£250,000 E36 M3 Among Bonkers BMW Auction Results Last Weekend

A fine car though the E36 BMW M3 Evolution may be, we can’t imagine ever dropping a quarter of a million quid on one. Regardless, someone did just that at the weekend, when a super-low mileage example went under the hammer at the RM Sotheby’s Munich sale.

The final figure for the 1997 M3 - which has just 2,752 miles on the clock - was €286,250, or £247,700. The car was originally delivered new in Japan and spent much of its life in a museum. The owner tasked RM Sotheby’s with selling several of these museum pieces as part of the ‘Bavarian Legends Collection’, which resulted in plenty of other eyebrow-raising auction figures.

The €792,500 (£686,000) 1980 M1 is leggy by comparison, having covered 24,000 kilometres in its life. It’s a particularly significant version of BMW’s sole supercar, having been first owned by former BMW Motorsport chief Jochen Neerpasch. He told the auction house that flogging the M1 “was one of my mistakes in life”. Seeing it sell for such a sum will reinforce this view, we feel.

The M1 wasn’t the most expensive of the collection, though. That honour goes to a 1958 507 Roadster, which sold for a whopping €1,917,500, or about £1.66 million. It’s not the most expensive 507 we’ve yet seen, with several having previously topped the €2 million mark.

Some way behind the 507 and M1 was an E9 3.0 CSL, going for €578,750 (£501,000) not long after BMW’s reveal of the M4-based modern ‘Batmobile’ interpretation. It’s the last of the 57 ‘second series’ models built by BMW. Speaking of CSLs, a 4,689-kilometre E46 M3 CSL sold for €325,625 (£282,000), comfortably eclipsing a 7,133-kilometre E30 M3 which managed a more modest but still wallet-busting €207,000 (£179,000).

Other notable lots included a 1938 328 (€511,250), a 1999 Z8 (€410,000) and a 1990 850 CSI pre-production prototype (€263,750). There were a handful of affordable-ish lots, including a 1976 528 which went for €32,200 (£28,000).

There were a few non-BMW-badged cars for sale, including several classic Minis and a Dixi 3/15 DA-1, a model which became BMW’s first car after it acquired Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach. There were also some BMW Motorrad motorcycles on offer.

Head over here to see all the auction results.