The secret path BMW took to success in Le Mans' past manufacturer boom

Tom Kristensen was hot property as the 1997 season drew to a close. And for good reason, after his starring performance on the way to victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours aboard the Joest Porsche WSC95 that year.

He had offers galore on the table, Nissan and Mercedes included, but he chose BMW. There were equally good reasons for that, too. The German manufacturer was headed back to Formula 1, and tied up with that programme was a firm commitment to win the French enduro.

That was just as important as the F1 angle to a driver just setting out on the sportscar career that would make him one of the all-time greats: “They told me they were going to Le Mans to win and would keep going until they did.”

On the face of it, the marque stuck to its word, though a turn of ill fortune meant it wouldn’t be Kristensen who took the victory laurels. But the story of BMW’s only outright victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours a quarter of a century ago in 1999 with the V12 LMR is far more complex than it looks.

BMW had an undeniable aspiration to win Le Mans. Paul Rosche, its grizzled engine guru and a powerhouse at the BMW Motorsport headquarters at Garching to the north of Munich, was a fan of sportscar racing. But behind the aspiration to take the biggest prize in endurance lay higher ambitions at the top table of motorsport: an F1 return to try to reprise its 1983 world championship success with Brabham and Nelson Piquet.

BMW had won Le Mans already, of sorts, in 1995 when its S70/2 V12 powered the winning McLaren. It saw the victory as an opportunity, one to both promote the brand and to get in bed with an established F1 player. In the wake of the 1995 Le Mans success for the Kokusai Kaihatsu-entered F1 GTR – a thinly veiled works entry by McLaren, said some – BMW started taking press ads trumpeting its role in the success. McLaren wasn’t impressed.

PLUS: The winding road that brought McLaren back to Le Mans

“McLaren said, ‘Hang on, you don’t have the right to do that’,” recalls Jeff Hazell, who headed up the GTR programme at the McLaren Cars division of the company that built both road and race F1s.

BMW powered the Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing McLaren F1 GTR to victory in 1995

Photo by: Sutton Images

The S70/2 was bespoke for the F1: linking up with old friend Rosche was an obvious route for McLaren’s former Brabham designer Gordon Murray when it came to commissioning an engine, though only after the F1 team’s engine supplier, Honda, had turned him down. “The only reason we put BMW on the cam covers was to stop people asking about the engine,” Hazell goes on.

BMW subsequently got on board with the F1 GTR programme, and then some. Hazell remembers talking to Rosche as he was starting to nail down the details of the deal when he was asked if McLaren would take over development of the BMW E36 3 Series Super Touring contender, which as the 320i was racing all over the world, including in the British Touring Car Championship with Schnitzer Motorsport.

“They kind of strong-armed us a bit when they asked if we could do it, but we ended up saying yes,” he recalls.

"Every year after 1987 some kind of proposal about F1 was put to the board, but every year they said no. Around 1994 or 1995, that turned onto a 'maybe'"
Steve Soper

The tin-top programme became part of a wider plan. BMW Motorsport, it was announced, would eventually move to the UK in a link-up with McLaren, or at least the chassis side would. Engine development was to stay in Europe under a road map that never reached its final destination.

Part of the deal involved an early end for the F1. At the end of 1995 a new production target of 100 cars was announced – the final figures were 78 for the road and 28 for the track. Sales had never taken off as envisaged, and McLaren needed to get out of its commitment for 300 BMW V12s.

The involvement with the F1 GTR apart, the tie-up never stretched much beyond some Super Tourer development focused on the front aerodynamics and suspension, and a trio of BTCC outings for Peter Kox at the back end of the 1996 season. Had it run its course, Murray would have moved over to BMW after two years.

The true story of what BMW was planning may never come out. Rosche and Karl-Heinz Kalbfell, who had returned to run BMW Motorsport after a previous spell in the 1980s, now as part of a wider marketing role, died in 2016 and 2013 respectively.

But long-time BMW factory driver Steve Soper, whose stint with the marque would stretch from 1989 to 2000, has no doubt that it was all part of a wider plan. Rosche had always had some kind of F1 engine on the drawing board or even the test bench since it officially called time on the M12/13 four-cylinder turbo F1 powerplant at the end of 1987.

Rosche (left) and Murray had been collaborators previously at the Brabham Formula 1 team

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

“Every year after 1987 some kind of proposal about F1 was put to the board, but every year they said no,” says Soper. “Around 1994 or 1995, that turned onto a ‘maybe’.”

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

But the requirement now was a link-up with an established team at the front of the grid: there had been an earlier attempt to return with a car designed by Nick Wirth, a car that ended up becoming an Andrea Moda! Soper’s belief is that the BMW Motorsport hierarchy reckoned it could persuade McLaren to jump ship from Mercedes, whose F1 V10 the F1 team had started using in 1995.

Kalbfell offered some insight into BMW’s thinking in an interview with this author in the summer of 1998, nearly a year after it was announced that the marque would be heading back to F1, not with McLaren but with Williams.

“It was always clear that when we started again [in F1], it would be with a top team,” he said, also confirming that Rosche never took his eye off the F1 ball. “There wasn’t any time when we were completely away. We developed engines, not to the full extent, but so that we knew what was going on.”

BMW’s link-up with McLaren resulted in two factory campaigns at Le Mans. In 1996 there were a pair of F1 GTR short-tail cars on the grid run by the Bigazzi BMW factory team, Piquet, Soper, Jacques Laffite and Johnny Cecotto among the drivers. A year later BMW stepped up to mount a more serious sportscar campaign. Now with the F1 GTR in long-tail form, it would take on the new FIA GT Championship as well as Le Mans with the crack Schnitzer team.

BMW and McLaren came close to winning both Le Mans and the FIA GT title. The new version of the F1 GTR, conceived to meet the challenge of ever more extreme rivals in GT1, ended up second and third at the Circuit de la Sarthe in 1997, a customer entry run by the GTC Competition squad heading home one of the Schnitzer entries.

Within three months, motor racing’s worst kept secret of the era was out. BMW would be returning to F1 with Williams in 2000, it was announced in September 1997. Its route back to F1 was paved not by its efforts to get in bed with McLaren, but Renault’s decision to quit the pinnacle of the sport, ending its long-running and successful engine supply deal with Williams. By the time of the announcement of the BMW-Williams partnership at the Frankfurt motor show, it had become clear that the unfulfilled Le Mans ambition would move from Woking to Didcot, too.

BMW developed the LM for 1998, but it was rushed and neither car finished

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The decision for Williams to develop an all-new LMP was made late. Very late. So much so that when the programme was launched in January of 1998, there was no car, no model.

Instead, actor Desmond Llewelyn, Q from the James Bond franchise to which BMW was in the middle of a three-film deal to supply 007’s modified machinery, was brought in to stand in front of a flip pad bearing a simple line drawing and talk about it in the broadest of terms. The real thing wouldn’t run for the first time until the weeks leading up to the Le Mans pre-qualifying weekend – the precursor of today’s Test Day – at the end of April.

Kristensen reckons the car, known as the V12 LM after the engine that had been carried over from the F1 GTR, wasn’t that bad. He points out that it ran as high as third before both the two entries run by Rafanelli – the renamed Bigazzi team – went out with identical wheel-bearing problems. Soper is less kind: “It was a shitbox.”

The first car suffered from what Humphrys calls “formulaoneitis”. A complex design had been further complicated by the involvement of BMW’s styling department

“The people who did it had never done a sportscar before and it was rushed,” Soper continues in his blunt assessment of the Mk1 BMW LMP. “And the wheelbase was very short: it wasn’t nice to drive.”

Williams and BMW knew they had to think again as they strove for that elusive outright Le Mans victory. Graham Humphrys, who’d engineered the GT2 class-winning Chrysler Viper GTS-R for ORECA at Le Mans in 1998, had run into old friend Patrick Head over the course of the event. The Williams technical boss invited him to take a closer look at the V12 LM in the wake of the race.

“While everyone was away recovering, I had a couple of weeks looking at the existing car by myself,” recalls Humphrys, who’d been responsible for a line of designs at Spice Engineering that had taken multiple class victories at Le Mans. “I did a report on what I thought the problems were and what was needed. When Patrick had a look at it, he said, ‘Well you best get on with it, then!’”

Soper describes the new car that gained the R suffix to distinguish it from its predecessor as “a revolution not an evolution”. Humphrys points out that all the people on the project were the same, including John Russell, who remained the programme boss; it was just that it had now been subtly turned by an incomer to push and pull in the right direction.

The first car suffered from what Humphrys calls “formulaoneitis”. A complex design had been further complicated by the involvement of BMW’s styling department.

The revamped LMR benefitted from external input from Humphrys

Photo by: LAT Photographic

“It was F1 meets the corporate world,” he says. “Common sense didn’t prevail.”

Just 68 of the V12 LMR’s 3222 components were carried over from its predecessor, BMW declared at the time. It was a brand-new car right down to its Xtrac gearbox, yet remarkably it went from drawing board to the race track with a shakedown in early January in little more than five months. It sounds unthinkable today, but Humphrys insists that all he did was “to keep it simple”.

“There were a lot of good people at Williams, it was just that they had no experience of sportscars,” says Humphrys. “They needed pointing in the right direction. I put all my knowledge about sportscar racing down on a sheet of paper and distributed it around the office and did the original layout. After that my job was just to keep the plates spinning.”

Corporate involvement from BMW was limited this time. Instead, Peter Stevens, stylist of McLaren’s F1 road car, was brought in as a consultant. He was charged with ensuring the car looked like a BMW, but at the same time wasn’t compromised by its styling.

The V12 LMR would win Le Mans in one of the strongest years ever in terms of manufacturer participation at the sharp end of the grid, until today that is. It was ranged against Toyota, Mercedes, Audi, Nissan and Panoz, but ultimately it turned into a two-horse race between BMW and a reworked version of the Toyota GT-One that had come close to victory the previous year.

It was a kind of double battle: a car from each manufacturer went at it hammer and tongs into the early hours, and then the confrontation resumed in the final stages when it was the turn of the slower of the two BMWs and the remaining Japanese-crewed GT-One. Kristensen was long since changed into civvies as the fight for Le Mans glory that year entered its final stages.

The Dane and team-mates JJ Lehto and Jorg Muller took a clear lead when the Thierry Boutsen Toyota was punted into the wall – and retirement from racing courtesy of the serious back injuries he sustained – under braking for the Dunlop Chicane in the small hours. The disappearance of the Japanese car co-driven by Allan McNish and Ralf Kelleners gave the BMW crew dubbed the ‘The Giants’ a three-lap lead that had become four when Lehto went off in the Porsche Curves in hour 21.

Kristensen, Lehto and Muller were set for victory in 1999 before a freak failure opened the door for their sister crew

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The top of a damper had freakishly wound itself off and, as the car sat down on its belly, a section of the front anti-roll bar fell down into the throttle pedal assembly. With the throttle jammed open, Lehto had no chance of keeping it out of the wall.

“Tom and I still argue about that one,” says McNish, who would go on to win Le Mans twice with Kristensen. “We both reckon we would have won.”

BMW’s hopes now swung to ‘The Jockeys’: Yannick Dalmas, Pierluigi Martini and Jo Winkelhock. They had opted for a conservative pace at Dalmas’s insistence.

Schnitzer estimated that the Toyota would have emerged from its final stop 15s in arrears. Then it would have been up to Katayama

The Japanese Toyota line-up of Ukyo Katayama, Toshio Suzuki and Keiichi Tsuchiya were also tortoises to the hares of the other two cars from the Cologne-based organisation. But the pace was stepped up by both crews as the clock ticked down, Katayama setting fastest lap of the race as he chased down the BMW.

Whether Toyota could have taken a first victory 19 years before it finally put its Le Mans hoodoo to bed remains a matter of conjecture. Katayama sustained a puncture when he was forced over the kerbs at the first Mulsanne chicane with 50 minutes to go. The aggressor was amateur Thomas Bscher, who happened to be driving a BMW – one of the old V12 LMs.

Schnitzer estimated that the Toyota would have emerged from its final stop 15s in arrears. Then it would have been up to Katayama. “I was so nervous that I could hardly hold my pencil,” says Hans Reiter, who engineered the winning car. “I think I had come to the realisation that they were going to catch us.”

BMW finally got its Le Mans victory in 1999, and a good job it did. Despite the promise to keep going back until it won, the core of the team behind the V12 LMR at Williams had been laid off in the run-up to the race. The focus was now firmly on F1. There would be no return in pursuit of outright glory until this year with the M Hybrid V8 LMDh.