Race Crew Program
BMW Selects Dreyer & Reinbold technician to help IMSA Sports Car Team
Congrats Craig! What an Honor!
Craig helped BMW Turner Motorsports achieve the Winner’s Circle
Recently I was selected by Dreyer & Reinbold BMW management and the BMW NA central region technical team to participate in the BMW shop foreman/technician race crew program. This program was created to acknowledge and retain BMW technicians in the BMW dealer group network pairing them with race teams from the IMSA Weather Tech Sports Car series and Fanatec GT World Challenge America series.
My paring was with the Turner Motorsports team in the GT World Challenge America series at Road America. Turner motorsports fields an M6 GT3 in the pro class piloted by two talented and up coming drivers Robby Foley and Michael Dinan. Tasks for the weekend I was able to participate in included assisting team members with fueling, scaling and corner balancing of the car, alignment, warming up the car before track time, maintaining temps in the Pirelli tires before sessions, set up and tear down of equipment.
The M6 GT3 is an impressive machine. The car raced this weekend is six years old with 45,000 miles on the track. This is based off the F13 M6 street car. While the chassis, body and suspension is modified only weighing 2800 pounds, the engine is the same S63 found in the street version, aside from tweaks to the oiling system, intercoolers, cooling and engine management.
It was impressive to see first hand the involvement BMW has directly with racing at the sports car level. BMW Motorsport supplies track ready cars to the IMSA and GT World Challenge series along with many other series. Customers can purchase the M8 GTE, M6 GT3, M4 GT4 and M2 CS Racing race ready from BMW Motorsport. The race weekend was full of cars fielded by BMW from the Turner motorsports M6 GT3 to M4 GT4’s and M2 CS piloted by many teams. Many BMW engineers were on sight to assist race teams with support as needed to monitor and adjust parameters when in need.
While the cars and racing were fascinating the best part of the weekend were the people. The weekend could not have possible without the curator and hosts for the weekend from BMW Sue Novak and Antonio Mondenaldo. Sue created the program and was a fabulous ambassador for the BMW brand. Sue and Antonio made sure the weekend went well. The Turner Motorsports operation is a class act consisting of professional talented and personable persons. The team took me in as their own allowing me to jump right in and help at all aspects of the weekend. This was truly a memorable experience that I am thankful for. Thank you to all that made this possible.
Be sure to visit BMW Motorsport.com to start the purchase of your BMW race car. If this is too racy for your daily commute be sure to visit Dreyer & Reinbold.com for a great selection of new and used BMW’s that are more comfortable for your daily commute, not forgetting the BMW racing background of DNA in each street BMW.
