Why isn’t BMW competing in the F1?

Formula 1 is in rude commercial health. This year, the grid will contain entries from Mercedes-AMG, Audi, Ferrari, Cadillac, Alpine, McLaren and Aston Martin. Honda is supplying engines to Aston Martin, while Ford is adding its expertise to Red Bull’s engine program and Toyota is a major sponsor of Haas. 

All of which makes you wonder, where the heck is BMW?

After all, few car manufacturers have a more storied competition history than the Bavarians. It’s in their blood. The company’s fabled M Division was founded with the M3, a competition car that featured an engine that could trace its lineage back to some of the most exciting Formula 1 cars ever.

The last time we saw an F1 car bearing the BMW roundel on the grid was in 2009, when the BMW Sauber team was sold back to Swiss businessman Peter Sauber.

It wasn’t a particularly successful period for BMW in the top echelon of motorsport. The company had partnered with Williams between 2000 and 2005 but was frustrated. It believed it had built a championship-winning engine but was being let down by the Williams chassis. It was time to take decisive action.

In 2005, BMW announced that it had acquired Sauber Motorsport with the team rebirthed as BMW Sauber. It then enjoyed an unspectacular three years in F1, the high point of which was a 1-2 finish at the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix, gifted to them after Lewis Hamilton drove his McLaren into the Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen in the pit lane.

Fast-forward to today, and the Sauber team has become, somewhat ironically, the Audi F1 team. But enough of the backstory. Why isn’t BMW on the grid this year?

The repercussions of the last F1 foray cut deeply within the top tiers at Munich. BMW isn’t a company that’s accustomed to being a motorsport also-ran. 2009 was the year targeted for BMW’s big world title push, and the team finished sixth out of 10 entrants in the constructors’ standings.

Faced with that predicament, BMW pivoted smartly.

It started developing a car for the DTM German touring car series, with spectacular success, winning the drivers’, teams’ and constructors’ championship in 2012 after a 20-year absence. It repeated that success in 2013.

BMW, through its Mini division, won the Dakar Rally five times between 2012 and 2021.

It has claimed the top spot on the podium at the Nurburgring 24 Hours three times since 2010, with the M4 GT3 Evo being the current winning car.

At present, BMW is concentrating its motorsport attention on LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hypercar) endurance racing, having developed a prototype in 2023, with its first entry at Le Mans coming in 2024.

Thus far, it’s been an ill-starred record at Circuit de la Sarthe for the BMW team, two separate crashes resulting in a double DNF at its first attempt in 2024 and mechanical issues affecting both cars at least year’s race.

Undeterred, BMW has doubled down on its endurance racing plans. This year, BMW M Team WRT also began fielding BMW's hypercars in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in America.

In the past, the cost of entry to each of these programs has been such that a manufacturer typically chose either endurance racing or F1. Committing resources to both would have been prohibitive.

Yet this year, we see factory entries from Ferrari, Alpine, Cadillac and Aston Martin in both F1 and the World Endurance Championship (WEC). The payoff is clearly worth it to these companies. 

Could BMW re-enter F1 off the back of a successful endurance racing push?

BMW M boss Frank van Meel explained to Hagerty in 2025 that the company isn’t interested in a return to F1.

“We’re not ignoring [Formula 1]; we’re just not participating,” he said. “That is on purpose. For us, the World Endurance Championship (WEC), which includes races at Le Mans and Daytona, was the place to go,” he claimed.

“[WEC] cars are closer to series-production models [than Formula 1 cars]. We can learn things and transfer things [to our production cars]. But, from Formula 1, to learn things and transfer things to series-production cars is almost impossible. It’s too far away,” he said.

With so many big manufacturers in F1, it's a long way from the early 'garagista' days of the sport, when enthusiastic grassroots teams could cobble together an entry. Indeed, the hoops General Motors has had to jump through to get an 11th team onto the grid for 2026 have been quite incredible.

While the money in F1 has never been greater, these powerful multinational car manufacturers have some real clout and have a strong lobbying voice with the FIA, the organisation that runs the sporting side of F1, and FOM, the commercial arm.

BMW's contention that F1 cars have little commercial and technical link to the cars that buyers see in showrooms doesn't really hold water. Many of the issues that have afflicted the 2026 rule set can be traced back to exactly this issue: manufacturers pushing to get showroom-relevant tech, like hybrid power, into F1 cars.

In other words, their commercial imperative is now affecting the sporting product.

BMW is not alone in wanting this link to be even stronger. In 2025, FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem proposed a shift away from the "too complex" and expensive 2026 hybrid engines, suggesting a return to simpler, cheaper, and louder naturally aspirated V10s or V8s, potentially by 2029.

This proposal was nixed by Mercedes-AMG, Honda and Audi. Under the voting rules, only one of the five manufacturers present at the meeting in Bahrain needed to block the proposal to see it fail.

This has created a schism between what the F1 fans want, namely louder, lighter, more agile and more charismatic F1 cars, and what the manufacturers want in delivering a technological showcase and a link back to their road cars.

Perhaps manufacturers should allow the fans what they want, for F1 to become a little more raw and visceral. BMW once built the most raw and visceral F1 car in history. It ought to feel at home with that.

Andy brings almost 30 years automotive writing experience to his role at Drive. When he wasn’t showing people which way the Nürburgring went, he freelanced for outlets such as Car, Autocar, and The Times. After contributing to Top Gear Australia, Andy subsequently moved Down Under, serving as editor at MOTOR and Wheels. As Drive’s Road Test Editor, he’s at the heart of our vehicle testing, but also loves to spin a long-form yarn.

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