In our last 'Friday favourite' feature of the year, BrunoSpengler recalls the car that returned BMW to the top of the DTM after a 20-year wait:
The BMW M3 that gave Bruno Spengler a long-awaited first DTM title in 2012 is perhaps an obvious pick for his favourite car. After several championship near-misses, the Canadian drove his Schnitzer Motorsport-run M3 to victory in four of that year’s 10 rounds and secured the title on the Bavarian brand’s return to the DTM after a 20-year hiatus. That also meant a perfect start to life at his new employer, following a career-defining switch from Mercedes.
Expectations weren’t huge given all the accrued knowledge of Mercedes and Audi, with BMW Motorsport boss Jens Marquardt stating pre-season that “it won’t be a failure if we don’t win a race this year”.
“It was difficult to arrive [as a new brand]. You didn’t have the car, you started from scratch. OK, the chassis was the same for everybody, but you had to do the engine, you had to do all the set-ups, all the aerodynamics, everything. “All the team [at] Schnitzer, operating the car and doing everything, was great to work with. They were really racers from the bottom of their hearts. They were all the time flat out, day and night pushing, it was amazing” “A race that I really have in memory was Lausitzring because it was the first victory with this car and it was victory number 50 in DTM for BMW,” he says.
Second to Paffett at Brands Hatch, his title hopes took a knock – literally – at the Red Bull Ring when he retired following contact in a race Autosport likened to a destruction derby. That left him 40 points behind standings leader Paffett, but Spengler wasn’t to be deterred.Photo by:The Norisring contest was a race that truly got away from BMW, as Mercedes man Jamie Green passed Spengler and leader Tomczyk’s RMG machine inside the final three laps for a famous win.
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