That feeling has more to do with what you’re sitting in than the interior itself. Like you're trespassing in the space shuttle. I'm doing this to the point of being insufferable. I also make it a point to shout about every flame it throws. While Bill is lapping, I'm running from corner to corner at Mid-Ohio to catch a glimpse of the GTR. They're long and lingering, you could roast marshmallows. It's blasting flames out of the side exhaust. Auberlen is warming up the car when I get my first glimpse of it in motion. Downshifts sound like an explosion and are accompanied by fire.įire. It’s an H-pattern gearbox, but shifts take a fraction of a second, an abrupt interruption. The P60B40 is always screaming, Axl Rose with side pipes. The roof has a vent to keep you from baking inside. The fenders make it appear twice as wide. I start repeating "it's really here." For a car that only raced one season, the M3 GTR has a presence that other race cars don't have. The GTR is sitting in the garage at Mid Ohio when we pull up, and my first reaction is disbelief. The M3 GTR showed that Porsche was beatable, and in subsequent years cars from Ferrari, Aston Martin, Panoz and more entered. But in the years since, I’ve come to appreciate it as the car that broke Porsche’s stranglehold on the GT class. I loved it for how in-your-face it was, and how brazen BMW was for just throwing a V8 in an M3, a V8 the company knew shouldn’t have been there. I’ve been enamored with the M3 GTR since its debut. The road car program was immediately scrapped, and while the M3 GTR continued to be legal in Europe, it was done in the ALMS.Ī heartbreaking moment for your author. BMW barely wanted to build 10, let alone 1000. At least 100 of the cars had to exist, but, and this was the real problem, the automaker had to build 1000 engines. Perhaps because of Porsche's complaint, rules defining what constitutes a production car changed for 2002. The ALMS allowed the GTRs to race.īMW Motorsport and the Prototype Technology Group (PTG) teams won seven of 10 races and finished first and third in the ALMS championship. It was exorbitant on purpose: BMW didn't really want to sell the cars. They had the dry-sumped P60B40 rated at 380 horsepower and manual gearboxes. In a move to make the car unimpeachably legal–and to shut Porsche up–BMW offered to sell 10 road cars.
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