The rise of a GT squad responsible for a unique 24-hour racing feat

Rowe Racing is bidding for a second consecutive Nurburgring 24 Hours win with BMW this weekend. It would be a record of sorts: no team has notched up back-to-back victories at the Nordschleife enduro during the ultra-competitive GT3 era. But the German operation has already made a bit of history. Last year it became the first operation to triumph in the twice-around-the-clock classics at the Nurburgring and Spa in the same year with different manufacturers, BMW and Porsche. Not bad for a team that only 10 years ago was operating out of a couple of lock-up garages.

Rowe, pronounced ‘Rover’ as in the car or the dog, has come a long way in a short space of time. It has become established as one of the top GT3 endurance teams, up there with WRT, Phoenix and the Haupt Racing Team that has grown out of two-time Nurburgring winner Black Falcon.

It won Spa for the first time back in 2016 in the maiden year of its relationship with BMW, was a close second in 2018 and again 2019 after a switch to Porsche for a second programme focused on the Belgian enduro. It had also been on the podium twice at the Nurburgring, in 2013 (with Mercedes) and then 2017 (BMW), prior to last year’s victory with BMW.

Rowe Racing is described as a project name for the endurance operation run by Motorsport Competence Group AG. Yet it would be wrong to describe Rowe simply as a customer of MCG’s. The founder of the Rowe Oil brand, Michael Zehe, is a partner in the company together with Hans-Peter Naundorf, who as team principal runs the operation based just outside Saarbrucken.

Rowe Racing or MCG, call it what you will, has its roots in amateur racer Zehe’s aspirations to compete at the wheel of one of the new Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3s when the car was released to customers for 2011. He’d flown the flag for the lubricants company he’d founded in the 1990s with a variety of cars on the Nordschleife through the late 2000s and into the following decade, and was looking for a team to run a Merc.

ROWE Mercedes SLS-AMG GT3 2012 Nurburgring 24 Hours

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

He contacted the Persson Motorsport DTM squad, where a mutual contact put him in touch with Naundorf, who’d been a race engineer with the team in the DTM for 10 years. Persson had been eyeing the new GT3 Merc with interest, but ultimately decided to remain focused on the DTM.

“I had to call Michael to tell him that Persson was out of the project and also that I was leaving the team,” recalls Naundorf. “He asked me what I was going to do, but at that stage I only had a few ideas and some talks. Then he phoned me back, said we should meet and, when we did, he asked what I thought about founding our own team. I told him everything we would need, and the next day he came back to me with a big Excel file. I realised that he really understood what was required and the cost structure involved, so I thought, ‘Let’s do this’.”

Within a month of their first meeting, land had been bought to build the workshops out of which the team now operates, but for the first year Rowe ran out of what Naundorf calls “two garages that you might park a street car in”. They were “luxury lock-ups, but still lock-ups”, he adds.

"We didn’t want to stay with Mercedes and be one of 10 teams running their cars. For a sponsor like Rowe, if you are with a manufacturer with only two teams and four cars, you get more airtime" Hans-Peter Naundorf

Neither did the team have an auspicious start when it first wheeled its Merc out onto the Nordschleife for its first test ahead of a campaign in the VLN long-distance series, now known as the NLS. The car didn’t complete a proper lap.

“One of our drivers crashed on the first flying lap,” recalls Naundorf. “He was an amateur driver who’s not racing anymore, so let’s leave it like that.”

But Rowe did win a VLN round in July of that year, although good fortune was on the team’s side, reckons Naundorf: “We won because others dropped out, but I still have the trophy. Today we are at a completely different level.” The level at which Rowe operated quickly changed early in its history.

“Michael asked himself, ‘Do I want to have some fun by driving or do I want a team that has a chance of getting on the podium?’” recalls Naundorf of the sea-change in Rowe’s approach. “Michael is a guy who when he sets his mind to something, he really goes for it. He understands what it takes.”

Hans-Peter Naundorf, ROWE Racing team boss, in 2016

Photo by: BMW Motorsport

With a roster of drivers including two-time American Le Mans Series champion Klaus Graf and former Nurburgring 24 Hours winner Lance David Arnold on its books in 2013, Rowe ended up third and fourth at the Nordschleife classic. A year later, it was third again with a Merc, this time with factory driver Maro Engel on the squad. 

Two years after that, for 2016, Rowe switched from Mercedes to race the new BMW M6 GT3 for its regular programme at the Nurburgring, as well as a second one in the Blancpain GT Series (in which it had contested a full schedule for the first time in 2015) with a full-factory line-up of drivers.

“We didn’t want to stay with Mercedes and be one of 10 teams running their cars,” says Naundorf. “For a sponsor like Rowe, if you are with a manufacturer with only two teams and four cars, you get more airtime.

There was also a chance for us to work much more closely with a manufacturer. A development contract for multiple years and access to the kind of drivers they were offering looked a very sensible way forward.”
Naundorf admits that becoming to all intents and purposes a works team wasn’t an easy adjustment for Rowe.

“For Spa that year, for example, we were 64 people for two cars, half of them from BMW,” he recalls. “They had ideas on how to do things and we didn’t want to change our style, but we learned a lot and it has helped us to be able to perform at the level where we are now.”

Rowe got one of its BMWs to the finish in fifth place at the Nurburgring that year, and went on to claim victory at Spa with Alexander Sims, Maxime Martin and Philipp Eng. The team had doubts that the new car would even survive the Spa classic, but a trouble-free race for the winning trio proved decisive in an event interrupted by 15 yellow-flag periods.

Eng, Sims, Martin celebrate 2016 Spa 24 Hours victory

Photo by: Vision Sport Agency/SRO

“Others were quicker, but they got penalties so spent more time on pitlane,” says Naundorf. “Track limits weren’t a problem for us, because we’d told our drivers to stay off the kerbs. If they didn’t, the bonnet would work loose.”

There was a near-miss at Spa in 2018 when Rowe completed a BMW 1-2 behind the winning Walkenhorst M6. Yet Naundorf insists that there’s no comparison between Rowe Racing now and then.

“It’s night and day,” he says. “Looking back, we weren’t at the same level of organisation, infrastructure and approach that we have been for the past three years.”

The most successful period so far in Rowe’s history has coincided with it working with two manufacturers. The team moved over to Porsche for its BGTS campaign after BMW opted to shift resources to an Intercontinental GT Challenge effort in 2019.

"The costs of doing Spa are going up every year and Porsche wanted to spread its drivers around its teams more than in the past, so we thought let’s try the DTM" Hans-Peter Naundorf

“We didn’t want to do the Interconti, but we still needed a second programme,” explains Naundorf. “The possibility of working with Porsche came up. Our contract with BMW allowed it, so we thought we’d go for it.”

Rowe came within five seconds of another first-time-out victory representing a new manufacturer at Spa with Nick Tandy, Frederic Makowiecki and Patrick Pilet in 2019. Its other two 911 GT3-Rs finished fifth and seventh on a good day for the team, but there was an even better one the following year when Tandy, Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor made amends with a result that went in its favour by an equally small margin. That triumph followed hot on the heels of a win at the Nurburgring with the BMW M6 GT3 shared by Sims, Eng, Nicky Catsburg and Nick Yelloly.

Rowe won’t be defending its Spa crown in what became the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup last year. Instead, it is undertaking a new challenge with BMW in the born-again DTM on its switch to GT3 regulations. The team is fielding a pair of M6s for factory BMW drivers Timo Glock and Sheldon van der Linde.
The idea of doing the DTM came up while Rowe was in the midst of discussions with Porsche about continuing in the GTWCE for a third season together.

Tandy, Bamber, Vanthoor cross the line for 2020 Spa 24 victory

Photo by: Kevin Pecks/SRO

“There was this DTM thing coming and we asked ourselves if it was worth looking at,” says Naundorf. “The costs of doing Spa are going up every year and Porsche wanted to spread its drivers around its teams more than in the past, so we thought let’s try the DTM. The important thing was to have the support of a manufacturer. BMW had said they didn’t want to do the DTM, but we were able to convince them that it was a good thing.”

Naundorf has further aspirations for MCG. He’d like to take the team into the IGTC, perhaps as early as next year, and, in the longer term, has his eye on the Le Mans 24 Hours. But right now the focus is on the Nurburgring 24 Hours and its two-car assault with BMW. American John Edwards has taken Sims’s place in last year’s winning entry, while van der Linde, Martin Tomczyk, Marco Wittmann and Connor De Phillippi drive the second car.

“Our goal is always to be on the podium, because you cannot say that you are going to win in such a competitive environment,” says Naundorf. “We want to go into every race we do with a real sporting chance.”

ROWE celebrate Sims, Catsburg, Yelloly 2020 Nurburgring 24 Hours win

Photo by: BMW Motorsport