Ravaglia Motorsport enters Superstars

The team of legendary touring car driver Roberto Ravaglia – ROAL Motorsport – will enter the Italian Superstars series later this year. The team will still remain in the WTCC. For Superstars the team will develop the new BMW M3 E92 for racing.
“We are a team specialized in Touring Cars and I deeply believe in this championship growth. In the arrival of the new BMW’s M3 sedan we thence saw the right car,” said Ravaglia to the Superstars website.

“Since the beginning it actually has an high potential, suited to competitions and we are sure it could be a business vehicle for BMW too. At the moment this is a team private initiative but we would like to create a marketing value behind M3 commitment,” Ravaglia continued.

The new M3 E92 was launced in September of 2007 and is powered by an four litre V8-engine. The ROAL team has just received the body shells and are aiming to put the cars on track in May.

“We just received the body from Germany and we are studying championship technical regulations which are new to us. As the car will be marketed in Italy only from the middle of March, we are getting ready to stock up everything is needed for fitting out: we will actually start from the body and not from a standard car. At this time we are under pressure for WTCC preparation, as the structure is the same, but we will start with the study and making out of components like roll-bar.

“Moreover Oral Engineering will be able to go on with homologation only after standard car will be on sale and thence this time is available to us in order to carry out the study about how to “build” the car. We hope to be able to deal with first tests on track in May: having made up our mind about going ahead with this project only in December, we were already aware that we would have jumped first races. This first year will be of use in developing the car with the objective, in 2009, to tackle the full season with two cars.”

No drivers have yet been selected for the program, but WTCC-regular Felix Porteiro will drive the car during testing.

“Not being able to offer any guarantee about when the car will be really ready for first race, we liked better not to face this subject. For development phase we’ll make use of our drivers engaged in WTCC. At the moment not Zanardi, as the car could not be adapted for him, but for sure Felix Porteiro.

“Besides, as we are not able to aim at the championship, due to our late debut, it is my intention to alternate on the car several drivers with important names, so to guarantee the project visibility and, at the same time, to make use of their valued suggestions for car development. We already had several contact about this but it’s too soon to mention definite names.”

The team has announced that they aim to run two cars in the project and the possibility to provide customer cars to other teams.