FIRSTM

Atrivia quiz question for you: what was the very first ‘M’ car out of BMW? Until very recently, I, perhaps like you, would have given a very different answer to the model you see here: the 530 MLE. And, if you didn’t know what the hell that was, don’t be embarrassed. Before some recent high-profile attempts at a revival of the model, it was (from the point of view of most people) more or less a ghost.

That’s because, if you lived outside South Africa during the late sixties, through the seventies and into the eighties, this model didn’t happen. Nothing to see here. At the time the country was coming under huge international political pressure over apartheid and increasingly the subject of economic embargoes.

BMW meanwhile established first a modest CKD assembly offshoot