BMW M1 Procar Championship
| Category | One-make series |
|---|---|
| Country | Europe |
| Inaugural season | 1979 |
| Folded | 1980 |
| Drivers | Varied |
| Teams | Varied |
| Constructors | BMW |
| Last Drivers' champion |
Niki Lauda (1979) Nelson Piquet (1980) |
The BMW M1 Procar Championship, sometimes known simply as Procar, was a one-make auto racing series created by Jochen Neerpasch, head of BMW Motorsport GmbH, the racing division of automobile manufacturer BMW. The series pitted professional drivers from the Formula One World Championship, World Sportscar Championship, European Touring Car Championship, and other international series against one another using identically modified BMW M1 sports cars.
Billed as an opportunity to see a mix of drivers from various motorsport disciplines, the championship served as support races for various European rounds of the 1979 Formula One season, with Formula One drivers earning automatic entry into the Procar event based on their performance in their Formula One cars.Austrian Niki Lauda won the inaugural championship. In 1980, the series held some events outside of Formula One schedule, and was won by Brazilian Nelson Piquet. BMW chose not to continue the championship in 1981 to concentrate on their entrance into Formula One.
Jochen Neerpasch, the head of BMW's Motorsports division, was the first to propose the idea of a one-make championship. The division had started construction of the first sports car for BMW in 1978, the M1, and had planned from the start to enter the new sports car in the World Sportscar Championship in 1979, as well as offering the cars to customers for other series. BMW Motorsport planned to build M1s to meet regulations known as Group 5, but a rule change instituted by the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA) in 1977 altered the requirements for Group 5. The new regulations required a minimum of 400 examples of the M1 to be built to meet Group 4 regulations before the car could be further homologated for the Group 5 category.
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