ALPINA – Motor Racing Tradition – 1968 – 1987 - 2009

Motor racing is very much part of the ALPINA history, in fact ALPINA’s engagement in racing started shortly after the company was founded. The foundations of ALPINA’s impressive successes in motor racing were laid by company founder Burkard Bovensiepen with his engagement in the Touring Car scene. Renowned and famous racing drivers like Derek Bell, Harald Ertl, James Hunt, Jacky Ickx, Niki Lauda, brian Muir, Hans Stuck and Dieter Quester successfully piloted ALPINA racing cars throughout many seasons. In 1977 ALPINA ended its engagement in order to concentrate resources on the development of its road cars. However, this abstinence was short lived, only ten years later ALPINA re-appeared on the scene to the joy of drivers and fans alike in order to compete in the German Touring Car Masters (DTM). Ellen Lohr, Andy Bovensiepen – son of company founder Burkard Bovensiepen -, Fabièn Giroix, Peter Oberndorfer and Christian Danner achieved a number of successes in the BMW ALPINA M3 Group A race car. In 1988 ALPINA again pulled out of motor racing to concentrate production capacities on its current line-up of road cars.

After over twenty years, ALPINA returned to international motor racing in 2009 with the completely newly developed BMW ALPINA B6 GT3 race car.

In Europe their are currently four classes for GT motor racing. Ranging from the GT1 class of full-out thoroughbred race cars to the GT4 class of nearly standard production cars. In order to develop a race car which would appeal to a broad range of drivers, from the semi-professional to the ‘gentleman driver’, ALPINA chose to enter the GT3 class, which is a heavily modified class yet with strong visual resemblance of the underlying production car. The GT3 class enjoys massive popularity, with currently 12 manufactures (including Audi, BMW, Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin) partaking and battling in a number of different national and international race series.

Using the production version, the road going high-performance BMW ALPINA B6 S Coupé, as a basis, ALPINA engineers researched, developed and engineered the BMW ALPINA B6 GT3 in Buchloe, Germany. Upon initial completion and homologation of the B6 GT3, the French team “Sport Garage” snatched-up the first two cars in 2009 to successfully race in the FIA GT3 European Championship as well as the French Serie Championnat de France FFSA and the 24h of Spa.

ALPINA also raced with a factory team in 2009, also partaking in the FIA GT3 European Championship, the German ADAC GT Masters and other selected races including some VLN Long Distance Races and the famous 24h Nürburgring.

Despite the usual ‘teething problems’ and it only being the first season, a number of great achievements were chalked-up by the B6 GT3 in 2009: 4 victories, 9 pole positions and 625 race leading kilometres.

In 2010 ALPINA gave up its engagement in the form of a factory team, the action having taken-over a new team from Austria, namely ‘s-berg racing’ which is now racing the B6 GT3 alongside team ‘Sport Garage’. The Austrians have already shown that they are more than capable, coming in 2nd in the ADAC GT Masters in Assen (Netherlands) and 4th in the FIA GT3 European Championships in Brünn (Czech Republic).

The ADAC GT Masters are broadcast live on TV on the German channel ‘Kabel1’. On ‘Sport1’ you can watch the ADAC GT Masters Magazin which is always shown on Saturday after the race.