BMW M1 Procar

Group 4 recognition waited on the road cars, and the road cars were late. Lamborghini's failure had cost about a year, and BMW could build only 200 a year against the 400 the rules wanted, so in 1979 the M1 was a racing car that could not race in its class. Max Mosley, then the Formula 1 constructors' legal adviser, later named Jochen Neerpasch as the man behind the answer. With Bernie Ecclestone and Mosley, Neerpasch set up a one-make race to run with the Grands Prix, and BMW confirmed it at a press conference in the BMW Museum, Munich, in December 1978: eight rounds, at the Belgian, Monaco, French, British, German, Austrian, Dutch and Italian Grands Prix, with 26 cars for 25 places on the grid, 20 at Monaco. BMW also said the Procars would be eligible for the Group 4 class of the German championship from the start of the season, and in June 1979 Niki Lauda, Hans-Joachim Stuck and Regazzoni raced M1s in that championship at the Norisring. Later that season, touringcarracing records, a national homologation from the ONS let the Procar run in the championship's Rennsport Trophäe with its big rear wing. Motor Sport's report of the press conference looked ahead to the racing:

The Procar kept the production M1's steel space frame and glass-fibre body, and BMW's own technical description of the Group 4 car says what changed around them. The engine was bored out with its stroke unchanged and fed through slide throttles in place of the road car's butterflies, with an oil cooler in the nose. The brakes were ATE's, with swing calipers on ventilated discs and twin master cylinders whose balance the driver could adjust; the suspension had magnesium hub carriers and Bilstein dampers. Outside there were wide arches over wider wheels, a deep square front spoiler, a tall rear wing and louvres over the rear window. BMW Motorsport sold it ready to race. The specification below gives its figures.

BMW worked to keep the cars equal. Every car went back to BMW after it was built, Motor Sport reported, "for testing, setting up and presumably policing for equality", and Alan Henry wrote that the rev limiters were set 500 rpm below the engine's intended limit, at 8,500 rpm, to keep them reliable. All ran on Goodyear tyres. Goodyear chose a cheaper construction than the one Marc Surer, BMW's development driver, had set the cars up on, and they were hard to drive at first; Henry later summed up their character as "a surplus of power over adhesion". A.H., who drove one at Donington in the summer of 1979, wrote in 1984 that "The ProCars were out-and-out racers, bearing little resemblance to the docile, flexible and essentially usable road version".

Christian Danner, who raced a Cassani car in 1980, remembered how far the scrutineers let teams go:

BMW's plan of December 1978 shared the work out. Ron Dennis's Project Four would build "a minimum of a dozen" customer cars at Woking, Tom Walkinshaw two at Kidlington, for Dieter Quester and Derek Bell, and Osella the rest in Turin, and BMW Motorsport, Osella, Heidegger and Mader would prepare about 100 engines for them. In the event Project Four built most of the racing M1s, and Dennis remembered why the work paid so well:

Dennis was remembering nearly four decades on, and he does not say who "they" were. The works cars were run by Bob Sparshott's team, which racingsportscars lists in 1980 as "BS Fabrications"; at Hockenheim that year the works entry reads "Procar Association", and A.H. wrote in 1984 that the Procar Association had bought the cars from BMW and run the 1980 series. Derek Bell, announced in December 1978 with a car of his own from Walkinshaw, appears in no Procar race in racingsportscars' lists.⁠source 4​source 5​source 7​source 3​source 12

The BMW M1 Register's table lists the racing cars serial by serial. It marks a run of rows PROCAR, numbered from 0 to 40, with number 35 used twice and one serial left unnumbered; the first, PROCAR 0, is 4301017, and the last numbers, 36 to 40, belong to serials of early 1980. Their Italdesign dates run from 10 October 1978 to 19 March 1980, and the Register enters 34 as white, five as primer, one red and one blue. Four early ones carry an internal note, "ZS-T-1", whose meaning no source read explains; the unnumbered serial, 4301050, has no Italdesign date and was in primer. Two earlier serials, 4301004 and 4301005, are marked "PROCAR Test", and the first of them is the car Andy Warhol painted. On 25 of the PROCAR rows the BMW column carries the same date, 9 May 1979; the Register does not say what that column records.

BMW's plan had been 26 cars for the first season, five of them works cars. racingsportscars lists 361 entries in the Procar races, 182 in 1979 and 179 in 1980, under 27 different serials, and one of them, 4301126, the Register lists as a road car, Serie 61, which Cassani entered in 1980. Some identities are not settled: racingsportscars records Toine Hezemans's car as "4301075 or 033". The production readings below give BMW's own figure for the cars "in Procar trim" beside the Register's count, and how many were made sets both against the other totals.⁠source 13​source 3​source 4​source 1

The works cars went to the five fastest Grand Prix drivers in Friday's practice, and in 1979 they started from the first five places on the grid; in 1980 a place at the front was no longer guaranteed. Ferrari's and Renault's drivers could not take part, because their teams were contracted to Michelin and Procar ran on Goodyear. At Zolder, BMW recalled in 2008, the two fastest in practice, Ferrari's Villeneuve and Renault's Jabouille, could not take their seats. Lauda found his own way in: Project Four entered a car for him, No. 5, serial 4301028, so that his Grand Prix practice times still put him at the front while he raced an M1 of his own. In 1980 Project Four entered the same car for Stuck.

The private teams brought their sponsors' colours. Cassani's cars carried Uher and later H.I.S. jeans, GS-Sport's BASF Cassetten and Denim, and others Airpress wind deflectors, Memphis, Warsteiner and Castrol Austria. Among the preparers were Osella, Schnitzer, Eggenberger, Sauber, Heidegger, TWR and Helmut Marko's team, with Konrad, Krebs, Ecurie Arvor and Winkelhock's own team in 1979 and BMW Nederland, BMW Italia with Merzario and Zol'Auto in 1980. Surer thought the Grand Prix drivers had the advantage over them:

In 1979 there were eight championship rounds, from Zolder on 12 May to Monza on 9 September, and a race outside the championship at Donington Park on 3 June. De Angelis won at Zolder, Lauda at Monaco, Silverstone and Hockenheim, Nelson Piquet at Dijon and Donington, Laffite at the Österreichring and Stuck at Zandvoort and Monza. Lauda took the title with 78 points from Stuck's 73 and Regazzoni's 61. Over the two seasons, by Motor Sport's count in 2017, seven world champions and 35 Grand Prix starters drove in the series.

In 1980 there were nine rounds, among them Donington on 26 April and two races away from the Grands Prix, at the Avus and the Norisring. Stuck won at Monaco and the Norisring for Project Four, and Piquet won the last three races and the title, with 90 points from Alan Jones's 77 and Stuck's 71. There was no third season. The principal sponsor, Goodyear, withdrew, and BMW Motorsport's effort went to Formula 1, where its turbocharged engine was to power Brabham's cars.⁠source 2​source 14​source 15​source 5

From December 1980 the M1 was recognised in Group 4, and the Procars became its racing cars. racingsportscars finds 35 different BMW serials in all its M1 results, from 1979 to 2003, and almost all of them are serials the Register marks PROCAR. Lauda's car, 4301028, went to Steve O'Rourke's EMKA team, which ran it at Le Mans in 1981 and 1982, retiring both times, took second place in the Silverstone 6 Hours of 1981 and third in the Brands Hatch 1000 km that year. De Angelis's Zolder winner, 4301040, became Red Lobster Racing's car in America and won the IMSA GTO championship of 1981 with Dave Cowart and Kenper Miller; B de T Racing raced it until 1983. 4301026, which Eggenberger had run for Helmut Kelleners, won the Kyalami 1000 km on 3 November 1979 with Eddie Keizan and Kelleners. Piquet's works car of 1979, 4301018, raced in IMSA with Dennis Wilson in 1981 and 1982; the second PROCAR 35, 4301269, ran for BMW North America and BMW Motorsport in IMSA in 1980 and 1981. And 4301098, a GS-Sport car in BASF colours in 1980, was the car in which Helmut Henzler won a first-division round of the German championship at Wunstorf on 21 June 1981, on his way to that year's Rennsport Trophäe.

Stuck's 1979 car, 4301062, which won at Zandvoort and Monza that year and at the Avus in 1980, has more entries than any other M1 serial, 76 of them. It was Kurt König's car in the German championship's Group 4 class in 1981 and 1982, and under Helmut Gall it won the Group B class at Le Mans twice, 14th overall in 1984 and 15th in 1985, after the M1's Group B recognition of 1 March 1983. One Procar never ran in Procar at all: PROCAR 30, 4301077, went to Japan, where Naoki Nagasaka raced it in most seasons from 1979 to 1984 and won with it at Fuji and Suzuka. And PROCAR 0, 4301017, the first of them, raced in Austria and Czechoslovakia in Sepp Manhalter's hands until 1990. In 1984 A.H. wrote that "the few remaining racing versions … eke out a twilight existence as also-rans in major sports car events".⁠source 3​source 14​source 16​source 17​source 12​source 18

BMW kept Procars of its own. For the M1's 30th anniversary in July 2008 it ran two Procar races at the German Grand Prix meeting at Hockenheim, with 10 Group 4 cars, some privately owned and some from its museum. Lauda, Surer, Danner, Dieter Quester and Kelleners were among the drivers, Surer in the BMW Switzerland car he had raced in Procar, and Neerpasch drove the Warhol car with Frank Stella beside him. On the Saturday Neerpasch had clutch trouble at the start, the planned parade became a race, and Lauda won it after Surer let him by on the last lap; on the Sunday the cars ran a parade behind a rolling start. Christian Klien, who drove one of them, was surprised: "The car is 30 years old, but it had really good handling, it was really well balanced." Procars ran again at the Austrian Grand Prix of 2016.⁠source 7​source 5​source 19