actually youre wrong about ryan cooper. and alot of it. and if you actually think about it when the protagonist in carbon evades the scene at the flashback race and he leaves palmont city with a red bag full of "cash" but it was actually swapped out by darius' guy so howd he get the fund to buy such and expensive race car? its simple he goes to underground(kinda like how the fast and furious tokyo drift was release before the Han was released into the franchise and dom said "han was family" tokyo drift happened after han nd the torretos were introduce. well the same applies here.) and races in olympic city beats the boss goes to underground 2 and beats the boss in that one(never has the main characters name ever was released untill nfs prostreet so whos to say ryan cooper wasnt the guy in nfs u1 and nfs u2 and mw and carbon) sells everything and then goes to mw(not sure how that actually all started and how the main character actually knows of mia that well never know) with the bmw then flees there and goes to back palmont walks away from the illegal racing after being the boss of all territories and goes to prostreet and beats all the bosses then goes to undercover and gets arrested then reappears sometime later in the story from others point of view as a legend based name while razor is in jail. the bmw got taken by darius and sold to someone thru black market and then Frank stole and put it in the shipping container and the crew of heat found out it was a hot car and abandoned it but how it got to rockport from Palm city is a mystery that wasnt shown but i heard someone from payback bought a car off a guy from carbon but if that fake or true theres no evidence stating its true or fake. and razor then gets outta jail(all thought it doesnt actually like razor did) and requests the bmw specofically. its not a coincidence that someone calls and says they want you to go steal it and deliever to them. im not sure if that nfs shift 1 and 2 are connected i think those were just their attempt at simulator style racing and didnt succeed but nfs the might or might not be connect. but reading all this stuff makes me want to go back and play them all one by one lol but being as im a father of a 7 month old daughter and work 2 jobs i really dont the time to go and play all these videogames