BILL AUBERLEN

By H.A. Branham

Bill Auberlen has spent a career, largely, winning. Whenever and wherever, in whatever -- with a clear inclination toward wheeling BMWs. Having never met a sanctioning body he didn’t like, Auberlen’s story comes laden with statistics that are overwhelming, over-arching and due to the 2014 sports car merger, are thankfully collected under the IMSA umbrella.

So, while we don’t want to go overboard with numbers, we must give you a few.  Blame it on 2026 IMSA Hall of Fame inductee Auberlen, who seemingly had the urge to merge long before Jim France and Don Panoz started conspiring over glasses of Don’s wines -- hopefully, it was the white -- at Chateau Elan.

Original IMSA … World Sports Cars … GRAND-AM … American Le Mans Series … and since 2014, the reimagined IMSA. Production-based cars and exotic prototypes. Auberlen has been there, done that and continues to do it; he started the 2026 season driving in the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge at the age of 57. As for those numbers:

• Between 1987-2023 Auberlen collected 65 class victories, making him the current IMSA all-time victory leader.
• A three-time IMSA series champion, all pre-merger.
• Class victories at the Rolex 24 At Daytona, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, the  Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen and Motul Petit Le Mans.

Auberlen winning rival sports car organizations’ major events and class titles -- gotta love that -- when the opportunity presented itself.

“I didn't really care about what the series was,” Auberlen said prior to the 2026 Watkins Glen race weekend, from his home in Redondo Beach, California. “And when one series sort of went away, we were fortunate there was somebody else to pick it up and give is a place to compete and show what we could do with our cars.

“I imagine I started racing when I was 17 and I’m more excited about it now, every time I get into a race car, then when I was 17. I think that’s because when you’ve come so far in your career, you can actually sit back and appreciate every moment that’s happening now, where you didn’t get to enjoy that when you were younger, because you were so busy always fighting for every job and every career move.”

“Bill Auberlen is a legend, no question,” said IMSA Senior Director of Race Operations Mark Raffauf. “He’s a star. He was doing everything, every way, every which way. But I go back to his dad, [to tell the story.]”

Let us go back to dad, Gary “Gerd” Auberlen, who ran a speedometer repair shop near Redondo Beach and raced motorcycles. His son went to the races to watch but also to haul ass around the paddock, as much as he could get away with, on a 60cc minibike. Bill has pointed to those times as “the start of it.”

Gerd eventually started racing sports cars, building a Porsche with the help of a teenage mechanic. Bill Auberlen said he learned sports car building and racing from the ground up, with the ground usually a cold concrete garage floor.

Gerd-co-drove a Porsche 911 RSR to a GTU class victory at Sebring in 1985. After the 1986 season, he turned their team’s operation over to his son. Second time out in ‘87, at Sebring’s demanding layout -- Score!’, a second-place GTU finish. Bill was all of 18. A year later, He co-drove to second place in GTU at the Rolex 24.

And so it went -- and so it goes, today. Bill Auberlen races in the 2026 IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge, where he owns 20 victories and is third on that series all-time winners list. Think about that for a second. Eighty-five wins across IMSA's top two series? Incredible.

He drives a BMW M4 GT4, a car-driver connection dating to 1996 when car owner Tom Milner of PTG Racing came calling. In ‘95, PTG had become BMW North America’s top American research and development team for the BMW M3. 

BMW and PTG remained partners until ’06; BMW and Auberlen also stuck. Going into the 2026 season, Auberlen had been in BMWs for more than 400 of his nearly 600 races.

Major success came quickly. A decade after his runner-up GTU runs at Daytona and Sebring, he swept both races in 1997-98 for BMW, establishing himself as one of IMSA’s true stars.

A given: Auberlen has competed in more races driving BMWs than anyone, ever -- even when you count Germans.

Has there ever been another IMSA competitor so identified with one brand?

“It wasn’t always that way,” Auberlen said, recounting the days of taking over the Porsche 911 RSR from his father. “I loved the Porsche RSR … but it wasn’t competitive anymore.”

Auberlen switched to Mazda RX-7s and stayed primarily with those cars, assembling a solid privateer effort -- until Milner’s deal came along.

Pre-BMW, Auberlen and his race team “had daytime jobs as mechanics and a nighttime shop working at the shop. Every single day. Nobody made any money. I remember every time the phone rang thinking it was going to be somebody I owed money to.

“We were just 20-somethings trying to make it to the next race. It was five guys. We all stayed in one hotel room. I mean, that was awesome times, right?”

Most of the times have been awesome for Bill Auberlen, who remains under contract with BMW. Auberlen seems to love retelling how it all began, after he approached a BMW marketing guy one race weekend, on a lark, about driving their cars, which were struggling. Milner, trying “something different” told the man if BMW would give him a seat, he would deliver their first IMSA victory. Longshot.

“Sure enough, I got a phone call from Tom Milner who asks me if I want to race for them at Texas World Speedway and also asks how much money it would cost to put me in the car and I’m like … ‘Wait a minute, you can make money in racing?’

“The moment I sat in that BMW M3, I knew it was a whole different animal. It was like I finally figured out what I was designed to do as a human, and that was to race the BMW. I understood it. It understood me. We spoke the same language. Perfect synchronicity.

“We won a lot of races together and a lot of championships together. We set a ton of records that will be very hard to break. And here I am, 57, and I’m still under contract. I’m a very fortunate guy.”

Former longtime IMSA President Scott Atherton: “Bill’s career-long affiliation with BMW speaks volumes about his character and loyalty. BMW was smart to secure him when they did. And it’s safe to say Bill has over-delivered throughout his three-decade career wheeling the ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’.

“And in my opinion, one of Bill’s most significant career accomplishments doesn’t appear in the record book. During the period when sports car racing in North America was extremely fragmented and divisive, Bill played a leadership role as a ‘double agent’ - actively competing in the ALMS and GRAND-AM championships. He may not have realized it at the time, but his ‘lead-by-example’ approach set the stage for the merging of the two platforms into one.”