Despite the challenges due to the COVID-19-Pandemic, this year’s racing season was an enormous success for our motor sports customers. Teams and drivers won championships on the long-haul route, as well as touring car championships and drifting events.

One of the major successes were the two overall victories of ROWE Racing at the ADAC’s total 24-hour racing Nürburgring and at the total 24 hours Spa-Francorchamps – once with a BMW M6 GT3 in the Eifel and once with a Porsche 911 GT3 R in the Ardennes.

The ADAC-GT-Masters-Newcomer SSR Performance from Munich also supplied a masterpiece. The customers sports team of Porsche from Munich celebrates with the two drivers, Michael Ammermüller (181 points) and Christian Engelhardt (181 points), beside the driver’s evaluation also the evaluation of the team.

The GT3-Sport has become more and more exigent over the past years

A current GT3 racing car costs around 460,000 euro (net), depending on the vehicle manufacturer and the respective options. Because of high aero loads, the time of each lap keeps getting faster and therefore, the dampers and elastomer spring elements are used more.

“For this reason, when we develop a suspension kit, we concentrate on everything that concerns the specific vehicle and its dynamic,” argues the degreed engineer Thomas Rechenberg, the head of KW motor sports. He continues “in order to support for instance our BMW M6 GT3 motor sports customers at the ADAC’s total 24-hour racing Nürburgring, we already began the first tests and coordination in December 2018.”

Together with our motorsports customers we tested the KW Solid Piston damper several times at the Nürburging in a hard 24-hour race.

“We further adapted the valves, which are connected in a series and usable in different loads, as well as the entire setup of all components for the seventh, the eighth and the nineth race at the Nürburgring. Our goal was to further optimize the characteristic line and to configure it in a more moderate way,” explains Thomas Rechenberg.

“We evaluated the dampers on our test bed in the 7-Post-Track-Replay of the Nordschleife together with team Schnitzer and BMW motor sports. Then, we further adapted the setup parameters. Due to our displacing pistons, we were able to lower the springrates in order to raise the level of grip of the tires.”

The KW motorsports customers reached the finish line of the 24-hour race in 2020 in the Eifel with their BMW M6 GT3 on the positions one, three and four.

Apart from the GT3 racing car, the suspension kit manufacturer produces motor sports dampers, whose powers can be 5-fold, 4-fold, 3-fold or 2-fold, not only as homologated series of suspension kit developments for numerous GT3-, GT4-, TCR- and Cup vehicles, but it also offers the opportunity of an individual production that is specific to a particular vehicle.

Thus, in the 2020 long-haul route of the Nürburgring, the Pixum CFN Team Adrenalin Motorsport won the championship thanks to the BMW 325i E90, which started in the category V4 of production cars, and thanks to KW’s motor sports dampers. 

Equally, in the DTM-Trophy a race was won thanks to KW’s technology of suspension kits. HP Racing International dominated this season.

The AMG GT4 is homologated with KW dampers. The special thing about the DTM-Trophy: Tim Heinemann, part of KW motor sports’ staff, has won the championship already in advance.