The M1 Is BMW’s Solitary Supercar

As a college student on a tight budget, Mike was tired of dumping time and money into repairs for his 1965 Ford Mustang. One day, then, he traipsed down to the local used car lot to have a look at a Datsun B210 he’d seen for sale. The Datsun was a fine little car, but on the same lot sat a red BMW 2002. Out of curiosity more than anything else, Mike took it for a test drive. That was all it took for him to catch the BMW bug. Once bitten, a hankering for the M1 was not far away.

Finally, in 2009, after years of searching, he found his car: a red 1980 M1 owned by a collector in England. When Mike picked it up at the Port of Houston, this M1 had a mere 12,500 miles on it. Today, it has around 22,000 miles on the odometer, with Mike regularly ticking that number upward on the roads around Dallas and at tracks like the Circuit of the Americas in Austin.

“I baby it, in that I take care of it,” says Mike, “but I drive it as an M1 should be driven: spirited on the roads, and on the track I drive it hard.”

And in keeping with the “do-it-yourself” ethos surrounding the M1, Mike now runs the BMW M1 Registry, dedicated to tracking these cars and assisting in their preservation. Something tells us that Neerspach and his cohorts over at Bayerische Motoren Werke would approve of Mike’s attitude toward ownership.