Some say you should be judged by how you deal with failure. If that’s the case then BMW’s response to being thrashed in the 1972 European Touring Car Championship has to be regarded as one of the finest moments in motorsport history.

Stung by defeat at the hands of Ford, BMW created its Motorsport division. For 50 years it has been a source of success for the Bavarian manufacturer in touring car racing, sportscar competition and Formula 1, not to mention some of the greatest road cars of all time.

Ford team manager Jochen Neerpasch was recruited for the project and along came other key figures, including Ford’s 1972 DRM champion Hans-Joachim Stuck. The bewinged 3.0 CSL (actually with 3.3-litre and 3.5-litre versions of the sweet straight-six engine) swept Ford aside in 1973, Toine Hezemans taking the ETC drivers’ crown. BMW also topped its class at the Le Mans 24 Hours. Mission accomplished. But really it had only just begun.

The competitiveness of the ETC fell away during the rest of the decade, apart from the arrival of the rapid but unreliable Broadspeed Jaguar XJ12C that should have been more successful, and BMW drivers would take every crown from 1975 to 1983. Those successes were largely left to privateer teams, but BMW Motorsport’s wider presence increased with the Junior programme, the fire-breathing Group 5 320i Turbo and then the M1.

The initial idea to work with Lamborghini on the M1 failed and the mid-engined supercar’s success in…