I DON’T KNOW how the BMW M1 Procar series came about, and in my purely selfish fashion nor did I really care. It was good for me, and that was all that counted at the time.
For the series they built these supposedly identical cars and they sold some to privateers and then made half a dozen available to Formula One drivers that qualified in the top six. It ran as a support race to several of the European grands prix, with nine races in 1979 and then, for us, six of the nine races in the series for 1980. Luckily in those days I very rarely qualified out of the top six so I was pretty much always there for a run.
There was good money in it for us drivers, and there were prizes of cars for winning races and for certain spots in the championship. Everyone wondered why the team owners were allowing their drivers to participate, but it turned out that the team owners were getting the same money as the drivers. That was a nice little earner for doing nothing – and I’ve never seen a team owner who didn’t want more money.
For me it proved to be quite good because it paid for my tennis court at the farm and I ended up by winning a BMW, which I then put a few extra bob into, upgraded it to a black 325 convertible and sold it to a fairly wealthy lady in London for a tidy profit.
How it worked was that after practice if you were in the top six you went down and claimed your BMW M1 and they put your name on the windscreen and all the pro cars (as in the Formula One drivers) were done in white with the red and blue stripes that is now the badge for BMW’s M spec cars. The privateers had their sponsors and their cars looked totally different. I think Niki Lauda had a privateer one, so he raced whether he made it into the top six or not, and that is how he won the first series.
The series was a great concept and a lot of fun – a great pressure relief on a high-pressure weekend. The cars were pretty good too, properly geared up for racing. But like anything with us drivers, it was also serious. At one race meeting in Avus we were all taping up the gaps in the panels and doors and around the pop-up headlights. We were all looking for that little bit extra on the long straights, and this would make the car more aerodynamic. If someone else was doing it, so were we.
It was a classic example of the purple-pole syndrome. If Mercedes today came out with a 90-foot purple pole at the front of its car, you’d bet your life that a few of the boys at the next race meeting would also have a 90-foot purple pole. They wouldn’t know what the hell it did, but they’d have it and then work it out.
All us drivers had egos you couldn’t jump over, so we all wanted to beat one another. And we felt we were the best in the world, and I think we pretty much proved that – it was very rare that we’d get beaten by one of the privateers.
Over time it became very clear to me that the cream would rise to the top. You’d go to circuits around the world, say in Can-Am or a race meeting on an airfield in Germany where we were all in Cortinas – the Formula One guys always ended up quicker than not only the locals, but also the guys experienced in that type of car.
We proved time and time again why we were all racing in Formula One – because we were the best.
One of the great things about the M1 was that it had guards and panels and was a little more forgiving if we touched each other. In a Formula One we’d avoid contact; we did touch wheels every so often, but it was a lot less forgiving and you knew every time there was a chance that could end your race. So we were very conscious of that and tried to avoid it, but in these things a little tap here and there was OK. Somewhere like Monaco in particular, in those things you were inevitably going to have some body contact … and we did.
If you saw a gap you went for it and if you had body contact you had body contact and you just hoped that it wouldn’t rub a guard against the tyre. It was like when I went down the inside of Peter Brock at Siberia at Phillip Island when I was racing touring cars – I knew you could just lean on him and I’d be OK, so I did. We contacted pretty hard and I smashed all the windows on the left hand side of his car, but that was it. We continued racing. He didn’t come up afterwards and he wasn’t ranting and raving like I’d just taken his first-born for a sacrifice. He realised it was a racing incident. Just like what Jamie Whincup did at Bathurst when he passed Scott McLaughlin in 2016. They took the race off him for that, which really annoyed me. I mean, do you want people to race or not?
You never consciously said ‘I’m going to enjoy this because I can lean on somebody’ or just belt the other bloke out of the way. The trick was not to do it, because there was always that chance you’re going to damage yourself – put the bodywork in on the tyre or bend a steering arm – so you did avoid it.
This was an era where drivers were still getting killed in Formula One, so I think we all had respect for what we were doing. Look at those years, it’s carnage. There were still people having crashes and getting injured, the carbon-fibre monocoques that revolutionised driver safety were still a year or two away.
I don’t think any of us at that stage were driving through the tunnel at Monaco with the belief we couldn’t get hurt. So even in a BMW M1, we treated the racing with respect.