BMW has two factory entries in the Hypercar class at this week’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of which will be adorned with the art of Julie Mehretu. BMW revealed this M Hybrid V8, its 20th Art Car, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on May 22nd and subsequently shared it at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este at Lake Como, Italy later that week. Mehretu met with media at Villa d’Este and talked about her first rolling work of art and how the process gave her a new appreciation for the automotive world.

Mehretu, a New York-based contemporary artist, originally declined BMW’s offer to create the latest Art Car. She was unanimously selected by an independent jury of international museum directors for the role in 2018. During the Covid pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, she reconsidered: I was checking in with a lot of the people that I went to for guidance . . .  I think all of us were doing that around the world to make sense of this time when we [had been] hypermobile. And then the next thing you know, we’re all sheltering in place and under strict quarantine. I was thinking these are the times where you push yourself, and so while we’re all sheltering in place to think about mobility became a really interesting space. I thought, just take this [commission] and open up a new door.

She knew nothing about racing but became a racing fan: I really enjoyed going to the pit stop [at the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona] and seeing the numbers of people who work in there that are all communicating in some way or another with the vehicle itself and with the drivers [and realizing] that it is a team sport in that way. Going to Daytona was exhilarating—it was so much fun.

Although the Art Car debuted in May, Mehretu says it will not be done until after it races at the 24 Hours of Le Mans: The car will go through many transformations. Even the drivers you see going in and out of the car will mark up the car, and I made marks in that area thinking about that. There’s all the debris from the [track], the exhaust on the back, the car comes out just looking very different and we’ve discussed leaving it that way—you know, we’ll see what it looks like. If there are too many insects, we might have to do a little bit of hand washing, but we’ll see. I think with all of the [BMW Art] cars, the car has gone through the experience of the painting. The painting has transformed and marked up the car and then the painting—the car—will go through the race as the second major project [the first project being the wrap], and then it will be finished.

Her nephew, a car geek, was instrumental in helping her decide to take the BMW Art Car commission: My brother loves cars, and since my nephew was a child, tiny cars, toy cars, were always in his hands. That would be his meditation: Parking about 100 or 150 different toy cars in different configurations. He’s here with me [in Europe, for the Art Car’s debut] and he’s part of the reason I’ve done this project. He really was like, “please don’t say no, don’t say no. This is one of the things you should do!” And he’s loved it.

How she conceived the BMW Art Car in her studio: I had a scale model [of the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car] in the studio for a long time. I would just push the model around on a cart and it would go in front of different paintings at different times. And I just kept it there while I was working for the whole year. And then, about six months in, I saw this painting in front of it and then just thought of them together—I felt like the car could actually experience the painting. At first, I didn’t know how we were gonna approach that. [My assistant] Jackie Furtado worked with me on the digital sketches that [BMW] gave us, the vector files and the 3D model. And we were able to simulate how the car could go through the painting as a portal.

Mehretu also designed the racing suits and helmets that the three drivers— Sheldon van der Linde (South Africa), Robin Frijns (Netherlands), and René Rast (Germany)—will wear at Le Mans; she is an honorary fourth driver. I worked with another person who used to work at my studio, Minnie, who is now working on her own in fashion and apparel. She came back and we worked together on the driver’s uniforms, or overalls, and then the helmet as well. I know the helmets are very special, so we had a meeting with the drivers on Zoom. Each driver, from the different places that they live, showed their own helmets. And we tried to do something different on each helmet according to who they were.

Mehretu wanted to change the appearance of spare body parts for the race car, but Le Mans regulations prohibited it: One desire I had, and BMW tried really hard to get this to happen, was for the spare parts for the car—I wanted to do them in the ghost of the painting. So, they would be the negative of the car. If a part of the car had to be replaced, it would be replaced by its ghost, so the car would also shift and [change] shape through the race. We couldn’t do that; we tried hard. [It would have made it] part of this active performative painting, but in that sense, it’s ok. I mean, the point is to win, not to be disqualified.

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Alexander Calder was best known for his sculptures, not for his painting, but near the end of his career some of his paint jobs were hard to ignore. In 1973 he was contracted by Braniff Airways to paint one of its four-engine DC-8 jets. The bright, cheerful result was dubbed “Flying Colors.”

In 1975, Hervé Poulain, a gentleman race car driver, commissioned Calder to use his imagination and paint a BMW 3.0 CSL that Poulain would race in the 24 Hours of Le Mans that year. It became the first of 20 official BMW Art Cars. It was also one of Calder’s last works; he died in 1976.

BMW Art Car number 20 debuted on Tuesday at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Designed by New York-based contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, the 640-horsepower BMW M Hybrid V-8 racer will compete in the 2024 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 15-16, carrying the number 20. Drivers will be Sheldon van der Linde, Robin Frijns and René Rast.

Mehretu, 53, was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2020. Last October Mehretu, who was born in Ethiopia, broke the auction record for an African artist at Sotheby’s Hong Kong when her piece Untitled sold for $9.32 million.

Mehretu attended the Rolex 24 at Daytona last January, and watching the BMWs race provided some inspiration. “Designers, engineers, aerodynamicists and so many other creative minds are working on taking this vehicle to its extreme,” she says. “When it goes out on the racetrack now, so many dreams will be fulfilled.”

The car’s abstract visual form is the result of digitally-altered photographs, which are superimposed in several layers of dot grids, neon-colored veils and the black markings characteristic of Mehretu’s work.

“In the studio, where I had the model of the BMW M Hybrid V-8, I was just sitting in front of the painting and I thought: What would happen if this car seemed to go through that painting and becomes affected by it?” Mehretu says. “The idea was to make a remix, a mash-up of the painting. I kept seeing that painting kind of dripping into the car. Even the kidneys of the car inhaled the painting.” She employed 3D mapping to apply the artwork to the contours of the car.

Art Car artists are chosen by a panel of international judges. Perhaps the most famous BMW Art Car is number 4, created when artist Andy Warhol applied the paint himself, rather than do what most Art Car artists do: Paint a model of the car, and have the full-sized BMW colored separately. “I attempted to show speed as a visual image,” said Warhol, who died in 1987 at the age of 58. “When an automobile is really traveling fast, all the lines and colors are transformed into a blur.” Warhol took the speed aspect literally, as he applied 13 pounds of paint to the BMW M1 in just 28 minutes. The car went on to finish sixth overall at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Indeed, the first four Art Cars all competed at Le Mans, a trend broken in 1982 when Austrian artist Ernst Fuchs painted flames on a stock BMW 635 CSi for Art Car number 5. The Le Mans tradition was revived for Art Car number 15 in 1999 when American artist Jenny Holzer, known primarily for her words, applied some to her artwork. The BMW V-12 LMR went to Le Mans with PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT emblazoned on the top of the race car, LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL on the rear wing, and THE UNATTAINABLE IS INVARIABLY ATTRACTIVE on the driver’s side bodywork.

Leading up to this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, Mehretu’s Art Car will make an appearance at the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este in Italy’s Lake Como on its way to the track in France. As part of the exhibition for historic vehicles organized by the BMW Group and the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este, Mehretu herself will present the 20th edition of the BMW Art Car Collection.

It will be on the grounds of the Villa Erba, also on Lake Como, together with the BMW Art Cars by Calder (1975), Frank Stella (1976), Roy Lichtenstein (1977), Warhol (1979), Holzer (1999) and Jeff Koons (2010), which all made their race debuts at Le Mans.

For a look at all the BMW Art Cars, click here.

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Frank Stella, the abstract painter and sculptor who was the second artist after Alexander Calder to design a BMW Art Car, died Saturday at age 87. The New York Times said that Stella had been battling lymphoma.

Stella loved racing—both automobiles and horses—and had many friends in both communities. His 1976 contribution to the BMW Art Car Project was a white BMW 3.0 CSL overlaid entirely by small black checkers, resembling graph paper. Over that base he painted thin geometric outlines in black. The car, driven by Brian Redman and Peter Gregg, raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but didn’t finish the race due to an oil leak in hour five.

Stella also designed the exterior of an “unofficial” art car—it is not considered one of the official works commissioned by BMW—in 1979 at the invitation of his friend Gregg, the sports-car racer who had a class win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and five victories at the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Gregg bought a BMW M1 Procar, used in the one-make racing series created by the automaker, and had Stella paint it. The car was displayed in the Guggenheim Museum.

Stella considered the M1 part of his “Polar Coordinates for Ronnie Peterson” series, which he created to commemorate his friend Peterson, the Formula 1 driver who died in a crash at the 1978 Italian Grand Prix, when his Lotus collided with the car of James Hunt. Gregg and Stella, who often traveled to races together, were present at the Grand Prix to watch Peterson and his Lotus teammate, Mario Andretti.

Stella was the passenger in a car driven by Gregg in 1980 en route to the Le Mans circuit when they collided with an oncoming car outside Paris. Both were injured but recovered, but there was damage to Gregg’s vision, which never improved and ended his racing. Seven months later, Gregg took his own life.

Stella was considered a major contributor to the freewheeling abstract expressionism movement that began after World War II, swirling around mostly in the art community of New York City, where Stella lived. In its definition of abstract expression, the Guggenheim points to Jackson Pollock as the movement’s leading artist, “who placed his canvases on the floor to pour, drip, and splatter paint onto them and to work on them from all sides, which set him apart from the tradition of vertical easel painting.”

Stella’s “Black Paintings” are his most famous work. They consist of mostly geometric shapes on a white canvas, using black paint.

“Stella was courtly, charismatic and formidable,” wrote Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee, in Stella’s obituary. “Even when he wasn’t speaking, a terrific intelligence came off him like steam.”

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BMW is building its first production Art Car with the help of Jeff Koons. A limited run of BMW M850i XDrive Gran Coupes will be on sale, each painted in a design by Koons that takes multiple layers of paint and 285 hours to apply.

Koons first collaborated with BMW on an M3 GT2 Art Car in 2010 which competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He joined artists including Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, and Roy Lichtenstein to turn race and road cars into rolling works of art. In 1995 David Hockney painted a BMW 850 but this new venture will be the first time anyone will be able to buy one.

At the project’s announcement Koons revealed very little saying only, “I was thinking very intensely about it: What is the essence of the 8 Series Gran Coupe? What is the essence of power? How to create something that exemplifies all the energy of the BMW 8 Series that is also able to touch upon the human element?”

BMW design boss Adrian van Hooydonk added, “Car Design takes inspiration from Art and Engineering and turns that into highly emotional experiences. Working with Jeff Koons again to jointly create something truly special is a great pleasure. He is one of the greatest artists of our time and one of the most inspiring and engaging human beings to work with.”

BMW has disclosed that eleven different colors ranging from blue to silver, yellow and black will feature on the exterior paintwork. Inside the car will have a cupholder lid with special edition badging and the artist’s engraved signature, and seats in the red and blue colors of the BMW M division.

The design will be unveiled in full at Frieze Los Angeles in February 2022, but you can bet that collectors are already fighting to get their deposits in, despite there being no word of pricing and only hints at what the finished car will look like.

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VR app lets you put a BMW art car in your garage

Intake: An artsy new app for Android and iPhone lets you shoot photos and videos of BMWs painted by creative legends anywhere you want. Using the augmented reality technology of the Acute Art app, you could virtually park Alexander Calder’s 1975 3.0 CSL on your driveway, stow Jeff Koons’ 201 M3 GT2 in your garage, or slip Matazo Kayama’s 1990 535i (above) into your space at the office. Esther Mahlangu’s 525i from 1991 and John Baldessari’s 2016 M6 GTLM are available as well, and the app also features a wide range of other art works that you can virtually hang on your walls.

Exhaust: To see a BMW art car in person you’ll have to travel to Art Basel in Switzerland this September, where the Alexander Calder 3.0 CSL will be on display; but with this neat app, you don’t even need to leave home. 

SSC comes clean on 2020’s missed record run

Intake: In an Instagram post, nine months after its highly publicized record attempt, SSC North America officially acknowledged that it misreported the results of the Tuatara hypercar’s top speed run in October of 2020. (The average speed around which controversy swirled? 316.11 mph.) “We were truly heartbroken as a company to learn that we did not reach this feat, and we are in an ongoing effort to break the 300 MPH barrier transparently, officially, and undoubtedly,” reads the post’s caption. “If it hasn’t been made clear up to this point, we would like to acknowledge officially that we did not reach the originally claimed speeds of 331 MPH or even 301 MPH in October of 2020.”

Exhaust: Since the original attempt, SSC made a second effort to break the production car top speed record, traveling to the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, Florida, with Racelogic Vbox data loggers and a Racelogic rep to independently verify the numbers. Guinness hasn’t officially confirmed the Tuatara’s new stats—279.7 mph northbound and 286.1 southbound for an average of 282.1—but, in the meantime, SSC has saved some face with transparency, albeit rather late in the game. For now, the Koenigsegg Agera RS remains the verified record holder, with a two-way average of 277.87 mph. 

Toyota’s Kentucky plant rolls out its 10,000,000th Camry

Intake: Toyota’s first wholly-owned vehicle plant in North America is celebrating a big milestone—two, in fact. On July 21, a white 2021 Toyota Camry SE became the 10 millionth Camry to roll off the line at the automaker’s Kentucky facility. Toyota is also in its 35th year of operation in the Bluegrass State.

Exhaust: Even if you think a Camry isn’t the sexiest choice, it deserves respect for its functionality and longevity—eight generations and counting. When it comes to popularity, however, the stalwart midsizer still has a ways to go to catch its Corolla cousin, the best-selling car of all time (37+ million).

Mercedes girds its loins for an EV world

Intake: How serious is Mercedes about transitioning its lineup from ICE to electric power? $47 billion serious. The automaker is preparing for half of its sales in 2025 to be all-electric or plug-in, with that figure rising to 100 percent by 2030. It’s leaving some room for margin, however, stating that its business will “be ready to go all electric at the end of the decade, where market conditions allow.” The plan involves three new EV architectures (one for passenger cars, one for performance vehicles, and one for vans) in 2025, eight new Gigafactories, and a global charge network comprised of 530,000+ AC and DC stations. The automaker is also acquiring YASA, a U.K.-based manufacturer of electric motors that currently supplies the SF90’s power unit to Ferrari. The Vision EQXX concept, which is teased above and will bow next year, teases a 621-mile range and single-digit kWh cruising consumption. The Stuttgart automaker will also dedicate itself to studying solid-state batteries and nanotechnology.

Exhaust: The fun news for enthusiasts? Mercedes is sure to lean on high-margin vehicles for profit to fund the flood of BEVS. That means more high-zoot Maybach and hi-po AMG models are on the way, many of which will incorporate hybrid power.

Watch Christian von Koenigsegg’s guide to the Jesko

Intake: The Koenigsegg Jesko is almost ready and bossman Christian von Koenigsegg is ready to show the world what it looks like and, more importantly, how it goes. Koenigsegg highlights the car’s carbon wheels, which weigh just 15 pounds apiece, and the massive brakes with their stainless steel pistons—the most powerful fitted to any Koenigsegg to date. The car wears special Michelin Cup tires designed to run beyond 300 mph. The car on show won’t hit that speed, since it’s the track-focused Attack model; the Absolut is the version with its sights set on 300 mph. The Jesko has been designed to be more usable, with a small stretch to the monocoque providing a roomier cabin and better visibility through larger windows. The interior of the car isn’t quite up to production spec—the seats will be different, for one—but we do get to see the clever instrument cluster, which moves with the steering wheel, and the car’s touchscreen interfaces which will feature over-the-air updates. The Jesko’s twin-turbo V-8 produces 1297 hp on pump gas but can hit 1622 hp on E85. Power is directed through Koenigsegg’s Light Speed Transmission and you can see just how fast it shifts in the video.

Exhaust: All 125 Jeskos have been presold and we’re quite sure that most will be specced way beyond the $2.9 million “entry level” price. It’s yet another incredible feat of engineering from Koenigsegg and we hope these cars don’t just get stored away in private collections, never to be driven or seen again.

GMC was founded 110 years ago today

Intake: The General Motors Truck Company was founded on this date in 1911, when the sales of two truck companies recently acquired by General Motors, Reliance Motor Car Company, and Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, were brought under one roof. It wasn’t until 1912 that the first GMC-branded product would be built, but GMC as we know it can be traced back to these roots.

Exhaust: Although sometimes GMC gets overshadowed by its more mainstream Chevrolet competition, the “Professional Grade” brand gets to strut its stuff when it counts. Some of the coolest GM pickups ever built have been GMC exclusives, from the Syclone and Typhoon to the GMC Hummer EV. We wish one of our favorite truck brands of all time a happy 110th birthday as we eagerly await what they have in store for us in the near future.

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