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Valuable steel: the £500,000 BMW M1

6 November, 2016

Have you ever wondered why the 2009 BMW 1M was never called the M1, like every other M-series car that the automaker has ever produced? It’s because of this car — the incredibly rare BMW M1.

In the ’70s BMW wanted to enter into GT Racing (what would later become the Procar Series), and the German-designed horses were to be built under an agreement with Italian manufacturer Lamborghini. However, conflicts arose between the companies, which prompted BMW to produce the car themselves in-house.

With a production run of a mere 457 units, only 399 sold as road cars from 1978 to 1981, while the rest were used for racing purposes — the car also claims the title of BMW’s first mid-engined model to be mass-produced, and now commands a price tag of £500,000 or more for what little of them remain today.

But that’s enough ramblings from us, watch, and more importantly listen to the beautiful sounds of the BMW M1 as driven by James from the YouTube channel MR JWW.

1986 Pontiac Firebird

9 October, 2025

Seeing the car with his own eyes already had Scott fizzing, but when the curator of the car let Scott sit in the driver’s seat it became a truly unforgettable day. There was no way Bo and Duke’s orange stunt jumper could compete with this. To top it off, a photograph of him sitting in the car turned up in the local paper, so he started a new school with an added aura as the kid in the Knight Rider car.
Scott still thought about the Knight Rider car from time to time, but if he had not gone with his wife Abbey to the Selwyn Motor Fest in 2018, it may have remained just a treasured memory. At the show, Abbey asked Scott what his favourite car was as they ambled round. The man she had married instantly connected with his nine-year-old self, but in a deeper voice he said, “KITT from Knight Rider”. Had she just said, “That’s nice dear,” and left it at that, life might have continued as normal. However, unaware of the hole she was about to start digging, she said that she had never heard of it.

Blueprinting basics

3 October, 2025

You occasionally hear petrol heads tossing around the term ‘blueprinting’ when referring to an engine they have assembled, and have sometimes altered significantly. What they are probably trying to say is that their engine was carefully machined to optimum tolerances and balanced — probably for racing. But that isn’t what the term meant originally. You see, in the 1950s, when US stock car race cars really had to be stock, the racing teams would go to the factories and rummage through the parts bins until they found components that were closest in tolerance to the original blueprint developed by the engine’s designers.