Luca Magnoni on Nova Race's BMW Switch and why Honda NSX GT3 stays

Nova Race’s BMW M4 GT3 programme has hit the ground running in the 2026 Italian GT Championship (CIGT), banking podiums and going toe to toe with the factory-backed opposition. Alongside it, the Honda NSX GT3 that made the team’s name is still on the grid – racing in Am class, still quick after years of in-house development, even as the car reaches the end of its life. Team owner and driver of the #55 Honda NSX GT3 Luca Magnoni talks us through both halves of the programme.

Why Honda made way for BMW

Nova Race’s move from Honda to BMW, announced in November 2025, ended a five-year close partnership with Honda and JAS Motorsport. The team would campaign the BMW M4 GT3 in both Sprint and Endurance for 2026. For Magnoni, the timing was everything.

“Honda had reached the point where the car was approaching the end of its life – it’s still competitive with the upgrades we’ve made, but it’s a dated project now,” Magnoni told GT REPORT in an exclusive interview. “We’d already spent two years looking around to work out what the future path could be.”

That path led to BMW, and to Roberto Ravaglia, the Italian touring car great who is BMW Italia Ceccato Racing’s team manager.

“The move to BMW also came through our relationship with Roberto Ravaglia, so we bought cars from Ceccato, and we now intend to take over their used cars, so as to also have a higher number of BMWs in the Italian GT championship. On top of that, we valued BMW’s presence at the track – both the parts truck and the engineers – so it felt like a natural progression from our history, where we’d always had to develop the car ourselves more than the people actually building it.

“It was also, let’s say, a purely economic choice for me: it was a bit easier to find competitive drivers for BMW to fill every seat, in both sprint and endurance.”

Living alongside Ceccato Racing

Switching marque also changed the kind of manufacturer support on hand. Where the Honda years had asked Nova Race to shoulder much of the car’s development itself, BMW brought a fuller package to the table.

“We did have some past experience with Mercedes in GT4, but because BMW already had years of presence in the Italian championship supporting Ceccato, the assistance is really top level. Even away from the circuit, we get daily bulletins from around the world – what’s happened to other teams, updates and so on. And then, as I said, there’s the spare parts truck at the track, which is important to me, and the parts supply – even during the week – is extremely fast and efficient.”

That BMW presence in Italy was built around Ceccato Racing, the BMW Italia-backed squad whose #7 has set the benchmark at the front all season. Far from treating them as a rival, Magnoni sees the two teams as part of the same BMW family.

“We’ve always had an excellent relationship, especially with Roberto Ravaglia. We even buy some of our spare parts from Ceccato during the week, and the relationship is very good. They obviously have the official drivers – one of their cars runs the official line-up – but our aim isn’t to compete with them specifically; we compete the same way against every team. The fact that we’re not the only BMW reference point in Italy actually makes things a bit easier for us: their car is already full of drivers, so strong drivers who want to race a BMW naturally see Nova Race as the outlet to be a lead driver.”

The results are already bearing him out. Nova Race runs two BMWs in the Sprint championship – the #55 under its own name and the #77 as FAEMS Team – and both have run with the front-runners from the opening weekend. At Imola the #77 of Ian Rodriguez and Giuseppe Forenzi was on the podium, finishing close enough to Ceccato’s #7 to make the works team work for it, and by Vallelunga the #55 of Pedro Ebrahim and Jasin Ferati had taken second on the road, behind that same benchmark car. For a team in its first months with the German brand, going wheel to wheel with BMW’s Italian flagship entry is no small feat.

“We’ve performed very well, even against the official drivers,” Magnoni says. “I wasn’t at Imola myself – I wasn’t doing the sprint round, so I watched it from home – and when I saw our driver flashing his lights at Raffaele Marciello, I felt a real surge of pride, because it was our first race [with BMW] and we did well.”

Built on the NSX

For all the promise of the BMW move, the Honda NSX GT3 still has a place in Magnoni’s squad – and with good reason. This is the car that put the team from Varese on the map, hard-won years that had already delivered the team’s first overall Italian GT win, back in 2021.

“They were certainly challenging years. We had to prove the car was genuinely competitive, because there weren’t many in Europe racing it at a high level – most entries were more gentleman-driver efforts. We managed, through our agreement with JAS – our main contact for Honda, especially in the early years – to get the support to run very strong drivers and be properly competitive.

“In fact, in our second year we won the outright sprint title with Jacopo Guidetti and Leonardo Moncini in 2022 – a first for Honda, and the youngest crew ever to win the Italian championship.”

Why the NSX isn’t done yet

The Honda programme had initially been wound down for 2026, before Nova Race confirmed in May that the NSX would return for the Endurance championship, entering as a third car alongside the two BMWs in the GT3 Am class. With his main business taking up much of his time this year, Magnoni opted to race just one of the two championships himself.

“This year I’m very busy with my main business, so I decided I’d only do one of the two championships – I chose endurance. Rather than rent a BMW, it made more sense to use our own NSX, since we still have one and a full package of spare parts. We still have JAS’s support too – the engineer we have trackside is from JAS – so we decided to do the endurance championship with it. I’ll most likely also do the Monza sprint round in October, on my own.”

For Magnoni, though, the NSX is about more than spare parts and logistics.

“I’m very attached to Honda because it’s my first GT3 – I’ve driven an Audi R8 LMS too, but the NSX is the first proper GT3 I raced at a fairly serious level. With the upgrades we made in 2025, it’s still competitive to drive now.

“We’re maybe not performing brilliantly this year, but that’s mainly because the level of the other Am crews is very high – almost all of them run a Pro in the line-up, whereas we run three genuine Ams, and it’s the same on our BMW: three genuine Ams there too.”

Where the BMW programme goes next

The NSX may be nearing the end of its road, but the BMW is only at the start of its. Where the Honda is a known quantity winding down, the M4 GT3 is the platform Magnoni is building the team’s next decade around.

“Right now we’re looking at this generation of car for another four, five, maybe six years, until the new model comes out, and I hope to continue beyond that too.”

That long runway gives Nova Race room to grow the fleet, with the NSX’s eventual retirement opening a slot.

“From next year we could already look at adding another car, because I think the Honda will really be at the end of its model cycle by then – so towards the end of the year we’ll assess whether to buy a third car, or maybe even a fourth. In the past with Honda we got up to four GT3s, so it’s not a problem.”

Expansion is easier with BMW for another reason, too – one that comes down to the badge on the nose.

“It’s also a bit easier to find foreign drivers willing to come and race a BMW. If we were in America, we’d have less trouble finding drivers for Honda – for Acura – than for BMW, but in Europe there’s always been a bit of that issue. The fact that, say, Valentino Rossi races a BMW is also a plus.”