Mclaren f1 gtr serial#

Naturally there followed protests from disgruntled private GT teams but these were not followed up. They were, however, not eligible for championship points. Porsche was granted permission to compete in the BPR with this monster in mid-1996 and even with a factory team and its top pilots such as Stuck, Boutsen, Wollek and Dalmas.

Mclaren f1 gtr serial#

One problem: the regulations stated that the racing car had to be derived from a serial model, which was not available in 1996. They were given permission by their management to build a 911 with a central engine (from the group C model 962). The latter even quit at the end of 1996 but Porsche could hardly handle their defeat. From 1995 onwards, the Mclaren F1 GTR entered the race and humiliated the competition of Porsche and Ferrari. The success was enormous from the beginning with a lot of interest and beautiful GT cars driving long distance races. BPR stood for the gentlemen: Barth, Peter and Ratel who, in 1994, had invented a formula to organise GT races for gentleman drivers. In 19, the McLaren F1 GTR was the reference in the then BPR championship. The other McLaren teams were clearly better prepared than the Italians and that was not really the intention. However, that did not turn out as planned. BMW wanted results! It had already sent the Italian Bigazzi team into the field in 1996 to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The change from these to a McLaren F1 is already enormous and it was really not the intention to increase the starting field.

In the past 10 years, they had only worked with the M3 E30 and the 320i Supertourer. It was a bit of a surprise that a typical touring car team like Schnitzer was chosen for this. And the first one is perhaps a little atypical with the year 1997, when Schnitzer was sent out by BMW Motorsport to the FIA GT Championship and the 24 Hours of Le Mans with the McLaren F1 GTR Longtail.

We are not going to do it chronologically but pick out random years or periods. A promise is a promise and here is the first article on the history of Schnitzer BMW.