DIAL M FOR MAGIC

To mark 50 years of BMW M, Richard Lane begins a special by driving an M5 CS to meet M's original boss at the site of its first race win and then noses around its HQ

- Richard Lane

Le Mans, September 1968. Not June? Not this year. This year, the 24-hour race is postponed after summer-long civil unrest in the staunchly patriarchal France of Charles de Gaulle, although that's another story. As far as we're concerned, the story is at Le Mans, in September. It's the final leg of the World Sportscar Championship and the decider between Porsche and Ford. Who will prevail? The 4.9-litre GT40s are narrow favourites after wins at Spa and Watkins Glen but one unbelievably juicy and almost incomprehensible sub-plot brought about by the calendar change is that Ford's new motorsport chief is at the wheel of the #33 works Porsche 908.

Fast-forward 20 years. In another life, the same man is tasked with leading Mercedes' return to factory motorsport operations after 33 years of self-imposed exile. It's a shrewd bit of HR, and not only because Mercedes goes on to secure the 1989 World Sports-Prototype Championship, in the process taking an emphatic one-two at Le Mans with the handsome Sauber-Mercedes C9. Arguably the more momentous development that year is our man's establishing of an all-new junior driver programme for the Silver Arrows. Its inaugural trio of signings includes the fresh-faced son of German bricklayer and devoted father Rolf Schumacher.

Yet here's the remarkable thing about Jochen Neerpasch. The exquisite intrigue of 1968, the rehabilitation of Mercedes into motorsport more than three decades after the Le Mans disaster, giving arguably the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time his first big break: any one of them would be legacydefining events for most people, but that's not quite the case for this 83-year-old.