Ever wondered how a V8 1M Convertible might look?

Here's the answer...

By Matt Bird / Sunday, 18 October 2026 / Loading comments

Courageous car people are to be commended. It’d be boring, after all, if everybody went for the safe option and bought what they were supposed to. Or what was readily available off the shelf. We’ve all conjured up dream builds with friends or bored on a work call, but very, very few have seen the idea through. This person did…

What you’re looking at here is what happens when a BMW lover spends more than £100,000 taking the best bits of 1M, V8 M3 and 1 Series Convertible. Even by one-off project car standards, it’s an unusual one. We’ve seen all sorts of engines in the 1 Series over the years, including the M5 V10; the M3 DCT has found its way into smaller coupes; the 1M has been tinkered with over the past 15 years, too. They’ve always had a roof, though - the word is overused these days, but this must be unique. And that’s to be applauded.

You can’t keep looking either, right? There’s the 1M bodywork with a convertible roof to get your head around first. Then the M3 V8 under the bonnet, the manual gearbox in the middle, the orange stitching on later M4 seats matched to the M Performance wheel… Some real time and effort (and money) have gone into this, undoubtedly. Completed in 2025, it surely can’t have been used much since.

The attention will be off the scale. People will hear an M3 but see a 1 Series, note a convertible but also the 1M bits, expect a DCT change and hear a manual one. It’s the best kind of headscrambling project car, the most right kind of wrong there is, and looks to have been nicely done. So much so, in fact, that you might want to have the screen taken off the dash…

Obviously any prospective buyer will want to know everything possible about the conversion process, check that all the features work as they should and have a good chat with their insurance company. This is very far from your average BMW. It’s the final 10 per cent that takes up 90 per cent of the build time, or so the saying goes, meaning it’s best to be sure. Your local dealer might get in a bit of a muddle with it.

Basically, whoever buys it next will need a similar level of BMW love to the person who commissioned the 1M V8 Convertible. Because either you’ll get it, and can afford more than £50k for it, or you won’t - that’s the joy of passion projects. Obviously it’s more than an M3 of the era, but that’s not the point - rational, objective arguments will never stand up well to such a build. The point is fun, surely, and a V8-powered 1 Series looks nothing if not fun. Purists, avert your gaze if you haven’t already…

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