A closer look at a pair of two-litre Group 5 racers from Lotus and BMW ...

One of the golden eras of GT racing was in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Group 5 silhouette machines vied for class and outright victories. The benchmark of the day was the Porsche 935 and its many derivatives but they shared the track with many other Group 5 racers. Among them was this one-off Lotus Esprit S1 Group 5, which was developed with limited support from the factory by privateer Richard Jenvey. It was actually built on a prototype Esprit road-car chassis and used a modified version of the Type 907 engine. While Jenvey intended to race the car at Le Mans in 1979, reliability issues prevented the Esprit S1 Group 5 to fully explore its potential. Jenvey raced the car through to the end of the 1981 season and kept the car for the next three decades. The next custodians had the car restored by G-Cat Racing and it has since been raced in historic events.
One of the cars the Esprit was designed to take on in the two-litre category was the BMW 320 Group 5. These were raced by a factory team but also by privateers including the featured example, which was entered by Hohmann Auto Technik for Ronnie Peterson in the German DRM series. The Swede was competitive but ultimately scored no victories. It was sold at the end of the 1978 season and continued to be raced by its next owners. Now owned by an Australian enthusiast, E21 R1-07 is one of the very few genuine BMW 320 Group 5s currently used in historic racing.

Enjoy the links:

[URL="https://www.ultimatecarpage.com/chassis/3062/BMW-320-Group-5-E21-R1-07.html"]1977 BMW 320 Group 5 (E21 R1-07)[/URL]

[URL="https://www.ultimatecarpage.com/car/8001/Lotus-Esprit-S1-Group-5.html"]1979 Lotus Esprit S1 Group 5[/URL]

That Esprit is really cool. Never seen it before. How intriguing.

Kitdy: truly a North American. He is only at ease with and interested in cars with awkwardly-placed sealed beams.

I need it.

The silhouette stuff was always kinda stylistically adjacent to things I liked, but some manufacturers produced some aesthetically interesting and cool cars at the time. I was surprised to have never seen this before.