The 2025 FIA World Endurance Championship campaign was not an easy one for BMW M Team WRT in the series’ headlining Hypercar category, but René Rast has been in the sport long enough to know that overcoming adversity is often the first step on the road to success.
“We did not have the season we were hoping for,” is Team Principal Vincent Vosse’s honest assessment of BMW’s second year at the international pinnacle of the discipline, since after bright beginnings in the Qatari curtain-raiser – where the #15 M Hybrid V8 finished best-of-the-rest behind the all-conquering Ferraris – ‘things started to go a little bit wrong’.
Rast agrees that the Bavarian prototype never had ‘the ultimate pace’ to win in 2025, with the German taking centre stage in the third instalment of FIA WEC’s new YouTube docuseries, ‘Beyond the Track’, released today.
The episode joins the team over the course of a challenging weekend in Bahrain last November, where following a top five result 12 months earlier, BMW found itself ‘on the back foot’ from the outset and ‘struggling a lot’. The #15 Hypercar made an early exit in the race while the #20 sister entry took the chequered flag just eighth, which, Rast acknowledges, is ‘obviously not what we are coming for’.
Described by Vosse as ‘not a showman but a very humble person,’ the three-time DTM champion is in many ways the squad’s lynchpin, and while quipping that he is ‘not their teacher’, it is clear Rast shares a special bond with his BMW team-mates – something that he admits is ‘very rare in racing’.
From joking about tying each other’s shoe laces to putting boots on the wrong feet and gloves on the wrong hands, their energy, he says, keeps him feeling ‘fresh and young’ as he approaches his 40th birthday later this year, characterising the relationship as ‘one of the best I’ve ever experienced’.
‘Beyond the Track’ pulls back the curtain on team debriefs and shines a spotlight on the jeopardy of race starts – a task invariably entrusted to the Minden-Lübbecke native. It is, he reflects, ‘probably the most tricky situation’ of the weekend, where ‘everybody goes a bit bananas’ in an effort to make up early ground and consequently, ‘a lot of things can go wrong’.
Indeed, motorsport as a whole, in Rast’s view, is ‘two per cent success and 98 per cent hard work and frustration – it’s like a rollercoaster’, but it is one he has ridden before and one that he will ride again. BMW M Team WRT took a lot of learnings away from 2025, and hopes are high that an ‘Evo’ update to the M Hybrid V8 in the form of a new aero package for the forthcoming campaign will help to drive development and redefine the brand’s FIA WEC journey.
‘To be part of the championship is not enough – we want to fight for the championship’, asserts Vosse in conclusion, while Rast is ‘already looking forward to the next chapter’, insisting that in the relentless pursuit of perfection, ‘we never give up’.
Check out the full episode below.
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