BMW celebrates its touring car success with the M3 DTM Champion Edition

If you didn’t already know, 2012 has been an outstanding year for BMW in motorsport. The company entered the DTM season as under-dogs, after an absence of 20 years, but finished the year with its hands on the driver, manufacturer and team titles – comprehensively beating its rivals at Audi and Mercedes-Benz.

The French-Canadian driver, Bruno Spengler, beat Mercedes driver Gary Paffett in the final race, clinching the title by just four points, transforming his Matt-Black M3 DTM into an M Division icon.

So, what better way to celebrate the No. 7 car’s success than make a limited edition of the current E92 M3 with an identical livery. (well an even better way would have been to release a road going version of the M3 DTM, but I guess I’m just being picky..)

The special M3 DTM Champion Edition was unveiled at BMW’s 40 Years of M event, held at the Nürburgring this week. Bruno Spengler was on hand to introduce the new car, which will be limited to just 54 units – the number of times BMW has won a DTM race in its history.

The colour comes from BMW’s Frozen palette (Frozen Black) and features M stripes across the boot lid and carbon fibre roof (as on Bruno’s DTM car), Spengler’s decals on the rear windows, Spengler’s helmet design on door sills and Spengler’s signature on carbon fibre interior trim.

The car itself is a standard 414bhp 4.0-litre V8 engined M3, fitted with the ZCP Competition Package, which includes powder-coated black wheels, gloss black air inlets on the bonnet, carbon fibre front splitters a and carbon fibre rear spoiler.

Production is due to begin before the end of the year, with first deliveries in January/February 2013.

A retail price has yet to be confirmed, but with the same basic spec as the M3 Performance Edition released in May, expect to pay somewhere upwards of that car’s £73,065. Given the European nature of the DTM championship, we would expect the M3 DTM Champion Edition to be limited to these markets.

Credits: Thanks to Tom Bertsch and our friends at Bimmerpost for the images and the tip.