with numbers from 0 to 40, 35 given to two serials and one serial left without a number. The rest are BMW's own cars and the pieces left over:

The works and pre-series cars all went through Italdesign between 28 July and 16 November 1978, in white, orange, red or blue, with black or brown interiors, and the three press cars among them were 4301011, 4301012 and 4301013. The first "PROCAR Test" car, 4301004, is the one Andy Warhol painted. "ZS-T-1" turns up again in the delivery notes of four PROCAR rows; what the codes "ZS-T" and "AQ/ZS-K" stand for, no source read explains. The Register's count of the road cars in the series, beside the published road-car figure, is in the line-up on the versions page, and its PROCAR count, beside BMW's, among the production readings of the Procar.

By our arithmetic on these classes, taking away the frames and the unbuilt numbers leaves the commonest total exactly. The road cars in the series and the 15 complete works and pre-series cars come to two more than the published road-car figure, and which two that figure leaves out cannot be told from the table. BMW's lower total and the two higher ones match no subtraction of the classes at all. The Register states no sources and no rule for its categories, so every count here is ours, of its rows.⁠source 1

Most rows carry three dates, one for each station of the chain that built the car: Italdesign joined body and frame, Baur in Stuttgart did the final assembly, and BMW Motorsport inspected each finished car in Munich. By their Italdesign dates, 33 serials belong to 1978, 156 to 1979, 247 to 1980 and 13 to 1981, and 11 have none. For the road cars the Baur date marks the end of assembly, so the table below counts each road car in the quarter Baur finished it, or by its Italdesign date where the Baur column is blank:

One road car has no date: it was stolen at Baur while it was being built. The road cars went through Italdesign well ahead of Baur: by their Italdesign dates alone, five belong to 1978, 130 to 1979, 242 to 1980 and seven to 1981, and two have none.⁠source 1​source 3

The first M1s were BMW's own. The earliest date anywhere in the table is 13 June 1978, at Italdesign, against the car built for the TÜV's crash test of 17 July. One approval covered the whole series, so BMW had to show in crash tests that the car protected the people in it. Baur's test model and two samples followed at the end of July, and the show car for Paris, with a dummy engine, was finished at Baur on 29 September. The racing cars began that autumn: 10 of the PROCAR rows have Italdesign dates in 1978, the first of them PROCAR 0, on 10 October. The first road car in the series, Serie 1, reached Italdesign on 30 November.⁠source 1​source 3

Baur finished the first road car, Serie 2, on 12 January 1979, and Serie 1 on 19 February, the month sales began, by CAR's report. Baur completed 90 road cars that year, 13 in the first three months and 36 in the last three. Most of the racing cars were built in 1979 as well: 26 of the PROCAR rows have Italdesign dates in the year, against 10 in 1978 and five in 1980. PROCAR 1 to 35 went through Italdesign between November 1978 and June 1979, in time for the first season, and the last five numbers, 36 to 40, between January and March 1980.⁠source 1​source 12

Baur finished 246 road cars in 1980, more than in the other two years together, and the last quarter was the busiest of the whole run, with 71; October and November had 28 each. The 10 road cars the Register sends first to "BMW SA", a company it does not identify, all went through Italdesign between September and December. On 1 December, after two seasons in which its racing cars had run in Procar, the M1's Group 4 recognition, form No. 670, took effect.⁠source 1​source 13​source 14

The first three months of 1981 brought 47 more road cars, 16 in January, 17 in February and 14 in March, and then the run stopped. No Italdesign date in the table falls after 5 March, and Baur's dates end on 5 and 6 March, but for two cars, Serie 352 and 353, which it finished on 2 June. Of the 49 road cars of 1981, 32 were white.

BMW's total, given in 2008 for the car's 30th anniversary, divides the cars into road cars and racing cars in "Procar trim":

The Register's PROCAR rows and its two "PROCAR Test" cars come to fewer than BMW's racing figure, and Motor Sport's guide of 2021 gives more, with a prototype besides, so the racing side has no agreed figure either. In the Register most PROCAR rows are white; five are in primer, PROCAR 0 is red and PROCAR 8 blue. The first plans were smaller. In December 1978 BMW announced 26 cars for the first Procar season, and by early 1981, Walton wrote, BMW Motorsport had 26 race customers on its books. The Procar follows the cars by serial.⁠source 3​source 1​source 5​source 15​source 9

The Register enters each colour as a plain German word, weiß, orange, rot or blau, and never as one of BMW's paint names or codes, which no source read lists. Counted by the year Baur finished each road car:

Orange matched white in 1979, and from 1980 white led; by 1981 nearly two in three of the new cars were white. Almost every road car had a black interior, as the interior shows.⁠source 1

The Register's last column records where each car was first delivered: to a BMW company, a dealer or a customer. Counted by country, with no name tied to any car, the road cars went first to 24 named countries, and West Germany took nearly half:

To the Gulf states and Jordan went 17, to Latin America seven. The first seven road cars, Serie 1 to 6 and 10, are entered only as "Customer Delivery", and five of BMW's own nine went to its press department between 1979 and 1981. A first delivery says where a car went first; where it went afterwards, the table does not record. Britain's 20 are the 13 cars of BMW (GB) Ltd and seven entered to customers in London or simply "GB", though the M1 was never officially imported there, as Heseltine wrote; and three cars went first to customers in the United States, where, the US National Historic Vehicle Register records, the M1 was never officially sold.⁠source 1​source 6​source 4

Every M1's chassis number ends in its serial, from 4301001 to 4301460, and on the Group 4 form the maker of the M1, its frame and its engine is BMW Motorsport GmbH; BMW had a general type approval for the whole series. The serial does not give the order of building. The road cars have their own place in the series, the Serie number, which agrees with the order of the Baur dates in 98 per cent of pairs, by our count, but not with the serials: Serie 1 carries a higher serial than Serie 2, and works cars, racing cars and spare bodies took serials in among the road cars'.

Engine numbers take the form M88 and a number, from M88-04 to M88-490 in the table. By our count 394 rows carry one and 385 different numbers appear, because nine of them are entered against two serials each, in pairs that take in works cars, a Procar and road cars; whether engines moved between cars or a number was entered twice, the table does not say. Most PROCAR rows, the two "PROCAR Test" cars, the spare bodies and the last six road cars of March 1981 read "None", and the Paris show car's engine is entered as "Attrappe", a dummy. No source read gives the number of engines built.⁠source 1​source 13​source 3

No reliable source read counts the M1s that survive. The Register records two losses during the build, a works car entered as "Accident – Total Loss" and the road car stolen at Baur, and nothing of the years since. Among the cars at the Procar runs of July 2008, Adam Cooper wrote, were Group 4 M1s from BMW's own museum. Notable BMW M1s follows the cars whose later lives are known.⁠source 1​source 7