The Outlaw: Iding Power’s Reimagined BMW M1

For over five decades, Ide-san of Iding Power has been known as the madman, scared of nothing.

Even before the Japanese domestic scene had a chance to materialize, he was getting his hands dirty extracting power from some of the craziest exotic imports. We’ve checked out his workshop in Yokohama, now it’s time to start looking at some of his cars, one that literally blew me away in particular: the E26 BMW M1. 

Introduced in 1978, the BMW M1 was Germany’s answer to Italy’s dominance in the world of high-end performance. Designed by the legendary Giorgetto Giugiaro – whose sharp, wedge-like aesthetic defined an era – the E26 was BMW’s first and only true mid-engined supercar.

It was supposed to dominate Group 4 racing with help from Lamborghini, but a tangle of inter-brand politics and subsequent delays turned the whole project sideways.

By the time the M1 finally hit the streets, the world had moved on. Only 453 were ever built. Each was hand-assembled, and each was a rolling contradiction; a Teutonic machine wrapped in an Italian suit, born from racing dreams and relegated to becoming the dreams of many.

It’s a car that to this day remains a sought after collectable, one nobody would ever think of touching. Or so you’d think…

Leaving a car alone doesn’t gel with Ide-san’s philosophy. A man steeped in both engineering precision and the fearless soul of Japanese tuning culture, he never saw factory limits as sacred.

He’s always made an impact with his choice of development platform, and the day a BMW M1 rolled into his Tokyo shop was the perfect chance to show the world that Japan does it differently.

The M1; an untouchable Giugiaro sculpture, with a Paul Rosche-designed M88 engine, already a masterpiece? Ide-san wasn’t deterred.

His take is restrained – almost surgical. The body remains stock, preserving Giugiaro’s wedge profile, but subtle badging hints that this is not your run of the mill M1 – if such a thing exists.

The M88 engine has been rebuilt featuring lightweight forged pistons, aggressively profiled cams, custom headers, a re-designed intake and a conversion to electronic fuel injection with a modern day ECU. The result? A 100hp hike from the stock figure, to somewhere north of 380hp.

I’ve never had the pleasure of driving a standard M1, so when Ide-san threw me the keys to the Iding Power E26-M1 M88/S4 – as he calls it – I was shocked.

It was instantly obvious that this straight six is something special, pulling cleanly from low rpm without issue, and a willingness to rev to redline in any gear.

The crisp throttle response and the way it got on cam in the mid-range made this one of the most memorable drives of my life, even if it was just around the access roads of Fuji Speedway.

Despite my brief time behind the wheel, I immediately tuned into the Iding Power philosophy; extracting that little bit extra, perfecting a little bit further, and doing so on cars that most of us would be afraid to modify.

To Ide-san, the M1 was never a museum piece. It was a prototype for what could have been. A car that, in another timeline, might have raced longer, harder, and louder. His work didn’t re-wrote the past. It honoured it.

The M1 was just a taster of what Ide-san wanted to share with me, one of a few important cars he’d let me experience in order to truly understood what his life’s quest has been all about.