What started as a throwaway April Fool’s gag on BMW Motorsport’s social media in April 2025 is now one of the most talked-about machines at the 2026 Goodwood Festival of Speed. The BMW M3 Touring 24H — a full-blown race car wearing a station wagon body — attacked the famous hill climb this weekend, sounding every bit as angry as it looks.
The backstory is almost too good. BMW Motorsport posted a fake concept called the “M3 Touring GT3 Evo” on April 1, 2025. The internet lost its mind.
Eight months later, someone at BMW decided the joke deserved an engine and a rollcage. Eight weeks after that, the car was built.
This is not some cosmetic exercise bolted onto a road car. The M3 Touring 24H is derived directly from the M4 GT3 EVO race platform, re-skinned with the G81 wagon body. Under the hood sits BMW’s P58 race engine, a 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline-six descended from the road car’s S58 but tuned to nearly 600 horsepower and 516 lb-ft of torque, all routed to the rear wheels through a six-speed sequential transaxle.
The thing already has a racing résumé. At the Nürburgring 24 Hours, Schubert Motorsport drivers Jens Klingmann, Connor De Phillippi, Ugo de Wilde, and Neil Verhagen drove it to a class victory in SPX and fourth overall. Fourth overall. In a wagon.
The dimensions tell you this is no subtle piece of engineering. At 5.2 meters long, it matches the footprint of a previous-generation long-wheelbase 7 Series. The bulging fenders push its width to 2,040 millimeters, and a massive rear wing finishes the profile.
The driver’s seat was moved 60 millimeters forward compared to the M4 GT3 EVO to make getting in and out slightly less acrobatic. That’s a concession to the car’s second life as a race taxi, complete with an optional passenger seat.
That dual purpose is part of what makes this project so unusual. BMW built a car capable of finishing near the top at the most grueling endurance race in Germany, then shipped it to a festival where it can give VIPs the ride of their lives up a 1.16-mile hillclimb in front of Lord March’s house.
The car now belongs to M enthusiast and collector Rainer Bonnetsmüller, who clearly has no intention of parking it behind glass. After Goodwood, the M3 Touring 24H heads to the Tutto Bene Hill Climb in Italy in September, then to the MotoGP race weekend in Spielberg, Austria.
BMW has a long history of building one-off specials that generate headlines and then disappear. The M3 Touring 24H feels different. It scratches an itch the company has long ignored — the overlap between Motorsport credibility and the wagon cult that has grown louder every year.
BMW built the M3 Touring road car because customers demanded it. Then they raced the wagon because the internet dared them to.
The lesson is simple: sometimes the best product decisions start as jokes nobody expects to land. BMW called the bluff, built the car in two months, won its class at the Ring, and is now parading it up the most famous driveway in motorsport. The P58 straight-six screaming through Goodwood’s flint walls is the sound of a manufacturer that, for once, listened to the loudest voices in the room — and delivered exactly what they wanted.
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