BMW creates one of a kind M3

Any authentic Bavarian’s favourite time of year starts right about now with Oktoberfest, and no company is more proud of being Bavarian than BMW.

It has boasted Bavarian royalty on its board and in its race cars and now it’s reaffirmed its roots with the Münchner Wirte M3 art car.

It has taken a mechanically stock BMW M3 Driver’s Package and given it the Munich-focused paintwork of its iconic 'Münchner Wirte' M1 Le Mans racer from 1981.

It’s gone further than that, though, bringing the M1 Münchner Wirte’s original artist in to transfer the idea from a two-door, mid-engined racer to a four-door sports sedan for the street.

The paintwork features a series of interlocking blue and white cords twisted together, plus smaller paintings of Munich’s landmarks and cultural features, from chestnut roasters to the Olympic Stadium and the Fauenkirche and even BMW’s four-cylinder tower headquarters.

There’s also the Siegestor and the Wiesn-Schänke beer tent from Oktoberfest itself.

“Although the two cars are very different, it was surprisingly straightforward to carry over the design from the M1 to the M3 sedan,” Walter Maurer, the Münchner Wirte’s original designer, explained.

“I hatched the original plan to turn this special artwork into reality in 1981, together with my good friends and long-established Munich restaurateurs Putzi Holenia and Kark Heckl, and the then head of the BMW press department, Dirk Henning Strassl.

A few weeks later, the Münchner Wirte M1 raced in the GT class at the 1981 Le Mans 24 Hour race, driven by F1 driver Christian Danner, Peter Oberndorfer and Prince Leopold of Bavaria. It ranks second in the number of M1 race car pictures on the internet, behind only the M- and BASF-liveried racers, in spite of missing the M1 Procar’s glory years.

BMW insists the similarities are more than skin deep, with both cars running 3.0-litre, straight-six engines and rear-wheel drive, but that’s really where the similarities stop. The M1 used mechanical fuel-injection and a mid-engined layout, the M3 is front-engined and uses direct fuel-injection and two variable-geometry turbochargers.

Procar was the world’s leading one-make race series, supporting Formula One races around Europe in 1979 and 1980.

Also, where the M1 Procar had 345kW of power and punched to 100km/h in 4.5 seconds, the M3 has 317kW and has a 4.1-second sprint to 100km/h. It’s limited to 280km/h, though, where the M1 Procar reached out to 310km/h.