The 1M closes at 1:30. The brake probe grew 350x.

Good morning. This week a one-year-only BMW auction closes today, a federal brake investigation grew by a factor of 350, and the man who designed Ford's Group B car explains why he put the gearbox in the nose.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

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BMW built the 1M for a single model year, sold about 740 of them in the United States, and then made every M car after it bigger. That is most of the reason a compact coupe with a $47,000 sticker now trades above what it cost new. The one closing this afternoon is the spec the market chases: one owner, roughly 14,400 miles, Valencia Orange Metallic over black, six-speed manual (the only gearbox offered), and the stripped configuration purists want, meaning no sunroof, no iDrive, no power seats. Three keys, the factory grilles, a car cover, and new 2026 tires come with it. The only modification is blacked-out exterior trim, which the included grilles undo.

The engine is the N54, a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter straight-six rated at 335 hp and 332 lb-ft, with a short overboost window above that. It drives a true mechanical LSD (borrowed from the E92 M3) through M3 suspension hardware in a body that BMW widened to fit it. The 1M was never the fastest M car. It was the one reviewers kept calling the most fun, and Top Gear made it Car of the Year in 2011.

Two things to weigh. First, this is a Canadian-spec car, titled and located in Texas, with a metric cluster and a digital odometer currently reading in miles. Two weeks ago we walked through the 25-year rule for Skylines; this is the other side of the border story, a car that was always legal here but whose paperwork trail a buyer still needs to read end to end. Second, the N54's known items (high-pressure fuel pump, injectors, wastegates, valve-cover and oil-filter-housing leaks) care about age at least as much as mileage. A 15-year-old engine with 14,000 miles has spent most of its life parked. Ask for the service files and check the CARFAX.

Bidding was at $48,000 with nineteen bids and six days left when the auction opened. Recent comps on the platform and on Classic.com put clean, low-mile Valencia Orange cars in the mid-$60,000s to low-$70,000s, with the best examples reaching the $80,000s. If this one clears $70,000 it will be one of the stronger 1M results of the year.

On August 21, NHTSA upgraded its investigation of General Motors' eBoost brake system from a preliminary evaluation to a full engineering analysis, case EA26006, the last step before the agency can compel a recall. The scope jumped from about 3,300 vehicles (2023 Cadillac Lyriqs, where the complaints started) to an estimated 1,164,820 across every GM product using the system, plus the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX, which GM builds on the same hardware. The opening resume logs 745 incidents, 22 crashes or fires, and six injuries. No deaths.

A conventional car uses engine vacuum to multiply your foot pressure on the brake pedal. An EV has no vacuum, so GM's eBoost, introduced in 2019, uses an electric motor instead. It also lets the car blend friction and regenerative braking and tune pedal feel by drive mode, which is why it spread into gas and hybrid crossovers like the Traverse, Enclave, Acadia, and the Colorado and Canyon pickups.

GM blames a fractured spindle inside the booster and says ABS and stability control keep working until the car stops, so the risk isn't unreasonable. What escalated the case is newer complaints describing assist vanishing while the driver is already on the pedal, which ODI says doesn't fit the spindle story. Losing assist mid-stop isn't losing the brakes; it's a rock-hard pedal and a much longer stop.

For collectors, two notes. The affected population includes GM's most important current products (Equinox EV, Blazer EV, Lyriq), so a recall lands on cars still under warranty and still depreciating. And ODI has a separate engineering analysis running on nearly a million 6.2-liter V8 trucks. Two open EAs on core products at once is a lot of regulator attention for one automaker.

Watch-number: 1,164,820. If it becomes a recall, we'll track the completion rate.

In 1983 Ford of Europe cancelled the Escort RS1700T, a rear-drive Group B car that had burned an enormous budget and would have lost to Audi's four-wheel-drive Quattro on any loose surface. Motorsport boss Stuart Turner ran a quiet design competition among British racing-car designers, judged with help from Gordon Murray and Keith Duckworth. Tony Southgate, the ex-BRM and Shadow F1 designer, won the chassis brief. The concept he was designing to, and the man who then owned the mechanical development, was John Wheeler, a former F1 engineer and Ford Motorsport's chief engineer. The RS200 is a Southgate chassis around a Wheeler idea.

The idea was about where the weight sits. Every other serious Group B car (Lancia 037, Peugeot 205 T16) was mid-engined with the gearbox bolted behind the engine, race-car style, putting roughly 65 percent of the mass on the rear axle. Wheeler's argument, which he still makes, is that a rally car is thrown into corners with the driver controlling balance through the front wheels, and a car with that much mass behind the driver swings like a pendulum around the steered axle. It also explains why Group B cars went end-over-end on crests.

So he put the engine in the middle and the gearbox in the nose: about 80 kg of transmission and four-wheel-drive hardware forward, 110 kg of engine aft, a split of about 49/51. The price was a drivetrain that sent power forward to the gearbox and then back again to the rear wheels through a second propshaft and three viscous diffs. Malcolm Wilson, the only driver to test the car before Stig Blomqvist was signed, remembers cooling problems, mounts that couldn't take the torque, and diffs that overheated. Under the Ghia body was Group C practice: bonded aluminum honeycomb floor and bulkheads, composite tunnel, steel subframes carrying double wishbones and twin dampers at every corner. Wilson says the twin dampers were the real advantage on rough stages; they never faded. The engine was Cosworth's 1.8-liter turbo BDT: 250 hp in the 200 road cars, well over 400 in rally trim.

Then the calendar ran out. The RS200 didn't start a world championship rally until Sweden in February 1986, took third there with Kalle Grundel, and was the car Joaquim Santos put into the crowd in Portugal a month later. After Toivonen and Cresto died in Corsica in May, the FIA ended Group B and cancelled its planned successor, Group S. The RS200 ran fewer than half the rounds of the only season it ever had.

Here is the part I find hard to stop thinking about. Wheeler had already drawn the Group S car: intercooler moved low behind the engine, a fully welded upper structure integrated with the cage, roughly 150 kg out of an 1,180 kg car. When Group S died, the drawings went in a drawer. Years later, approaching retirement, he bought a damaged donor chassis, called in favors from the original suppliers, and built it himself on his own money. It has the six-speed sequential he wanted in 1986 and couldn't get past the drivers. It's a one-off, and he still thinks Ford should build 200.

Ford announced a "remastered" RS200 in late 2024. The original engineer built his forty years ago, from a concept the sport never let him prove.

Congress has until September 30 to reauthorize federal highway programs, and the House's $580 billion bill carries the closest the United States has come to a national vehicle right-to-repair law. What's in it is narrower than the headlines suggest.

The bill everyone fought over is the REPAIR Act, H.R. 1566, introduced in February 2025 by Neal Dunn, a Florida Republican, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Washington Democrat who ran a repair shop before she ran for Congress. It would require automakers to give owners and independent shops access to the diagnostic and calibration data their cars generate, including data that now goes wirelessly to the manufacturer instead of through the OBD port. A subcommittee passed it unanimously in February. In May the full Energy and Commerce Committee swapped it for something smaller: the 2014 industry memorandum of understanding written into law, FTC enforcement, and an FTC study of the rest. That version passed 48 to 1 and is riding as the safety title of the highway bill. Dunn says it doesn't do the job and wants the original restored on the floor.

The sides aren't who you'd guess. Backing the full bill: parts makers, truck stops, small-business groups, and a coalition that includes insurers. Backing the narrower version: automakers, dealers, and the collision-repair trade groups, who say independents already do about three-quarters of out-of-warranty work and the bill mostly helps insurers push cheaper parts. Both sides claim the mechanic on the corner.

Why it matters here. Massachusetts passed telematics right-to-repair in 2020 and Maine did in 2023 with 84 percent of the vote; the result has been years of litigation and slow compliance. A 2011 BMW like this morning's 1M still talks to any scan tool through a port. A 2020 M8 or a 2024 911 S/T increasingly doesn't: diagnostics, sensor recalibration after a windshield swap, some battery-management functions on EVs all route through manufacturer servers and licensed tools. Independent shops kept the E30 and the 964 alive for thirty years. The bill decides whether anyone is allowed to do that for the cars built now.

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