A station wagon came within a quarter-second of a podium finish at the 2026 Goodwood Festival of Speed. The BMW M3 Touring 24H, piloted by South African racing driver Jordan Pepper, clocked a 46.54-second hillclimb run. That put him just 0.24 seconds behind Alex Summers in the Shadow-Chevrolet DN4, which took third place.
Fifth fastest up the most famous hill in motorsport. In a wagon. That sentence alone tells you everything about how far this project traveled from its origins.
The M3 Touring 24H started life as an April Fools’ joke in 2025. BMW teased it, the internet salivated, and then Munich actually built the thing. The development phase took eight months, the physical build took eight weeks, and the result was a one-off G81 3 Series Touring stripped of every domestic pretension and rebuilt as a legitimate endurance racer.
Under the long roof sits not the road car’s S58 inline-six but the motorsport-spec P58, producing nearly 600 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque. The xDrive all-wheel-drive system is gone, replaced by a rear-drive layout and a six-speed sequential transaxle gearbox. Mechanically, it shares more DNA with the €578,000 M4 GT3 EVO than with anything you’d park in a suburban driveway.
The car proved itself before Goodwood. It finished fourth at the Nürburgring 24-hour endurance race, a result that legitimized the entire exercise and turned what could have been a marketing stunt into a genuine competition car.
BMW no longer owns it. The M3 Touring 24H has passed into the private collection of Rainer Bonnetsmüller. The purchase price remains undisclosed, though given the car’s one-of-one status and its proximity to GT3-spec machinery, the number was almost certainly north of anything BMW slaps on a showroom window sticker.
Bonnetsmüller apparently isn’t parking it in a climate-controlled garage and walking away. The car’s next confirmed public appearances include the MotoGP weekend at Spielberg, Austria, and the Tutto Bene Hill Climb in Italy, both in September. It also spent time on display at the BMW M Clubhouse during the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.
The Goodwood result carries a quiet significance beyond bragging rights. BMW has likely wrung every last drop of performance from the current G81 platform with the street-legal M3 CS Touring. The race car was the final, extreme expression of that generation’s potential, and now it belongs to a private collector rather than the factory.
Whether BMW builds another M3 Touring for the next-generation G51 3 Series platform remains an open question. The company hasn’t committed, but the commercial and cultural success of the current car makes it difficult to imagine walking away from the recipe. There’s even renewed speculation that a future M3 wagon could finally reach the United States, a market that has watched enviously from across the Atlantic.
For now, the M3 Touring 24H stands as one of the more improbable creations in recent BMW M history. Born from a joke, built in weeks, raced at the Nürburgring, sold to a collector, and nearly on the podium at Goodwood. The line between marketing exercise and legitimate motorsport achievement has rarely been this thin, or this entertaining.
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