You can turn lemons into art when life gives you lemons.
The BMW M1 is a German carmaker’s most famous model. Its striking wedge-shaped design remains jaw-dropping. From 1978 to 1981 BMW produced only 453 examples, making them rare and valuable. Even junked examples can fetch six figures. So when one enthusiast found a crash example on Bring A Trailer in 2015, he bought it in the hopes of doing something with. One year later, another M1 was purchased by someone else – the one that had melted in a bonfire.
PKI (Pick Up A Trailer) was the owner and wanted to get parts from both M1s. Both had damage to the front and one was missing its rear. As PKI recalls in his Bring a Trailer post, “… it occurred to me that you can do things to a wreck (or a couple of wrecks) that are not legal to do to a running, working car. Instead of making these M1s into Frankenstein’s monsters, he decided that they could be combined into one piece wall art.
It has a light frame and a complete interior that give it the appearance of being ready for driving. The car’s exterior was painted in show-quality colors and the engine from his 2015 wrecked M1 was displayed.
PKI writes that “many talented people spent hours making this idea of an M1 Art Display come to life, but in the early part of June 2018, I had a BMW M1 hanging from a wall.”
This time-lapse video shows how builders placed the car on the wall. They created a unique pull system that lifted one side of it from a flat position and then moved it into its place to secure it. PKI was inspired by the comments to the article about the BMW crash. The rest is history.