The World Touring Car Championship suffers a blow with several carmakers deciding to trim down their participation. Foremost is BMW, which is set to announce further cuts to its motorsport program on Dec. 5. BMW began this drift by pulling out of Formula One several months ago.

BMW Motorsport boss Mario Theissen refused to elaborate and only said that the decision on next year’s program will be revealed on Dec. 5. In this year’s championship, BMW supplied five works car. By next year, many speculate that there would only be two left. Continued after the jump!

In relation to this development, Alex Zanardi announced his retirement from racing a few days ago. Zanardi also quit the ROAL Motorsport works BMW team. Team mate Sergio Hernandez is also expected to turn his back on the sport in reaction to the company’s decision.

Expected to remain on the BMW works team is Schnitzer Motorsport, which ran two of the works cars. However, its attentions will be shifting to running BMW M3 GT2s in the Nurburgring endurance series races. This means that UK-based RBM will run two works 320si cars in 2010 instead of one, with Andy Priaulx and Augusto Farfus the likely driver line up.

Aside from BMW, Seat is also expected to reduce its works effort from five cars to two. Chevrolet will provide three works cars while Lada supplies three Prioras once again.

[via autocar]

Tags: Bmw, bmw motorsport cuts, bmw news, car news

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under 2009, 4wheels News, Automakers, Bmw, Worldwide, Year, Zone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.