Greetings, fellow long-roof connoisseur! If you’re reading this post, you’re likely a fan of all things touring. There’s a reason “brown/manual/wagon” is meme of car-nerdom—a lot of us just love long roofs. In fact, if my registration paperwork is anything to go by, I’ve owned a brown manual wagon (AKA a Jeep Wrangler 2-door, because that makes sense) for nearly a decade now. That makes me a literal card-carrying member.
This official BMW M3 Touring race car? Yep. Right up my alley—and plenty of yours, too—and that’s why BMW built it. The term “by popular demand” gets thrown around a lot, but this time around, it’s dead-on-accurate. This race car was originally conceived as a joke to celebrate last year’s April Fool’s Day. I’m not sure what this says about German humor, exactly, but what started out as a gag has since become the real deal.
“On 1st April 2025, BMW M Motorsport posted images on its social media platforms of a supposedly in-development BMW M3 Touring GT race car,” BMW said in Monday’s announcement. “The response from fans and the media to this post was overwhelming. It reached more than one million users and generated over 1.6 million views. Engagement on the posts was also many times higher than the usual figures for BMW M Motorsport’s social media channels.”
Yeah, yeah, “like and subscribe!” We get it. But the hidden message here is that even as recently as last April, this was all a silly fantasy. It wasn’t until later in 2025 that BMW actually pulled the trigger and set its engineers to the task of wrapping one of its M4 GT3 EVO race cars in a five-door body. What you see here is the result.
“A project like the BMW M3 Touring 24H has never existed at BMW M Motorsport before,” said BMW M Motorsport boss Andreas Roos. “Many thanks to everyone who put their heart and soul into this unique car and brought it to life. I am thrilled – and at the same time, I am certain that our fans, who are never closer to us than at our second home on the Nürburgring, will be just as excited. I promise all fans a great show and look forward to an event of superlatives.”
According to BMW, the car is 200 mm (~7.9 inches) longer and a little over an inch taller than the M4 GT3 race car, and shares all of its other tech specs (power, etc.). It will be entered in this year’s Nürburgring 24H with the four-man driving crew of Jens Klingmann, Ugo de Wilde, Connor De Phillippi, and Neil Verhagen. BMW is entering it in the SPX class (“X” for “eXhibition,” I suspect), where it won’t compete directly with its BMW M4 GT3 EVOs in SP9.
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