The long version

BMW built just enough of these to satisfy Group 4 homologation, farming assembly out to Baur and Italian coachbuilders when its own factory politics fell apart, and the result was a race-bred chassis wrapped in a Giugiaro wedge that never got the works effort its engineering deserved. It was never sold new in the US, so every American example arrived through grey-market paperwork, and that filtering alone skews the surviving population toward collectors who researched the car for years first. Values have roughly sextupled since the 2000s trough, and a car this rare mostly gets trailered to concours lawns rather than driven to the shops.