Three drivers who had never raced together in the FIA World Endurance Championship climbed out of a BMW M4 GT3 EVO at Imola with a class victory. Dan Harper, Parker Thompson, and Anthony McIntosh won LMGT3 in the #69 car run by Team WRT at the 6 Hours of Imola, the opening round of the 2026 FIA WEC season. They didn’t even expect it themselves.
“I thought it would take us the whole season to achieve this goal,” Thompson said. “But now we’ve cleared this hurdle on our very first attempt.”
The win wasn’t clean-cut dominance. It was opportunism, grit, and a rival’s heartbreak. The McLaren ahead of Harper was faster and pulling away in the final stages, then it broke.
Harper, who had mentally conceded second place, suddenly found himself crossing the line first. “I feel a bit for the McLaren crew, as they were really super fast,” he said. “I had already settled for second place.”
That candor tells you something about the character of this crew. McIntosh delivered a blistering opening stint that hauled the car from fourth on the grid to the front. Thompson held station, and Harper closed it out.
Team WRT’s strategy was sharp. This is the same outfit that delivered a one-two LMGT3 finish at Imola in 2024. They know this track, and they know how to extract results from the BMW M4 GT3 platform.
The sister car, the #32 with Augusto Farfus, Sean Gelael, and Darren Leung, finished fifth despite a five-second unsafe release penalty and pre-race technical headaches that compromised setup time. Farfus called it a result that “feels better than it looks,” which is the kind of thing seasoned pros say when they know the car had more in it.
Up in the Hypercar class, BMW’s story was less celebratory but arguably more revealing. The two BMW M Hybrid V8s qualified for Hyperpole and started ninth and tenth. René Rast and Robin Frijns in the #20 were running ahead of the Toyota that eventually made the podium, then a drive-through penalty shoved them backward.
Rast clawed back to fifth. Kevin Magnussen and Raffaele Marciello brought the #15 home seventh after what Marciello called a tire strategy miscue that cost them a shot at fourth.
No podium, then. But both cars scored points in front of 92,175 spectators, a record crowd for Imola’s WEC round. Both drivers pointed to specific, fixable errors rather than fundamental pace deficits.
“Without that penalty, more would certainly have been possible,” Rast said. Marciello echoed him almost exactly.
Andreas Roos, Head of BMW M Motorsport, framed it carefully: competitive enough to fight for top positions, but not yet clean enough to stand on the box. That’s the gap BMW has to close, not in raw speed, but in execution.
A new driver pairing in the #20, a two-driver Hypercar format that demands flawless pit work, and a field that punishes every tenth left on the table. The margin for error is gone.
The tension running through BMW’s entire Imola weekend is the distance between potential and polish. The LMGT3 squad turned potential into a trophy, partly through skill and partly through fortune. The Hypercar program showed the speed but fumbled the details.
In endurance racing, those details are the difference between fifth and the podium, between a solid points haul and a champagne spray.
Team WRT boss Vincent Vosse called the GT class win “excellent” and the Hypercar results “strong.” He’s right on both counts. But strong isn’t the word BMW is chasing.
They came to the Hypercar class to win races, and they know it. The machinery is there and the mistakes are small. Whether they can erase them before Le Mans in June will define their season.
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