PRESENTED IN PARIS The finished M1 was presented at the Paris Motor Show in 1978. The top speed made it Germany's fastest street car. But Lamborghini had started assembling the cars late and the company could not afford to buy raw materials due to a poor economy. 
FREED FROM BANKRUPTCY BMW ended up firing Lamborghini and passing on the assembly task to the specialist Baur in Stuttgart. However, the process was delayed as unfinished cars and tools were locked up at Lamborghini, which had meanwhile gone bankrupt. The story goes that a group of BMW people went to Sant'Agata, broke into the factory and "liberated" the indispensable pieces from the bankruptcy estate. However, there is no official confirmation of this. But it was too late. BMW could not manage to build the required 400 homologation cars in 24 months. Therefore, Jochen Neerpasch had to come up with an expensive plan B to get the car out to race. The solution was the Procar series. It was a pure brand series that served as a warm-up for the Formula 1 lob with the five fastest F1 pilots from the qualification behind the wheel against 15 privateers. The cars got 470 hp with light tuning. In Group 5, which was largely unrestricted, the wildest supercharged versions got up to 1,000 hp. Click 'NEXT PAGE' to read on
