The lesser-remembered sportscar exploits of BMW's two-trick pony

Steve Soper, touring car legend. There’s no disputing that such an accolade sits nicely alongside the Briton’s name. Yet ask the man himself to name the favourite racing cars from his 12-year stint with BMW, and he picks a couple of machines that most definitely aren’t tin-tops. One of them wasn’t even a BMW and the other didn’t have a roof!

Soper goes for the BMW-powered McLaren F1 GTR, the long-tail car he raced for his long-term employer with Schnitzer in the 1997 FIA GT Championship and at the Le Mans 24 Hours, and the V12 LMR LMP prototype. He didn’t get to race the latter at Le Mans in 1999, but did over the second half of the American Le Mans Series. He was a race winner in both machines, and might well have won the FIA GT title with team-mate JJ Lehto in a different – and fairer – set of circumstances.

“They were both great cars, both a joy to drive,” says Soper today. “JJ and I had the McLaren set up on its nose. It was very pointy, but you could just nail the thing on the brakes and turn in. It was a lovely car the way we had it set up, which was all a bit unorthodox.”

But Soper points out that the McLaren was a road car underneath the massive overhangs sprouted by the F1 GTR for 1997. That’s why he puts the V12 LMR at the top of his list, above all the touring cars he drove.

Soper had raced BMW and new partner Williams’s first attempt at an LMP prototype, the stubby V12 LM, on its only race appearance at Le Mans in 1998, a short-lived one at that: wheel-bearing problems put both cars out early. Attempt number two created, he says, “a Stradivarius compared with a schoolboy’s violin”.

“Everything about the 1999 car was perfect,” he says. “There was a lot of buffeting in the cockpit with the first one, but you barely knew you were in an open car in the V12 LMR. The pedals were perfectly weighted and the steering was too. You didn’t have to think about the switches and the headlights were unbelievable at night. It ticked every box, and of course, it was fast. You just got in and drove the bloody thing.”

Soper got his first taste of the McLaren F1 in 1996, with Jacques Laffite and Marc Duez alongside

Photo by: William Murenbeeld / Motorsport Images

Soper’s time in sportscars with BMW yielded four FIA GT victories and three wins in the ALMS. There was also a fifth-place finish at Le Mans in 1999 in an updated version of the 1998 car. Not bad for a driver with a self-confessed hatred of 24-hour races.

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For all his dislike of the longest of long-distance races, Soper put his hand up to join BMW’s sportscar programme in 1996. BMW had got excited about McLaren’s against-the-odds victory with the quasi-factory Kokusai Kaihatsu/Ueno Clinic short-tail F1 GTR and, in a story interwoven with the marque’s return to F1 in 2000, set out to win the race again under its own flag.

“They told me they were going to keep going to Le Mans until they won it and asked if I wanted to be part of that,” he recalls. “The three biggest races in the world are the Monaco Grand Prix, the Indy 500 and Le Mans. I was never going to win Monaco or Indy, but here was my chance to win Le Mans, even if I didn’t like 24-hour races.”

Soper’s first sportscar race of any significance since a one-off outing in a TWR Jaguar Group C car at Fuji in 1985 was the Silverstone four-hour Global GT Endurance Series race in May 1996. He put the Bigazzi-run short-tail F1 GTR he shared with Nelson Piquet on pole, despite spinning at Luffield as he was about to start his qualifying lap. That was followed by an outing at Le Mans sharing with Marc Duez and Jacques Laffite. Their McLaren was only the sixth one home in 11th position after gearbox and exhaust problems, as well as an early-morning off, but Soper had qualified at the head of the F1 GTR flotilla.

"JJ [Lehto] and I had the McLaren set up on its nose. It was very pointy, but you could just nail the thing on the brakes and turn in. It was a lovely car the way we had it set up, which was all a bit unorthodox" Steve Soper

The following year, Soper was part of a full FIA GT assault with a pair of long-tail F1 GTRs run by the Schnitzer team as BMW started to get serious about sportscars. The programme was a credible bid to achieve the Le Mans win, but also part of a BMW attempt to woo McLaren to become its partner in F1. So too were the first tentative steps in moving BMW Motorsport, sans the engine division, to the UK.

“I’m absolutely convinced that the board had given the approval for F1 by the time all that was happening,” says Soper.

There’s an irony that Soper and team-mate Lehto would have probably won the title had not BMW’s F1 love rival, Mercedes, produced the CLK-GTR. The BPR series had essentially been annexed by the FIA and its vice-president of commercial affairs, Bernie Ecclestone. The rules for what was now FIA GTs changed ahead of the season to allow the CLK, hastily conceived and built in the wake of the demise of the International Touring Car series, to run. The rules were altered to say that a car needed its road certification before the end of the season, rather than ahead of the start.

Soper and Lehto came close to the FIA GT title in 1997 but were over-run by Schneider and Mercedes thanks to a rule loophole

Photo by: Sutton Images

The V12-powered CLK-GTR was, unlike the McLaren, a real racing car. It wasn’t a fair fight. McLaren, BMW and Schnitzer won the first three races, two of the wins coming for Soper and Lehto, but the writing had been on the wall from round one at Hockenheim when Schneider put the Merc on pole.

“Out of the box it was quick,” recalls Soper. “They’d hardly done any testing, so I thought once they get that thing rocking and rolling, we’re in trouble.”

Mercedes driver Bernd Schneider’s path to the title was helped by the AMG team’s ploy of swapping him between cars. Two of his six wins weren’t garnered in his regular mount: a quirk of the rules meant there was initially no minimum drive time for a driver to score points.

“Even with the better car they still wouldn’t have won the championship without that,” says Soper. “That should have been our championship.”

Soper and Lehto were genuine contenders at Le Mans together with Nelson Piquet, at least for a few hours. The Finn was ensconced in third place over his opening triple-stint before a split water line. The Schnitzer McLaren was back in the top 10 by the 10th hour, before Lehto put the car into the barriers at Arnage and out of the race.

Lehto hadn’t been happy when he’d learned, from the pages of Autosport, that veteran Piquet was going to drive alongside himself and Soper at Le Mans. But Soper insists that the Brazilian was up to the job.

“He was happy to leave the night stints to us and I’m sure if we’d been leading or whatever on Sunday morning, he would have upped his game,” says Soper. “He wasn’t a handicap.”

McLaren took second position behind Joest Racing’s Porsche WSC95 LMP car with the GTC Competition F1 GTR shared by Jean-Marc Gounon, Pierre-Henri Raphanel and Anders Olofsson. Third was the surviving Schnitzer entry of Peter Kox, Roberto Ravaglia and Eric Helary, the two cars finishing respectively one and three laps behind.

Soper says Nelson Piquet performed well in 1997's Le Mans 24 Hours - but was happy to avoid the night shift

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Could Soper and his colleagues in the #42 car have won Le Mans in 1997? Soper and Lehto were quicker than their full-campaign team-mates, Kox and Ravaglia, all season. At Le Mans they ran a revised aero package, whereas the crew of the sister car decided against using it. The car was slow on the straight and used too much fuel, its engineer Hans Reiter acknowledges today.

That was Soper’s big chance to fulfil his Le Mans dream. Two years later BMW had the car to win the race in the V12 LMR developed by Williams, the team with which it would enter F1 in 2000 after its courtship with McLaren failed. But Soper found himself demoted to a reworked 1998 car run by David Price Racing for himself, Bill Auberlen and Thomas Bscher.

The reason was Gerhard Berger. The newly retired F1 driver had been installed as BMW Motorsport boss over the winter of 1998-99 and couldn’t understand why in Soper he was employing a driver older than himself. Berger was 39, whereas Soper’s racing age was 42. Whether or not the team boss knew his driver was actually 48 isn’t clear.

“He decided I was too old and he was obsessed with ex-F1 drivers,” recalls Soper. “He liked Jo [Winkelhock] because he’d done F1, but he hadn’t actually qualified for any races. I said, ‘But Gerhard, talk to Schnitzer and Williams and ask them about who’s doing what in the car during testing’.”

"My best memories from BMW are from that time in sportscars. I hadn’t done much up until that point and it had been a long time before, but I was able to make the switch, whereas a lot of drivers couldn’t" Steve Soper

Soper cut a deal with Berger. BMW had taken the V12 LMR to the Sebring 12 Hours in March by way of preparation for Le Mans, and won the race, and there was talk that it would return to North America after Le Mans.

“I said, ‘OK Gerhard, I’ll drive the 1998 car at Le Mans, but if you go back to America I want to be in the car’,” he says. “He suggested the ALMS programme wasn’t going to happen, but I told him I understood that, but if it did, I want to be part of it. He agreed, and then I started hearing rumours that it was going to happen, and my name wasn’t part of it.”

Thomas Bscher and Bill Auberlen joined Soper on board the 1998-spec V12 LMR he raced at Le Mans in 1999

Photo by: James Bearne

Berger tried to renege on the deal, Soper says, but eventually acquiesced, though not before the marque stalwart was left out of the line-up for the first ALMS round after Le Mans at Mosport. BMW didn’t actually do the Canadian race, however: it withdrew over circuit safety concerns. Soper belatedly returned to the cockpit of the V12 LMR next time out at Sears Point alongside Lehto.

“I’d never been to the place and we didn’t do any testing,” he states. “I said to Charly [Lamm, Schnitzer team boss], ‘Give me 40 minutes in the car in free practice and I’ll be up to speed at the end of it’.”

Soper and Lehto won the race, the first of three over the ALMS season run-in. They finished first or second in all five races they did together.

“My best memories from BMW are from that time in sportscars,” he says. “I hadn’t done much up until that point and it had been a long time before, but I was able to make the switch, whereas a lot of drivers couldn’t. And those two cars were just brilliant to drive.”

Soper looks back proudly on his time in sportscars with BMW, although he's best remembered for his tin-top exploits

Photo by: Sutton Images