Besides being one of the few BMW M1 achievements (just over 450) and having had a famous actor, Paul Walker, as one of its owners (he became known worldwide for the Furious Speed saga films), this unit is even more special for another reason.
You are looking at a very rare BMW M1 AHG Studie, of which only 10 units were made. It is the rarest of the M1, even more than the M1 Procar, the competition, from which 20 units were made. In fact, the M1 AHG Studie owes its existence to the M1 Procar: it was the closest thing we had to a road M1 Procar.
To learn more about the history of the BMW M1 AHG and what led to its creation, we invite you to reread the article about the first of them all, which was auctioned in 2018:
Essentially, the BMW M1 AHG Studie was a modified version of the regular M1 to more closely resemble the M1 Procar — it's wider and comes with aerodynamic appendages in the image of the competition car — while it received mechanical modifications: the power of the six 3.5 l M88 inline cylinders rose from the original 277 hp to a more substantial 350 hp.
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In addition to all the changes made, each of the M1 AHG units received a unique paint scheme. In this case, we can see that on top of the original white paintwork, wide tricolor BMW M stripes have been added — it looks like it's ready to go; just put some numbers on the doors.
The BMW M1 AHG Studie by Paul Walker
Before being part of the Paul Walker collection, this M1 came off the production line and was delivered in August 1979 to BMW Schneider, in Bielefeld, Germany. It would later be transformed by AHG in the early 1980s — a company that marketed BMW but also had a racing division.
The model would be imported to the US where it was part of an automobile collection somewhere in the state of Georgia until 1995. Another collector, from the state of Texas, bought it in 2011 and shortly thereafter became part of the AE Performance collection, in Valencia, in the State of California, which included Paul Walker and Roger Rodas — both deceased in 2013.
A year later, in 2014, the BMW M1 AHG was acquired by its current owner, who has now put it up for sale at the Bring a Trailer, where the auction is still taking place — at the moment the value is fixed at 390,000 dollars (approx. 321 thousand euros), but the auction is still seven days away from the date of publication of this article. Originally enrolled in 1980, it has covered only 7000 km in (just over) 40 years of life.