Sometimes car manufacturers post an April Fools’ joke online and quietly forget about it the next day. BMW did the opposite. What started as a playful social media rendering has now become a fully functioning BMW M3 Touring race car, set to make its competitive debut at the Nürburgring Nordschleife next week.
The car, officially called the BMW M3 Touring 24H, will enter the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie (NLS) as part of BMW’s endurance racing preparations. Remarkably, the entire project came together in just eight months, following an overwhelming reaction from fans to BMW’s April 2025 joke post imagining a GT racing version of the brand’s high-performance wagon.
According to BMW, the response from enthusiasts was so strong that the company decided to turn the concept into a real racing program.
A Racing Wagon Based on the BMW M4 GT3
While it looks like a heavily modified version of the road-going BMW M3 Touring, the race car is technically much closer to the BMW M4 GT3 underneath.
Power comes from a race-prepared 3.0-litre twin-turbo inline-six engine producing around 586 horsepower, which is sent to the rear wheels. That’s roughly 86 horsepower more than the standard M3 Touring, and thanks to significant weight reductions typical of GT race cars, the Touring 24H should be dramatically quicker than its road-going counterpart.
BMW has not yet released official performance figures, but given the power increase and lighter race-spec construction, the car is expected to be significantly faster around demanding circuits like the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
A Nürburgring Race Car “Built for the Fans”
BMW describes the M3 Touring 24H as a “car for the fans,” and the launch livery proves the point. The car is covered with actual comments left by fans under BMW’s original April Fools post, turning the internet’s enthusiasm into part of the car’s design.
For its competitive debut, however, the car will run a different special livery when it lines up on the Nürburgring grid.
The racing wagon will be operated by Schubert Motorsport in the SPX experimental class of the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie. That means it won’t compete directly against BMW’s M4 GT3 cars running in the top SP9 class, but the project will allow engineers to test the car under real racing conditions.
Could BMW Sell the M3 Touring Race Car?
BMW has not confirmed whether the M3 Touring 24H will eventually be offered to customer racing teams. Currently, BMW sells its M4 GT3 race car to private teams for around £500,000, and if a Touring variant were ever produced for sale, it would likely sit in a similar price range.
For now, the car remains a one-off racing experiment born from internet enthusiasm.
And in a world where most April Fools jokes disappear within 24 hours, BMW has done something rather refreshing: it actually built the ridiculous thing.