HOW BMW CREATED THE ULTIMATE RACER
We look back on the ground-breaking M3
It was an instant hit. From its debut race in 1987, the E30-generation BMW M3 turned touring car racing on its head worldwide and title after title fell to the twodoor homologation special. From World titles to club racing, the M3 conquered all that was before it.
Work on the M3 started in 1985 after BMW head Eberhard von Kuenheim paid a visit to the firm’s motorsport department in Munich, headed by Paul Rosche, who had overseen the company’s successes as an engine supplier in Formula 2 and latterly Formula 1 for Brabham. “We need,” Kuenheim reportedly said as he left, “a sporty engine for the 3 Series.”
The four-cylinder two-litre 3-Series engine was increased to a 2.3-litre powerplant and used four-valve engineering. It was kept to a fourcylinder engine, rather than six, as the larger engine started to vibrate much sooner than the smaller one, so the BMW engineers managed to wring 10,000 rpm out of the smaller block.
According to Rosche, work started immediately. With the six-cylinder engine having the same cylinder gap as the fourcylinder, two combustion chambers were cut off and a panel bolted over the hole on the rear side, and the engine that had made the BMW M1 so good and transformed the venerable M635CSI now had a fourcylinder offshoot made, amazingly, in less than two weeks. With 300 horsepower on tap from the 2.3-litre engine, the 960kg car was an instant hit.
“It was the ultimate turn-key race car,” remembers Malcolm Swetnam who looked after Frank Sytner’s Prodrive British Touring Car Championship machine in 1988. “It came as a kit of parts from the factory and all you needed was some paint for when it was finished. It was amazing customer service and if you had a washer left over, you knew that you had missed something! You never needed extra bits: it was always supplied spot-on.”
The car’s first major race was the 1987 World Touring Car Championship race at Monza. The series, so eagerly expected at the time, turned into a shambles before the opening race when the sporting governing body, the Federation Internationale du
Sport Automobile (FISA), demanded a $60,000 registration fee to score points and then the Monza scrutineers excluded the Eggenberger-operated Ford Sierra Cosworths before the race. Hence, it was a top-six lockout for the little Bimmers, headed home by the Cibiemme-tended car of Johnny Cecotto/riccardo Patrese, until, with the cars now in the teams’ transporters, the scrutineers asked for another look. Somehow, they had got wind of the difference in roof thickness between a Hungarian team’s car (converted from a road car) and the BMW Motorsport-provided cars.
Their roof panelling was deemed to be too thin, and hence the first six cars were all excluded. The fact that the seventhplaced win-inheriting Holden of John Harvey/allan Moffatt wasn’t scoring points just added to the mess….
While BMW Motorsport was busy changing roof thickness, a band of busy Brits was looking at the German weapon for a different purpose.
Prodrive wanted a new rally car and team boss David Richards identified the M3 as an ideal Tarmac rally car, with a market in France and the Benelux countries there for the taking.
Richards struck up a relationship with Wolfgang-peter Flohr, the head of BMW Motorsport, who did him a deal on a number of cars and parts, but plans to garner support from BMW GB were soon scuppered: MD Tom Purves felt rallying wasn’t right for the brand, but circuit racing was.
That meant that Prodrive had to go it alone with Bernard Beguin behind the wheel and Motul and Rothmans providing backing. The Banbury squad worked on axles, strengthening the car and improving suspension, for example, and took what was always meant to be a racer into a competitive stage winner, too.
Prodrive was soon to diversify. Sytner arrived at Prodrive, having never met Richards, with a desire to get back into the BTCC after a torrid time in the early Group A days in his 635. Sytner wanted to be more than just a customer with a Bmw-supplied car, and a look around the Prodrive raceshop identified enough spares to build a race car.
Sytner remembers: “My plan was to run the new M3, and I had my own team and I had sponsorship from Mobil 1. Then I was introduced to Richards, who I didn’t know at that time. I met him, and here was
this guy doing rallying and I was the racing guy. We were connected to BMW and he was connected to sponsors and he had a workshop and a team and so the idea was to get together and see if we could do something.
“David was already getting chassis kits to make his M3 rally cars and he had one bodyshell left over and it was agreed that I would bring in my backer. I told David that I could convince BMW to stay on board with me and we would effectively be the works team. I said to David that he could own the team – he was the team man, I was not. All I wanted to do was to win the championship. As it happens, we then became very close friends, but take into account I had never even met him at the start of all this.”
In July, Sytner gave the car its bow, and led, at the grand prix-supporting BTCC race and a month later on Donington Park’s shorter layout he ran out the winner by half a second from Graham Goode’s Sierra, Sytner’s brakes having faded in the second half of the race. It was the car’s only outright win in the multi-class era of the BTCC, an impressive result.
“Remember, the M3 was already developed as a race car. If you ordered a race car, and it was the same as with the 635, you essentially got a kit to go racing,” points out Sytner. “It had whatever was homologated. What they had was already a Tarmac rally car, but actually Tarmac rallying and circuit racing are pretty close in what you require from a car. It is not a million miles away.”
The Prodrive engineering expertise made the BTCC cars different from the manufacturer-supplied cars, though. By 1988, Prodrive was running a six-speed gearbox. “BMW didn’t want to know about that,” remembers Swetnam. “It had its reliability issues at times and for the last race Frank wanted a five-speed box to be safe and to win the championship.”
BMW GB came to the party in 1988, thanks to BMW dealer Sytner’s efforts, with Mobil sponsorship as well. Sytner, despite occasional impudent speed from team-mate Mike Smith, won the championship and a year later James Weaver came on board as his team-mate in a season of fierce fighting.
Swetnam remembers the relationship with BMW Motorsport as an exceptional one. He says: “Schnitzer always got the new parts first and would try them for a race and then the customers got them. We knew that, and we accepted that was the process, but because we all got the parts soon after, no team every felt it was being had over. You could genuinely compete against the Schnitzer, as plenty of teams proved. It was like racing against the works Porsche 962s: the good customer teams could take them on.”
The M3 was a prolific winner in Group N and Production Saloon Car racing as well. It was a simple car, easy for the national-level racer to buy and maintain.
The likes of Matt Neal and Mike Jordan enjoyed success in Group N, while BMW enlarged the engine to 2.5-litres (380hp) for the DTM where, after Eric van der Poele had won in 1987, Roberto Ravaglia (the 1987 WTCC title winner) won in ‘89. Indeed, Ravaglia, who also won the European title, the Nurburgring 24 Hours and Italian championship aboard M3s, would have a special edition model named after him.
Back in rallying, the M3 was enjoying success on Tarmac, cannily staying away from gravel events as much as possible. In
France, Beguin was the man to beat, before Francois Chatriot scooped the 1990 title, while in Ireland, Billy Coleman’s car was in top form. Beguin also won the 1987 Corsican Rally giving the M3 a WRC success.
The M3 continued winning in the 1990s, at the Nurburgring and Spa 24 Hours, its last win in the Belgian classic coming in 1992. To keep it competitive, the car had undergone significant evolutions, such as weight reductions, improved aero, bigger brake ducts and more power.
Even when the E36 shape was introduced in 1992, there were so many of the original cars competing that successes continued for many more seasons. In the UK, for example, four straight Snetterton 24 wins fell to the M3, Neal being part of 1990’s winning trio, while Jordan took a brace of wins in ’92 and ’93.
“It was such a solid car,” remembers Jordan. “I bought mine from Neal and in that era of Group N we had sprint races, a couple of 500-kilometre races and 24 hours at Snetterton. The car worked in all of those formats! It was bombproof, a simple car and was massively well-engineered. If you prepped the car properly, it was a surprise to have a problem.”
Like many, Jordan was impressed by how the car was delivered by BMW. “It was very Germanic! Everything was homologated, so engineering-wise there was little to do. For example, it came with a fixed set of Bilstein dampers that worked everywhere so you just adjusted tyre pressures, got in and drove. There was nothing else that needed doing…”
Sytner agrees: “It was a fantastic car in the way it had such poise on the race track. And the key was that it just didn’t wear itself out. The tyres, the brakes: it was cleverly designed.”
That user-friendly nature of the car not only allowed hordes of them to hit the circuits at national level but for smaller teams to take on the larger ones. In Group N, Guy Povey, almost single-handedly, took on the larger squads to good effect.
Behind the wheel, the car required precision. “In Group N trim it only generated around 200bhp,” remembers Jordan, “so it wasn’t a powerful car, not especially fast and you needed to drive it tidily. If you tried to get it sideways, you would go slower.”
BMW had already been a mainstay of touring car racing at all levels around the world, but the M3 was the car that enhanced the company’s reputation as a touring car powerhouse. World, domestic and club level titles fell to the BMW M3, with Will Hoy taking the 1991 BTCC crown, for example. The list of drivers reads like a Who’s Who of motor racing. Nothing like it has been produced since.
The beauty of the car was its simplicity. Says Swetnam: “It was like a modern Lotus Cortina. You didn’t need to do anything to them. They just worked.”