BMW M3 Touring 24H: the joke that became a genuine GT3 race car storms Goodwood
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BMW's one-off M3 Touring race wagon, born as an April Fool's joke, now climbs the Goodwood hill after finishing fourth overall at the Nürburgring 24 Hours.
The BMW M3 Touring 24H is back in public view — this time climbing the hill at the 2026 Goodwood Festival of Speed. The funniest part is that the project started as an April Fool’s joke, but in eight months it turned into a genuine race-spec wagon that has already finished fourth overall at the Nürburgring 24 Hours.
The car is built on the M4 GT3 EVO, adapted to fit the G81 wagon body. Development took eight months, and the build itself just eight weeks. At the Nürburgring, Jens Klingmann, Connor De Phillippi, Ugo de Wilde and Neil Verhagen shared driving duties for Schubert Motorsport.
In the SPX class, the M3 Touring 24H won outright, and in the overall standings it beat plenty of far more conventional race cars. This is not a compact sports car by any measure. Its length — 5.2 meters — is roughly that of the previous-generation long-wheelbase BMW 7 Series. Width, thanks to the flared arches, reaches 2,040 mm. The driving position was moved 60 mm forward compared to the M4 GT3 EVO, to make getting in and out easier.
Given that the car was also meant to double as a race taxi, that detail makes sense. Under the hood sits a race-tuned 3.0-liter inline-six P58 engine with two turbochargers. It’s based on the road-going S58, but tuned to nearly 600 hp and 700 Nm of torque. Power goes to the rear wheels through a 6-speed sequential transaxle gearbox. This is no longer a quick family wagon — it’s a full-blown GT3 project wearing a body normally associated with trunk space, child seats and long road trips.
At Goodwood, the car isn’t chasing an endurance result anymore, but it shows a different side of its character: the sound, the acceleration, and just how strange a massive wagon with a huge rear wing looks tackling a hill climb course. Projects like this are exactly what make the Festival of Speed special — a car that breaks the usual genres, right alongside the hypercars.
The M3 Touring 24H is now owned by BMW M enthusiast and collector Rainer Bonnetsmüller. In September, the wagon will appear again at the Tutto Bene Hill Climb in Italy and during the MotoGP round in Spielberg, Austria.
What makes this M3 Touring interesting isn’t that BMW built another fast wagon. It’s something else entirely: sometimes the best race car is born from a joke that engineers suddenly took seriously.
Earlier, 32CARS.RU reported that the BMW M Vision Neue Klasse previewed the future design language for all M models.
