- 14,656
- The UK
- JASON_ROCKS1998
- JR98 GAMING
The BMW V12 LM is a LeMans Prototype built by BMW Motorsport in 1998 to race in the prestigous 24 Hours of LeMans race. After McLaren won the 1995 LeMans race with help from BMW Motorsport, and McLaren dropping out of GT Racing altogether because of the much faster CLK LM and 911 GT1, BMW signed a contract with the Williams Formula 1 team to build a LeMans Prototype to take on Mercedes-AMG and Porsche. BMW turned to Schnitzer Motorsport, a long time BMW racing team, to be the factory team running the car, dubbed the V12 LM. The new V12 LM would use the same engine as the McLaren F1 in it's 5990cc configuration. During testing of the 1998 LeMans race, the lap times set by the V12 LM were not favourable, their best lap putting them 11th behind factory entries by Porsche, Toyota, Nissan and Mercedes-AMG, all of which were running GT style cars instead of the theoretically faster LM Prototypes. By the time it came to qualifying, BMW had improved the time to get up to 6th. During the race vibrations were detected and the cars retired, with only 60 laps completed. After the race, further testing revealed that the aerodynamics and cooling were poorly planned, and that the car would only be able to race at optimal conditions. It was decided that both V12 LM's would be abandoned and that BMW, Williams and Schnitzer would start over in 1999 with the V12 LMR. Both cars were sold. Chassis 001/98 was sold to Thomas Bscher and chassis 002/98 was sold to Team Goh of Japan. For the 2000 LeMans race, Team Goh (in partnership with Dome), modified the V12 LM to attempt to fix the aerodynamic and cooling problems but the car was never campaigned and no team ever offered to buy the chassis. David Price Racing (who originally planned to race Thomas Bscher's V12 LM chassis) got a deal from Panoz in the US, so David Bscher had to campaign his V12 LM on his own. Despite losing the assistance of DPR, he was still able to run the car at LeMans 2000 but the car retired due to gearbox damage at an accident and at the SRWC round at the Nurburgring. This ended the racing career of the V12 LM
Last edited:
