This car has had me going down a rabbit hole trying to find out if it even exists. What I mean by that is there is no documentation that this race car ever raced or was even really built. Jean Pierre Beltoise is written in the window, and he was a famous French race driver. But this specific car Lothar/8 is not the one he won the championship in as far as I can tell.
Above are the only “real” pics of the car I could find based on the livery. The only other matches I could find after a lot of digging are of a model car:
1976 BMW CSL Championne Production. As far as I can tell it was a model car from the 70s sold in France.
When I saw this I got hopeful that it must have been based off a real car, possibly one that won a championship in 1976. So I looked into all the leagues that were around back then and there were CSL BMW race cars but none that matched the livery.
I knew that I had seen this car before though and then it hit me.
1977 “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo”
So after scanning through all the race scenes I grabbed a couple screenshots of the mysterious Lothar/8 BMW. This one sports the number “8” where as the toy model was “20”.
Since this movie took place in Monte Carlo it is possible that the production company was just paying homage to a popular model car that was a tribute car? Although it is definitely not in many scenes and was not one of the main cars in the movie.
So now I have no idea what to think, the “real” photos of the car at the top of this post have no numbers on it making this even harder to solve.
If anyone has any insights to this phantom car I’d really like to solve this it’s driving my ocd mad. (Pun intended)
To be clear I’m trying to find out if this specific car with the livery Lothar/8 was ever a real race car or just a model tribute.