Tag: pro racing

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BMW M235i Racing – 12 Hours of Imola

Before we get into the actual on-track action and the race, let’s talk about the car we drove for the 12 hours of Imola.

BMW M235i Racing by Sorg Rennsport

The story goes that a prominent leader in BMW Motorsport was at the 24 Hours of The Nürburgring several years ago and noticed that in the sub-GT4 categories, there were several BMW’s competing but they were old (E30’s and E36’s) and took a ton of work to get them race ready and maintained, let alone competitive.

With Mazda having a full factory developed and globally homogulated Global MX-5 Cup Car, BMW decided to build their own solution. Since its launch in 2014, the BMW M235i Racing has seen steady uptake in the marketplace, with BMW Cup Racing series all over Europe, in endurance races like the Creventic 24 Hour Series, VLN and in professional touring classes all over the world, like the TC classes in Pirelli World Challenge. As an entry-level professional race car, its hard to beat the value despite the sticker price and driving experience, as we’ll cover below.

The VLN BMW M235i Racing Cup Series  Photo Credit: VLN

We were originally supposed to drive this car below but in the prior 24 Hour of Nurburgring race, it was wrecked a couple times and was down for repairs. So Sorg prepared and brought out the “Orange Juice car” as my son named.

The car we were originally going to drive but was damaged at the Green Hell. Photo credit: Petr Frýba
The “Orange Juice Car” Photo credit: Petr Frýba

The basics

DIMENSIONS

Length: 4,454mm

Max. width: 1,862mm (without mirrors)

Height: 1,380mm

Wheel base: 2,690mm

Max. track width: 1,608mm

ENGINE / TRANSMISSION

Straight six-cylinder petrol engine

BMW M Performance TwinPower Turbo

Capacity: 2,979ccm

Output: 245kW (333bhp)

Torque: 450Nm

Racing exhaust with racing catalytic converters

Steering wheel with shift paddles and lights on the steering wheel (awesome!!)

BMW M Performance limited-slip differential

TANK Motorsport safety tank

SUSPENSION / STEERING

KW dampers

H&R suspension springs

Front: H&R anti-roll bar (2-way)

Rear: H&R anti-roll bar

BRAKES

Front: High-performance motorsport braking system –

Performance Friction (PFC); 4-pot fixed calliper

Rear: BMW M Performance 2-pot braking system

ABS / DSC / ASC

BMW Motorsport specific racing application

TYRES / WHEELS

18×10 inch alloy rims

265/60/18 tires – we ran Hankook full racing slicks though we’ve seen this car run on Pirelli’s, Dunlops and Michelin’s across the globe

SAFETY COMPONENTS

Cage with DMSB certificate and FIA approval

6-point racing harness from Schroth

Racing seat RECARO Pro Racer SPG (we had an OMP HTC-R carbon seat)

Exterior

The car is built a ‘body in white’ to make it super easy for a great wrap job. It is the 235i body with the body panels from the M2, which presumably provide a variety of aero benefits. Sorg has it outfitted with the optional rear wing, which is adjustable to aid in rear down-force.

Seth Thomas getting acquainted with the car. You can see the body in white and the full body wrap.

Bottom line, it looks awesome in just about every livery I’ve seen. A bit boxy compared to most sports car but expected for a BMW. The aero bits make it look aggressive and with the incredibly meaty 265-wide slicks, it looks beefy from every angle. You’ll notice that in most pictures, we ran with the windows up. It comes with the power windows still and fully functional. It wasn’t until the cockpit got really hot, that we’d crack a window to circulate air and feed cooler air into the helmet blower.

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Interior

This car is the standard for every production-based race car, even a club race car. Period.  The interior was clean and tidy with the factory dash just about fully intact. The steering wheel had shift lights, programmed to keep us within the meaty part of the power band and the small LCD screen that read out the amount of fuel we’ve used since the last refill/reset, lap times, water and oil temperatures.

Straight factory look and yes, my eye line is only a couple inches higher than this…

The shifters were in perfect position to shift up and down without readjusting your hands. The OMP HTC-R carbon fiber seat was on sliders, to accommodate several driver heights, of which for us ranged from 5’6″ for me to just over 6′ for Seth Thomas. I normally don’t love sliders but these were solid and provided all of the range we needed.

Much of the interior is trimmed with carbon fiber goodness, which looks great and keeps everything looking clean and professional.

The car still comes with a racing oriented but still operating Driving Stability Control (DSC) of which we turned completely off. I personally didn’t drive with it on on, so I can’t speak directly to the differences but having it fully off was great and I felt like I could easily manage the amount of corner-exit sliding with throttle and steering input.

Sorg outfitted the car with Motorola digital radio system, which was a bit random in its performance throughout the weekend. Imola is a big track, with lots of elevation changes so we rarely had good audio quality at the farthest points from the paddock and saved most critical comms for the front-straight away.

In the center console, you can see the Motorola radio and that on/off switch is for the helmet blower.

This was also the fastest and loudest (though not super loud) car I’ve ever raced, along with racing amongst the fastest and loudest cars I’ve ever raced with (up to GT3 cars). I found that my super awesome Stilo helmet with the ear muffs were simply not enough, so I had an on-track vendor install the additional component so I can have molded ear plugs, in addition to the built-in noise cancelling ear muffs and that seemed to help quite a bit.

Sorg installed an air-conditioned helmet blower, versus the standard air blower I have in my PRO3 car. This thing worked great for the most part. It needs an air intake, then it cools the air before forcing it through the air tube. The issue I ran into was that in my first race stint of nearly 2 hours, I ran the whole time with the windows up. And even though we had the car’s fan circulating air into the cabin, everything got heat soaked and with 40 or so minutes left in my stint, I was heat soaked and the blower was pushing around hot air (which was still better than nothing).

One driver mentioned that the dash was a little tall and he didn’t love not being able to see the hood and thus not having as strong of a sense of where the car body limits were. This is true but for me, I’m used to sitting low and being short, so I never see the hood, so that didn’t bother me.

The cable management, cage design and installation is pristine, though it was interesting to see that the cage is actually a bolt-in cage, versus a welded in cage at the mounting points. I’m sure there is science and logic behind this but that took me by surprise.

Lastly, the car had a full AiM data logging system built in and capturing ECU channels. As usual, we lived and died by the predictive lap timing feature and during practices, we used the Apex Pro Driving Coach tool, where Seth set some baseline laps and then we focused on making the lights as green as possible in the corners.

How did it drive?

Before driving the car, Dan and Seth said that the M235i Racing would drive like a big PRO3 or Spec E46 car, of which are my only two reference points. And after the experience, they were mostly right.

With power steering, ABS and a paddle-shifting automatic transmission, it was the easiest car to race I’ve ever driven. What you do is still the same in terms of driving but it’s just easier. All inputs don’t require much of any force and the seat, seating position and Schroth belts are simply comfortable. For example, I have an Apple Watch and when I drive my PRO3 car (no ABS, power steering and a CAE shifter) I don’t need to ‘start a workout’ on my watch. The amount of work I am doing and vibrations automatically make the watch think I am working out and it logs a workout.

In the BMW M235i Racing? Not so much. After both my racing stints, of which both were nearly 2 hours, I was toast. Overheated, dehydrated, mentally and physically exhausted I looked at my watch and no workout detected. I had to manually have it check my heart rate about 5 minutes after getting out of the car and it was still at 134bpm.

Getting 3-wheel action is easy- peasy in this car! Photo credit: Petr Frýba

So yes, it was the hardest, most exhausting driving I’ve ever done but I might as well had been sitting in a beach chair.

This thing is fast.

With ~330whp and on full racing slicks, this car is easily the fastest car I’ve ever driven in a race. My perspective is a bit skewed because while we were hauling @$$, we were driving in the slowest class of the race. It literally felt like I was driving with an anchor dragging behind because of how stupid fast the TCR, GT4, GT3 and Porsche Cup cars were.

Still, this car is fast and when not over-driven, it is really easy to go fast. The key difference for me was to trust the higher than normal mid-corner speed the car could carry due to it’s more advanced suspension and big/meaty slicks. Seth and Dan mentioned that the Hankook’s were not the fastest slick available but are likely a great value because they tend to last at 90% of the peak grip for a good amount of time.

Bottom line is that this car could hang mid-corner with every car on-track except for the GT3 race cars and possibly the TCR cars. I could definitely feel the additional size and weight of the car transitioning weight from side to side, compared to a 2700 lbs PRO3 car but after a few laps, it felt normal.

Not a mistake – this car can hang with most any car mid-corner! Photo credit: Petr Frýba

Power-wise, it has gobs of torque but not an incredible top-end. Corner exit I could stay on the rears of several TCR cars but then they would slowly pull away, while just about every other car would leave us like if we were parked.

Braking was great and confidence inspiring. Braking for Turn 2 (the first chicane) and Turn 17 are full, 10 out of 10 braking zones. After building up my confidence, I found myself braking at around the 175 meter mark for the 1st chicane and the just before the 50 meter for the last chicane. HOLY CRAP! But the car would slow down, turn in and handle it, with no complaints.

Being a turbo car, there was a tiny bit of lag from throttle application to feeling the grunt. So it was even more critical to get to full throttle as soon as possible. For the most part, the LSD and the Hankook’s would take the full throttle corner after corner and lap after lap. I only got a bit more sideways than I’d want on corner exit a couple of times: once in turn 7 when I was testing the limits carrying speed through the corner and up the hill – simply too early on full throttle with too much steering input and a second time on the exit of the last chicane, when I got a bit more exit curb than the car could hold while try to get full throttle. I didn’t back out, just a simple steering correction as I still had a few inches before getting to the big turtle bumps that were there to eat up suspensions.

Final verdict: It could be the perfect race car for you and me at some point

At around $85k USD brand new, the BMW M235i Racing is seriously a great deal. For reference, to have someone build a top quality Spec E46 race car, it can cost upwards of $60k. $25k gets you a pretty much guaranteed quality and consistency, factory supported race car.

I’ve looked around and still not quite sure what they are going for used but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them available for $40-50k USD.

The driving experience is incredible and consumables are on the low end for a pro-level race car.

The issue for me is that I care most about competition. I want to race in big fields, with closer to spec cars and see how I stack up to the best competition around. And outside of Pirelli World Challenge, there isn’t a ton of these yet in the US and especially in the club racing ranks. If that were a different situation, I would seriously consider finding and racing a BMW M235i Racing.

I’ve heard and read that the BMW M235i Racing Cup is popular, with country and Europe-wide championships that are fielding 20+ cars at a time. If I lived in Europe, this would also be a strong option.

Until any of those things happen, I’ll have to settle for making my in-process, BMW Spec E-46 look and drive as close to this beauty as possible and racing with Sorg Rennsport 1-3 times a year. I can’t wait for the next time!

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1st Pro Race – 12 Hours of Imola Creventic TCE Series

Going pro racing

My first on-track experience was a 1-day High Performance Driving with Proformance Racing School at Pacific Raceways.  It was a actually a birthday present for my wife.  She had a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 9 and I had a 400whp 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX STI.

His and her’s AWD turbo beasts!  I still miss that STI!

That day I learned that I had no clue what I was doing behind the wheel of a car from a ‘racing’ standpoint, especially one with that much power and in general the capabilities of the car.  I also realized that learning to drive a car on-track with skill and being fast was going to take time, but I was up for the challenge.

Over the next 12 months, I did several track days and learned about the then, GRAND-AM Continental Tire Series where production-based race cars, like my Subaru, raced in the GS and ST classes.  Further, here in the PNW, we had several drivers who had started out in local club racing and driven or were driving in series like that at the ‘professional’ level.

I have dreamt and continue to dream of owning and racing cars like this!

Since then, it’s been a goal of mine to at least once, drive in a professional racing series in a production-based sports car.

Getting the invitation

Over the past four years racing in primarily PRO3 class, I’ve met several former PRO3 drivers who have or still do drive professionally.  One of which is Dan Rogers and through him, Seth Thomas, of which they have co-driven in multiple race cars and series over the years.  In 2018, they decided to see about putting together a program to do at least a handful of the Creventic 24/12 Hour Endurance racing series, which has races in the most iconic circuits all over Europe and at Circuit of the Americas.

They reached out to several drivers who presumably have a minimum level of proven speed, ability to keep a car clean and ultimately, afford to take part in all or some of the races.  When I first got the email, I almost brushed it off completely, assuming it would be way too expensive for me to afford but it turned out to be not too bad and in the grand scheme of this type of racing, a solid value.  Coupling this with an extended family vacation and a couple of business meetings, taking part in the race went from a pipe dream to a bucket list reality.

12 Hours in a factory race car | BMW M235i Racing

The race will be a 12-hour race, split over two days.  I’m not exactly sure why this is but having visited Imola a few years ago, I can imagine it being a noise ordinance issue as Imola is actually a city park, with residential buildings right on or next to the track property and park.  I’ve also heard from organizing bodies that holding a race over-night is much more expensive than running during the day due to the required workers and lighting.

The BMW M235i Racing factory race car – raced in professional TC series all over the world.

The weapon of choice is a newest generation BMW M235i Racing 2-door coupe, built and sold directly by BMW motorsports as turn-key solution for the ‘entry levels’ of professional racing.  I don’t know the exact class we’ll be racing in but the car is capable of pace just slightly slower than the new global TCR cars.

Sorg Rennsport’s BMW M235i Racing car in for a pit stop

It has a 3.0L, twin-turbo in-line 6-cylinder engine and a 6-speed automatic transmission, with paddle shifters.  Dan Rogers, who has driven the car previously described it as essentially a bigger PRO3 or Spec E46 car, in terms of handling characteristics.  This is music to my ears as it means, well balanced, plenty of brakes and enough power to have a great time but not so much that you could get into too much trouble.  The car is owned and managed by the Sorg Rennsport Racing Team, out of Germany.

Learning the track

Having never driven Imola in-person, my main resort to learning the track was iRacing!  My simulator is primarily setup for iRacing, so even though I realized a couple weeks ago that Imola and a close sibling to the M235i Racing was available on Assetto Corsa, I decided to do all my training on iRacing and using the Mercedes AMG GT3 race car.  The AMG has a lot more power than what we’ll be driving but I figured it had similar characteristics from previous driving; rear-wheel drive, paddle shifters and more under-steering characteristics relative to something like a 911 GT3 or the Audio R8 GT3.

Over the past 4 months, I’ve logged over 1,000 laps and 30+ hours of seat time.  I’ve also used Virtual Racing School’s data pack feature, to compare myself with one of their coaches with a reference lap time of 1:42.xxx.  The data pack is from a different season where multiple updates to the car, tire model and track have been rolled out, so trying to replicate the lap time exactly isn’t possible but my goal was to get as close to it as I could.  My personal best ended up being a 1:45.2xx but most importantly, the last few weeks I was able to jump in and start hammering away high 1:45’s and low 1:46’s, with relative ease and regardless of fuel load.  In an endurance race, yes being fast is important but being consistent and keeping the car clean is even more important.

Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari – IMOLA!

So how well do I know the track?  We’ll find out for sure but by just closing my eyes, I can recite…

  • Turn 1, full throttle and get ready to straighten the wheel and brake past the 200 marker for the first chicane.
  • Turns 2/3, make sure to hit the backside of turn 2, so that I can square off Turn 3 and get a healthy full-throttle run at apex. Stay off the big bumps on the curbs.
  • Turn 4, slight left hander of which the goal is to stay flat but might need to lift depending on the angle of entry and how well the right rear tire is holding.
  • Turns 5/6, similar chicane but there is more distance between the two turns. Similarly, hit the back side of 5, square off turn 5 and get a healthy full throttle run at apex and use the exit curbing as needed.  Do not touch the big bumps on the inside of the corner, they will destroy your time and your car.
  • Turn 7, very slow left-hander that feels like a decreasing radius corner. Important to get the car turned and then back on throttle quick and somewhat aggressively.
  • Turn 9, very fast left-hand turn with a stab of the brakes and then quickly back on throttle – let the car nibble at the exit curbs but don’t get too greedy. It’s hard to stay full throttle with being too much on the curbs as the rear end tends to kick out.
  • Turns 11, 12, 13 – an interconnected, high-speed and critical sequence of turns. A brush of brakes to do a full ‘send it’ into turn 11 and making sure to hit the apex curb.  A stab of throttle before 6 out of 10 brakes, downshift to 3rd gear and bite off a decent size of the apex curb for turn 12 and then full throttle as quickly as possible to go up the hill and Turn 13 ends up being more of the exit curbing of Turn 12 than anything else.
    • It is very easy to let the car run over the big exit curbing here but iRacing will punish you for track limits so make sure to only get a max of 2 tires over the white line.
  • Turns 14 and 15 make up the last chicane of the lap, that feels a lot like Portland International Raceways. Take a big chunk of the T14 curb, flick the car to the left and get to full throttle at or before the apex of T15.  It’s ok and even sometimes the curbing of T15 helps rotate the car, let the car release to the exit curbing but only go 2 wheels off.
  • Turn 16, a full throttle bend in the road – create a straight line that helps you get to driver’s left to setup for a very tough T17.
  • T17, a very intimidating and high speed right-hand corner, where you are flat and right at shifting to top gear. Position the car for a late apex and be ready for 10 out of 10 braking effort, in a straight line and shifting from 6th to 3rd
  • Turns 18 and 19, the last set of real corners before the front straight away and start/finish. Important to get the curbs on both corners and T19 is the most important to get to and stay full throttle as quickly as possible.  Just a brush of brakes is needed and use all of the exit curbs.
  • Turns 20 and 21 are essentially bends in the road. Take them full throttle and have as little steering input as possible.  Steering input = friction = slowing the car down.  Make down the straight away as quickly and frictionless as possible.

Generally speaking, I think I have 80% or so of the track down in my head and developed muscle memory so that when I get into the car, I can focus on driving the car and figuring out how to go fast, versus figuring out my way through the track.

Physical training

This is an endurance race, in Italy at the start of the summer.  I’ve been in Italy around this time of the year in the past and it can get hot, really hot.  I’ve been working on my cardiovascular endurance – 60+ minute runs and cycling sessions.

I’ll be honest that while I’m in decent shape, I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be.  Life has gotten incredibly busy on all fronts and I’ve been lucky to get in 3 workouts per week and a few simulator sessions.  To top it all off, this past weekend, I did a PRO3 race weekend and only did one run group.  The driving felt great but, I improved my personal best lap time during the actual race but by Sunday afternoon, my lower back, on my left side was sore.  I’ve only experienced this last year, when I was a couple months post a surgery and next to no working out.

No expectations

Overall, I am sitting on this airplane with next to zero expectations.  There will be four total drivers, one of which I know will be faster than me (Seth).  Dan will either be around the same pace or faster because he has a ton more experience in professional races and Rob, the third driver – I don’t know at all.

I will work at being as fast, safe and consistent as I can possibly be but overall, am going to focus on having fun and taking the experience all in.