Inside BMW's long-awaited prototype racing return

BMW is back, shooting for outright honours in the big sportscar races after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century.

The German manufacturer’s attempt to follow up on its Le Mans and Sebring successes of 1999 with the V12 LMR begins at this weekend’s Daytona 24 Hours with a new LMDh prototype called the M Hybrid V8. It won’t be back at the Le Mans 24 Hours until 2024. And the reason for that can at least partially be explained by an ultra-tight timeline for a project described internally as a “zero error programme”.

The decision for a marque steeped in motorsport tradition to return to the very pinnacle of sportscar racing wasn’t made until June 2021. That gave its new LMDh just an 18-month gestation period before the two Rahal-run BMWs take the start of the opening round of the 2023 IMSA SportsCar Championship on Saturday.

Ask M Hybrid V8 project manager Maurizio Leschiutta if it would have been possible, like Porsche and Cadillac, for BMW to mount dual programmes in the World Endurance Championship as well as the North American IMSA series in year one, and he comes back with an emphatic “no”. Time was just too short, he says.

BMW started looking at the LMDh platform – and building a belated successor to the Williams-developed V12 LMR – at a watershed time in its motorsport history. It came back in December 2020 when it announced it would be quitting Formula E at the end of the 2020-21 season then in progress, just after it was finally announced the previous month that the DTM was switching from Class 1 to GT3 rules for 2021.

“The idea of doing another racing programme was up in the air, DTM was grinding to a halt and FE was on its way to not being a factory programme anymore,” explains Leschiutta. “We were looking to the future and the renewed interest in endurance racing was in our eye.

The decision to commit to LMDh came around the time BMW decided to axe its Formula E programme

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“The new LMDh regulations were coming together and we had been part of some preliminary meetings, just really listening rather than interacting. Then we said, ‘What would it take to do an LMDh car?’ Just before Christmas Mike Krack, who was at the time head of BMW Motorsport [before his departure to the Aston Martin Formula 1 squad], said, ‘Why don’t we have a look at this category in a deeper way?’ We set up a study group, a smaller project group that did a complete plan from both a technical and a business point of view.”

BMW explained when it quit FE that it had exhausted the opportunities for development transfer from the FIA’s electric-vehicle series to its road cars. Yet it has swapped to a category where the hybrid components of the powertrain come off the shelf from three one-make suppliers: Bosch, Williams Advanced Engineering and Xtrac.

Andreas Roos, head of BMW M Motorsport since last February, insists that LMDh is the “perfect fit” for the marque: “We have just launched our new BMW XM [SUV], with a V8 hybrid powertrain. Our LMDh car is a V8 hybrid, so we are fully in parallel. We are currently in the transition on our M cars from pure combustion into hybrid and on into the electric world. LMDh allows us to work in the same direction.”

"We said, ‘Let’s get a car running and start with IMSA and then we will try to get the board on side to complete the picture.’ In Italian we say l’appetito vien mangiando, which means your appetite grows once you start to eat" Maurizio Leschiutta

The LMDh study instigated at the end of 2020 was complete by the following March and its findings presented to Markus Flasch, then head of the BMW M brand. He liked what he saw – including the first renderings of what an LMDh bearing the marque’s propeller badges might look like. What Leschiutta calls “a small budget” was then signed off to allow preliminary work to progress. 

The choice of engine for what became the M Hybrid V8 was already made by the time it began to delve more deeply into the LMDh concept. Leschiutta explains that BMW looked at what it already had in its armoury as it made that choice.

The in-line four-cylinder turbo of the final generation of BMW DTM car was evaluated but “not considered the right engine for this category”, while the twin-turbo V8 from the M8 GTE was deemed too heavy. It plumped for a previous DTM engine, the V8 that powered the M4 before the change of regulations in 2019 – the P66/3 LMDh engine retains the four-litre capacity of that powerplant, but is now turbocharged and runs direct-injection.

BMW made its choice of chassis partner in March 2020: it chose Dallara from the four constructors of LMP2 chassis on which an LMDh must be based. Flasch put the results of the second evaluation undertaken together with the Italian organisation to the board in mid-June and got the required sign-off. The announcement of BMW’s return to prototype racing was made on Flasch’s personal Instagram account.

BMW won at Le Mans in 1999 with its second V12 LMR after its leading car (pictured) crashed out

Photo by: James Bearne

“We Are Back! Daytona 2023” was the perfunctory message laid over an image of a V12 LMR. Those words hinted at the initial focus on IMSA, confirmed when its official statement quickly followed. BMW has had a near-continuous involvement in North American sportscar racing dating back to 1995, when the Prototype Technology Group joined the ‘old’ IMSA series with an E36-shape M3.

That involvement encompassed the American Le Mans Series campaigns with the V12 LMR in 1999 and 2000 run by Schnitzer and an engine programme funded by BMW North America for the Grand-Am Daytona Prototype category, which yielded a Daytona victory for Chip Ganassi Racing with a Riley chassis in 2011.

Top 10: Ranking the greatest BMW Motorsport machines

Since 2009, these sportscar exploits have been masterminded by the Rahal team, now running under the BMW M Team RLL banner, first in the ALMS and, since the US sportscar merger, in ‘new’ IMSA.

“The North American market is one of the most important ones for BMW M and this is why we said for sure it will be the IMSA championship,” explains Roos. “But Flasch said from the beginning, ‘Let’s have a look at a later stage to see if we can do WEC and Le Mans'.”

It was important to get the programme off the ground first, says Leschiutta: “We said, ‘Let’s get a car running and start with IMSA and then we will try to get the board on side to complete the picture.’ In Italian we say l’appetito vien mangiando, which means your appetite grows once you start to eat.”

The WEC announcement came in late July last year and was quickly followed by the news that WRT will mastermind BMW’s return to Le Mans. The flurry of news followed straight on from the first test for the M Hybrid V8 at the Varano circuit in Italy. BMW opted to undertake the initial phase of testing in Europe, unlike Cadillac, which is also using the Dallara platform for its V-LMDh.

“We did the initial debugging of everything in Europe just because it was easier to manage being closer to home,” says Leschiutta. “But we knew that the significant testing had to be done on American tracks, with American personnel and American conditions.”

LMDh project leader Leschiutta (right) downloads with BMW Motorsport boss Andreas Roos in testing

Photo by: BMW

The single car used for testing moved Stateside in September. It was only at the second of IMSA’s so-called sanction tests for the LMDh that another chassis, the first of the race cars, ran for the first time. The second of those was given a shakedown at Sebring on the way down from Rahal’s new headquarters in Zionsville on the outskirts of Indianapolis to Daytona for testing and qualifying over the Roar weekend. 

The two M Hybrids will be raced by a familiar looking crew across the two cars. Philipp Eng and Augusto Farfus are the full-season drivers in one car and are joined by Marco Wittmann for Daytona and Sebring plus Colton Herta, a regular at the season-opener for BMW and now officially a BMW factory driver, for the 24 Hours. Nick Yelloly and Connor De Phillippi are joined by Sheldon van der Linde for Daytona in #25.

Roos insists that BMW didn’t look outside of its existing factory roster when putting together the squad for the two M Hybrids entered in the IMSA GTP class.

"In some ways you can’t ever be fully ready. It’s a bit like taking an exam: there’s always something extra you want to do in preparation" Bobby Rahal

“We made a clear commitment to our drivers and told them that we trust them and they are the drivers we will have in our line-up,” says Roos. “In the end there wasn’t much of a discussion. There were some drivers from outside asking for seats, so maybe some other drivers from our squad will get a chance when we enter the WEC or we will need some more drivers.”

BMW has at least partially addressed that already: Rene Rast and Dries Vanthoor, both stalwarts of WRT’s GT programmes with Audi, were announced as factory drivers by Munich before the end of last year. Rast has even tested the LMDh already. 

The M Hybrid test programme has been torrid at times; Leschiutta describes it as like “rolling a rock up a hill, and sometimes it rolls down again”. But BMW and Rahal know they have to be ready come 1340 local time on Saturday.

“I think we are in the best conditions possible given the timeframe of this programme,” he says. “In some ways you can’t ever be fully ready. It’s a bit like taking an exam: there’s always something extra you want to do in preparation. It’s just at some point the exam happens.”

BMW brought up the rear in qualifying at Daytona's Roar last weekend, but concentrated on long runs rather than performance

Photo by: Art Fleischmann

Rahal’s enduring ambition

Bobby Rahal won the Indianapolis 500 as a driver in 1986 and has twice reprised that victory as a team owner in 2004 and 2020. He now has the chance to follow up on his triumphs behind the wheel at the Daytona and Sebring enduros in 1981 and 1987 respectively from the timing stand. And he’s relishing the prospect. 

It is a target he’s harboured for a long time, but it would be wrong to say that he was pushing BMW to make the jump up from the GT divisions to the premier class.

“It’s always been an ambition to run for overall victories, but it wasn’t an expectation; the BMW programme in North America has always been focused on the production categories,” says the 70-year-old. “It was a bit of a surprise that BMW was going in the prototype direction, a very pleasant surprise.”

Rahal is a committed fan of sportscar racing. That’s where he started his career in the footsteps of his father Mike. His first racing car was a Lotus 47 in 1973, quickly followed by a Ford-powered Lola T290 Group 6 car in which he first came to prominence in the Sports Car Club of America run-offs at Road Atlanta the following year. 

“Sportscar racing is where I came from, what I grew up with,” he says. “I was lucky enough to have a fair bit of success at the highest level over here.”

Those successes include the Daytona and Sebring victories with the Bob Garretson and Bayside Porsche teams respectively, as well as a further four wins across the IMSA series. There were also three forays to the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1980-82 that yielded two retirements and a non-qualification, but he wishes that he’d done more in sportscars.

“One of the few regrets I have from my career is stopping driving sportscars after 1988,” he says. “It was really driven by where I was in my Indycar career and the need to focus on that.”

Rahal regards Le Mans as unfinished business: “I always thought growing up that would be wonderful to win. Our focus right now is on the one immediately in front of us in IMSA. But if there are to be additional BMW entries at Le Mans [alongside the WEC cars], I’d like to think we’d be looked favourably upon to do that. It’s too late for me to win Le Mans as a driver, but maybe it can happen as a team owner.”

Rahal raced a Bayside Disposal 962 regularly alongside Jochen Mass in 1987, and together the pair won the Sebring 12 Hours

Photo by: William Murenbeeld / Motorsport Images