The Man Who Approved the BMW 1M Kept the Rarest One

Wheels & Weisswurst is not a normal car show. Show up at BMW Group Classic’s Munich headquarters on Moosacher Strasse on one of the first or third Saturdays between May and September, and the reward for arriving in something old enough to qualify is a voucher for two veal sausages and a pretzel. The cars in the lot are the real draw, though, and on one recent Saturday, parked among the usual mix of E30s and old Airheads, was a BMW 1M in a shade of blue that most 1M owners have never even seen in person.

This isn’t just any 1M. It belongs to Dr. Kay Segler, the former head of BMW M who pushed the 1 Series M Coupe through a skeptical board in 2009 and is still, a decade and a half later, the person enthusiasts credit with the car existing at all. His car is one of only two BMW 1Ms ever painted in Monte Carlo Blue, and it carries a detail that hasn’t been written about until now.

Three Colors, Plus Four Exceptions

Read Also

2 day ago

BMW’s Rare New Wagon Loses Most Of Its Camouflage

5 autotech

BMW originally capped 1M production at 2,700 units. Demand blew past that number fast, and the cap came off. By the time the line in Leipzig stopped in June 2012, BMW had built 6,309 of them. For nearly all of those cars, the color sheet had exactly three boxes to check: Valencia Orange, Alpine White, or Black Sapphire. Right at the end of the run, BMW Individual painted four cars outside that list. Two went out in Monte Carlo Blue, one in Java Green, and one in Atacama Yellow, a color borrowed from the previous-generation Z4. Segler’s car is one of the two blue ones. The other lives elsewhere; the Java Green and Atacama Yellow cars are each one-offs.

The Interior Nobody Photographs

Every 1M, regardless of exterior color, got the same interior treatment: black with orange contrast stitching on the seats, wheel, and shifter. It’s one of the car’s signature details, right up there with the flared fenders. Segler’s car doesn’t have it. His is the only 1M in the world built with an Individual interior, and the orange stitching that defines every other car was swapped for blue, matching the paint outside. It’s a small change, and one you’d never catch in a photo from across a parking lot. But it means this specific car has no twin, inside or out, anywhere in the 6,309 that BMW built.

14,000 Kilometers In Fifteen Years

What Segler hasn’t done with the car is drive it much. By his own count, it has covered roughly 14,000 kilometers since he’s owned it, spread across 15 years. That’s under 1,000 kilometers a year, the kind of mileage you’d expect from a car kept under a cover, not one that gets driven to sausage breakfasts. He’s said before that he has no plans to sell it. Spend five minutes with him at an event like this one and it’s clear why. The car isn’t about lap times or resale value for him. It’s the one physical thing left over from a project he had to fight to get approved, back when nobody outside BMW M had heard the name 1M.

Read Also

6 day ago

Tested: 2026 Leapmotor B05 – Full review, price & features

7 autotech

This isn’t even the car’s first public appearance. It turned up at a 2023 gathering of roughly 80 1Ms at the Nurburgring, organized by the BMW 1 Series M Register. But there’s something fitting about seeing it at Wheels & Weisswurst instead, parked a few spots down from cars built decades before it, at the one BMW event built entirely around showing up, eating a sausage, and not worrying too much about being impressive. The 1M still manages it anyway. Here’s a photo gallery of the car courtesy of AutoNext.co