HARRISBURG, N.C. — BMW, which has won championships in both prototype and production car divisions on the American Le Mans Series tour, will return to the ALMS in 2009 with its next generation M3 coupes. The announcement, made last week at the Chicago Auto Show, will see former Indy 500 winner Bobby Rahal and his partner, late night talk show host David Letterman, field a pair of M3s on behalf of BMW Motorsport in the highly contested GT2 category.
Interestingly, the agreement between Rahal Letterman Racing and BMW comes just a year after the team joined the series in the tough GT2 arena running a Porsche 911 GT3RSR, becoming one of the leading Porsche operations in the category against the Ferrari 439GT juggernaut that saw the Italian carmaker dethrone its German rival in 2007 as the top brand in the category.
Indeed, until that championship defeat, Porsche had ruled the GT2 roost since BMW and its Prototype Technology Group partner had withdrawn from the ALMS scene after a controversy over the Munich-based company’s decision to contest the title tour with a specially designed M3 featuring an engine that many believed was a non-production, racing-oriented powerplant.
The unique M3 had been introduced to counter Porsche’s beefed-up GT3 effort following PTG’s crown-winning season in 2001. Having withdrawn from the ALMS, PTG and BMW transferred their efforts to the Grand American’s Rolex Sports Car championship, winning in its GT arena for several years with specially modified M3s powered by V-8s from the company’s M5 series. When Rolex officials moved to restrict the PTG coupes, BMW withdrew altogether from the North American road-racing scene until last week’s announcement.
How the new Rahal Letterman BMW effort will fare against the leading protagonists from Ferrari and Porsche in the GT2 wars will be interesting, with both Porsche and Ferraro continuing to develop their already highly developed cars, and with the PTG run Panoz entries showing ever-increasing competitiveness throughout the 2007 campaign.
Scott Atherton’s reaction to the announcement of BMW’s return was to the point and enthusiastic, the president of the ALMS saying, “This is a monumental day for the American Le Mans Series. BMW represents one of the cornerstones on which the American Le Mans Series was built. We are thrilled to embrace this from them with Rahal Letterman.”
The Rahal Letterman team will debut on the 10th anniversary of the series, and the 10th anniversary of the brand’s first prototype championship with its V12LM spyder in 1999, the precedent-setting car, also winning Le Mans that year and leading the way for Audi’s R8, which dominated both the Sarthe and the ALMS until it was replaced by the turbo diesel R10 in 2006.