The BMW M3 Touring GT racer is a Nürburgring star, and now they’re selling it
Finishing fifth overall in the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours, the BMW M3 Touring GT has become a star of the world’s most challenger endurance race
It all began as an April Fool’s joke in 2025, but BMW soon realised that there was some very real demand for its BMW M3 Touring GT racer. As a result, it quickly made it a reality and threw it in at the deep end with the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours. Challenging conditions and a 161-car grid made it far from an easy race, but nevertheless, the estate car placed fifth overall with Jens Klingmann, Ugo de Wilde, Connor De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen at the wheel.
Speaking with BMW M CEO Franciscus van Meel about its performance during the race weekend he said: ‘Right from the start we saw that we didn't have the pace to actually win the fight for the overall win, so our target was to stay in the game and make no mistakes, and if you have no technical problems, no accidents, then look where you can go… If someone would've told me yesterday that out of [our] four cars we would have three within the top ten, and the Touring would be in P5, I would've said okay… I'll take this.' Talk about understatement.
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The concept of such a car has been around since the production model made its debut in 2022, but even that came about through suggestions from the community. Van Meel acknowledged the huge value of this feedback following the success of the Touring GT: 'What we've learned is (that) if the community strongly suggests to do something, you should really consider doing it. In the past that's also how we came up with the M3 [Touring] in the first place, because there were so many people saying: “why don't you make an M3 Touring?” That's how we made the series production car.’ BMW skipped an April Fool’s joke entirely in 2026 given its focus on the M3 Touring GT, but Van Meel added: 'We're now of course at the end of the season and we'll start to look at next year with something else we can do.’ Le Mans Garage 56 BMW M5 saloon, anyone?
Development of the M3 Touring GT began in summer 2025, spanning a total of just eight months from start to finish. The highly successful BMW M4 GT3 Evo serves as its basis and with 80 race victories around the world under its belt, including last year’s N24 and the 24 Hours of Dubai, it’s certainly a strong platform to build upon. The Touring shares that car’s vast 2040mm width and P58 race version of M Division’s 3-litre twin-turbo straight-six, good for 582bhp without restriction.
Given the M3 Touring road car is longer than an M4, the race car is too, by 200mm including the huge rear wing – the wing sits higher than that on the M4 GT3 Evo by 32mm to clear the higher rear end of the Touring body, positioning it in clean airflow. There are no specifics on precisely how significant the benefits are, but the Touring body style is said to provide some inherent benefit to aerodynamic efficiency too. BMW even had to make modifications to the Touring's smaller front doors to increase their size to match the GT3 underpinnings – as a result, the rear doors no longer function.
Despite GT3 underpinnings, its experimental nature limits this car to the SPX category, making it virtually impossible to use anywhere else in an official capacity. Van Meel said: 'The plan was just to use it for this race, and afterwards sell it to someone who is very interested in buying it. We're still thinking what the future might be with the Touring, but we don't have any fixed plans.’
Who precisely will end up with the car is undisclosed, but what we do know is that their school runs will soon take much less time than they used to…
