The team was founded in 2011 by Michael Zehe and Hans-Peter Naundorf. Prior to the formal ROWE Racing identity, Naundorf had operated under the name Team ROWE Motorsport in the VLN championship as early as 2009, running an Audi TT with Franz Rohr. By 2010 the squad fielded a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup S, securing several top-ten overall finishes.
Late in 2010, Rowe Mineralölwerk CEO Michael Toe approached Naundorf about entering a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 in GT racing. Working with Florian Rhotert, Naundorf entered ROWE Racing in the VLN for 2011. The team ran up to three SLS AMG GT3 cars across its initial campaigns and steadily improved, finishing third and fourth at the 2013 24 Hours of Nürburgring — a result that signalled the squad as a genuine contender at the circuit.
Throughout the early part of the decade, ROWE Racing developed its core competencies at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Jan Seyffarth joined the team in 2012 and proved an important asset; he and Alexander Roloff won the 52nd ADAC Reinoldus-Langstreckenrennen by a margin of just 0.338 seconds. Further victories followed in the VLN calendar, including the OPEL 6-Stunden ADAC Ruhr-Pokal-Rennen in 2013 with Seyffarth, Lance David Arnold, and Nico Bastian, and the same race the following year with Thomas Jäger and Seyffarth.
Notable drivers who represented the team during the Mercedes era included Maro Engel, Christian Hohenadel, Klaus Graf, and Renger van der Zande. In 2015 ROWE Racing made its debut in the Blancpain Endurance Series, with the team mounting a strong showing at the 24 Hours of Spa — leading at the six-hour and twelve-hour marks with Daniel Juncadella, Bastian, and Stef Dusseldorp — before an alternator failure forced retirement with under an hour remaining.
A pivotal change came ahead of the 2016 season, when ROWE Racing secured official factory backing from BMW Motorsport. Fielding BMW F13 M6 GT3 machinery in both the Blancpain Endurance Series and Sprint Cup, the team made an immediate statement: after a fourth place at Silverstone, it won the prestigious 24 Hours of Spa on its first full attempt with the BMW in the race.
The BMW partnership elevated ROWE Racing to the status of a premier endurance team. The pinnacle of that collaboration arrived in 2020, when the squad won both the 24 Hours of Nürburgring and the 24 Hours of Spa in the same year — a rare double that underlined its standing among Europe's elite GT operations.
In 2021, ROWE Racing entered the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM) full-time, fielding two BMW M6 GT3 cars for factory drivers Timo Glock and Sheldon van der Linde. Van der Linde delivered the team's best DTM result with a fourth-place finish. In February 2022 the team announced it would not return to the DTM, choosing instead to focus on endurance competition with the newer BMW M4 GT3.
After transitioning to the BMW M4 GT3 platform in 2022, ROWE Racing continued to perform at the front of the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup (formerly Blancpain GT Series). In 2023 the team claimed the Spa 24 Hours for a third time, reinforcing its position as one of the most consistently successful BMW customer racing outfits in Europe.
ROWE Racing represents the model of a professional customer racing operation that combined commercial sponsorship from a non-automotive brand with a genuine factory relationship. Its partnership with ROWE Mineralölwerk gave the team long-term stability, while the alliance with BMW Motorsport provided the technical infrastructure to win the sport's most demanding endurance events. The 2020 Nürburgring and Spa double remains the defining achievement in the team's history.