It will certainly not be a debut to remember what the new BMW M4 GT3 did in the 24h of Daytona.
The new Bavarian car made its first outing in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, but in Florida it was a disaster on all fronts.
Already from the ‘Roar Before the 24’ it had seemed that the two cars lined up by Team RLL and that of Turner Motorsport suffered a lot compared to their rivals, but with the benefit of the doubt of tactics to then have a favorable Balance of Performance it was not wanted to unbalance that much.
On the other hand, the cold shower arrived in the race because right from the start both the # 24 shared by Philipp Eng / Sheldon Van Der Linde / Marco Wittmann / Nick Yelloly and the # 25 of #John Edwards / Connor De Phillippi / Augusto Farfus / Jesse Krohn they accused problems, without ever being able to give the impression of catching up with their rivals.
Arriving at the end with a ninth and a seventh place respectively in Classse GTD PRO after several pit stops and a few penalties added together, even the leaders of BMW M Motorsport could not help but note the flop, mainly due to problems with the underbody and to the diffuser (one even lost in the early hours at the ‘Bus Stop-Le Mans’ chicane)
Worse went to Turner Motorsport’s # 96 car, which in GTD was battling for the Top5 when an accident knocked it out overnight.
# 96 Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT3: Robby Foley, Bill Auberlen, Jens Klingmann
Photo by: Brett Farmer / Motorsport Images
“It was a difficult race, we wanted to keep the number of errors to a minimum and avoid accidents if possible, but unfortunately we didn’t succeed,” admitted Mike Krack, at the last race as BMW manager before the move to Aston Martin. F1 as Team Principal.
“The car managed by Turner Motorsport was unable to finish the race after a collision, and both of the RLL Team had problems and finished in seventh and ninth place.”
“While we did many miles of testing during the development phase, this showed that an exit in race condition poses further challenges ahead. We need to work together to improve reliability, operations and performance, as we have not been able to match the pace of the leaders in any moment of the race “.
“We will now analyze all the data to make sure we get back to the top again at the 12 Hours of Sebring. Today was my last race outing with BMW M Motorsport. I would have liked to say goodbye with a better result. I want to thank all my colleagues. , the teams and the drivers for their collaboration and trust in recent years “.
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