BMW Motorsport has announced their 21 drivers for the 24 hours of Nürburgring.
All names on the list are well-known drivers in motorsport, but not all of them used to represent BMW colors.
Five out of the six DTM drivers are on the entry list, where we’ll see 2016 DTM Champion Marco Wittmann, Bruno Spengler, Maxime Martin, Augusto Farfus, and Tom Blomqvist. Timo Glock won’t participate in this race. Wittmann, Martin, Blomqvist, and Farfus won the race for BMW in 2010.
From the IMSA Championship we have Martin Tomczyk, John Edwards, and Alexander Sims, while their Endurance colleagues from the IMSA Championship Kuno Wittmer and Nick Catsburg will join in too.
Richard Westbrook is on loan from Ford, who doesn’t participate in the race themselves, while BMW specialist Markus Palttala is also a part of the squad.
Antonio Felix Da Costa is back in a closed car again, which is a change after his Formula E programme for MS Amlin Andretti.
Four other known faces in a BMW is Jörg Müller (winner of the race in 2004 and 2010), Philipp Eng (winner of 24 Hours of Spa 2016), Jens Klingmann, and Jesse Krohn.
Photo: BMW Motorsport
And now we get to the four new but familiar faces.
Tom Onslow-Cole has previously driven a BMW in BTCC and is now back for the brand. He has done plenty of endurance races in many different cars and won a good number of them.
Marc Basseng is new man at the team, but he has participated in the race many times and even won it in 2012.
Alex Lynn did the Young Driver test in a BMW M4 DTM at the end of 2014, but since then he has raced mainly in single-seaters, like GP2 among others.
Timo Scheider was a long time employee of Audi Sport in DTM, but he is now out of that contract. Only a few days ago he announced his participation in the FIA World Rallycross Championship, but now he has a seat in the 24 hours race for BMW.
So I guess we can describe it as an all-star team for BMW.
The drivers will be delegated between Schubert Motorsport and ROWE Racing, who will enter with two cars each. Furthermore BMW Team Schnitzer will enter with one car.
The five cars will be in action for the first time on March 25th, when the VLN season starts at the legendary track Nordschleife.
