I didn’t know it then but in 1978/79, BMW launched its most beautiful failure of a supercar. Having created a dedicated and separate company—BMW Motorsport— to create a halo product in the form of a real racing car that normal people could buy, the M1 was, Surprise! yet another wedge-shaped beauty designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro.
As a kid growing up in the 80s, I had no inkling of all this secret DNA threading across so many of my favorite sports cars! In fact, my first contact with the M1 was at school when a classmate showed off a ‘Scaletrix’ type motorized miniature. That little M1 came in white with 3 distinctive bold color stripes running diagonally across the body, and while I didn’t know what model or make it was, it left a strong impression on me.
Fast forward a couple decades and now I’m collecting BOXY stationery in earnest. When I laid eyes on this BOXY SPORTS pen case, that vestigial memory of the M1 came roaring back like a tornado. I knew I had to get the case even if I didn’t know what it was supposed to represent. Sharing a picture of it soon elicited responses from more knowledgeable folks: the white-blue-purple-red scheme was an obvious ‘tribute’ to BMW Motorsport. And so I set about looking for a nice miniature of that same Group 5 ‘Pro Car’.
To match up with the Kyosho made 1/64 scale M1, I picked out several BOXY pencils, one in each of the signature colors (or as close as I could get to it):
• BOXY BMC M5-527 multipen in white
• BOXY-200 ballpoint in light blue
• BOXY M5-300 in dark blue & red
As for the real life M1? It was a business failure as the stand alone BMW Motorsport company couldn’t quite balance the production numbers with cost and lack of actual demand. It turned out that while normal drivers liked the idea of owning a racing car, the actual cost in terms of price and relative lack of comfort was a losing proposition. They were losing money on every car they sold, and they had to try to sell as many as possible in order to meet the regulations for Group 5 racing.
Today BMW has learned its lesson and the famous stripes are simply a ‘badge’ worn by tuned-up models that do not sacrifice luxuries. And that was all customers really wanted: to be seen as owning a powerful car even when it wasn’t all that spectacular at all. Oh well!
