This is the story of three colored stripes blue, purple and red and the letter “M”

Let’s start with the “M”. The fact that this abbreviation comes from the word “Motorsport” is actually the basic knowledge of every motorsport fanatic and thus explains its origin by itself. But what about the freely colored lines initially in the colors blue, violet and red and what is the logo that is so well known today actually originated? Very few people know this …

First of all, I want to reveal the secret of “who”, who exactly was responsible for the colors and who was behind them. The designer Wolfgang Seehaus (former BMW exterior designer) was responsible for this. He created the colors blue, purple and red. Jochen Neerpasch (former racing director and part-managing director of BMW Motorsport GmbH) and Manfred Rennen are jointly responsible for the rest of the design, which was created in 1972.

The background was that a uniform logo (called Corporate Identity at the time) was to be created for the newly emerging BMW Motorsport GmbH, which was to take over the company section for the sporting products of the BMW brand and represent it to the outside world, which should represent the sporting division independently . This already traded a year later. 1973, to BMW M GmbH.

The explanation why there are exactly these colors blue purple and red is this:

“Blue stands for the BMW brand, red stands for motorsport and purple for this unique combination of both”

… So the official statement.

If you replace Jochen Neerparsch’s statement at the time with blue, it remains valid to this day!

In fact, the color blue stands for the BMW brand. The color red is probably due to the color of the BMW sponsor at that time, the company “Texaco”, which BMW was supposed to be sponsoring in motorsport at the time, but these negotiations failed at the end of 1972. The color purple became a mixed color simply freely chosen for pragmatic reasons. Although at the time races indicated that he too should have been involved in the decision on the choice of color, there is no evidence of this in the archive.

The final /// M logo was then developed by the Italian design studio “Italdesign” which was headed by Giugiaro.