From April Fools' joke to Nurburgring hero: the story of BMW's wild M3 Touring race car
The internet asked for a racing estate, and for once it actually got one
This might be our favourite car story of the year. It began as a simple April Fools' joke, a rendering of a racing BMW M3 Touring estate that was never meant to exist, and ended with a real, fire-breathing race car battling at the front of the Nurburgring 24 Hours. As lifelong estate lovers, we adore everything about this.
It really was just a joke
It genuinely started as a gag. For April Fools' Day, BMW published nothing more than renderings of a race-prepped M3 Touring, never expecting the reaction it got. The post exploded online, reaching people BMW had never reached before, and fans refused to believe, or accept, that the car was not real. As one team member recalls, he had to keep explaining, no, this car does not exist, we did not build it, and everyone was crushed that BMW had not made it. The demand was overwhelming.
So BMW actually built it
Faced with that much love, a small group inside BMW made a bold call: if they were going to do this, it could only point in one direction, the Nordschleife, BMW's home turf. And crucially, it had to be a proper race car, not a show pony that falls apart after three kilometres. So they built a genuine competition M3 Touring for the Nurburgring 24 Hours, running in an experimental class, and even printed some of the best fan comments from the original April Fools' post onto the car. Some fans literally saw their words on the finished machine.
Engineered to a GT3 standard
This was no half-hearted effort. The team's goal was to get the M3 Touring's weight balance and aerodynamics into the same window as BMW's M4 GT3, and they spent days in the wind tunnel and at test tracks chasing exactly that. On Yokohama tyres they wrestled with rear-axle stiffness and confidence, but the payoff was startling: testers said the car almost felt like an M4 GT3. For a long, load-lugging estate body, matching a purpose-built GT3 racer is a seriously impressive achievement. It is the sort of fast-wagon madness we also loved in the Lynk & Co 07 GT shooting brake, only turned up to full race spec.
Then it went and ran with the big boys
The race itself was the payoff. From the very first hour the M3 Touring showed startling pace, running inside the top ten and at times posting the fastest lap times of any BMW on track. In the early stints it even hassled BMW's own M4 GT3 Evo racers, and in one moment destined for the highlight reels, one of the team's drivers hauled the estate past a works Mercedes under brutal, changeable conditions on the run to Schwedenkreuz. Watching a Touring wagon fighting wheel to wheel with front-running GT3 cars, through rain, hail and blinding sun, was pure motorsport theatre. There was the odd stroke of bad luck too, with repeated Code 60 slow zones costing time overnight.
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We love this with our whole hearts. A brand listening to its fans, taking a throwaway internet joke and pouring real engineering, money and passion into making it reality, is exactly the kind of thing that makes car culture special, and doing it with an estate makes it even better in our book. That the finished car could genuinely race with GT3 machinery, rather than just trundle round for a photo, is the icing on the cake. More of this, please, BMW. It proves that sometimes the best ideas really do come from the internet, and that a fast wagon remains one of the purest joys in all of motoring.
BMW has been busy at the Nordschleife lately, also setting a record with the M2 and its M Performance Track Kit, a track that also saw the driverless Xiaomi YU7 GT set a record.
