20 Years of GT3 Racing

CHAPTER 1

THE GENESIS OF GT3

The grid was filled by 42 cars, its end out of sight beyond the first corner. Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches, Aston Martins and more. A fledgling category hit the ground running at Silverstone in early May 2006. It was an unprecedented kick-off for an all-new championship – and for an all-new class of car. The inaugural round of the FIA GT3 European Championship provided a sign of what was to come.

Yet no one could have predicted how GT3 would grow over its first 20 years. Inside a few short seasons, it would gain a foothold all over the world as more and more cars were developed for the category and it was adopted by an increasing number of series. After a few additional years it had become the predominant class of GT racing globally. In the first two decades, 23 manufacturers have been represented and thousands of GT3 cars built and sold. The exact number is unknown, but it is known to be somewhere approaching 3,000.

Chevrolet, Dodge, Maserati and Ascari were the other car makers on the grid at Silverstone, as the opening season of the FIA GT3 series came to life with the first of two races that late spring weekend. The idea was to bring together the most prestigious sportscar brands – the likes of Lamborghini and Ferrari – together with iconic models such as Chrysler’s Dodge Viper and the Chevrolet Corvette, and give them a level playing field on which to compete. Cost control was at the very heart of a new philosophy.

 But as new and shiny as GT3 was on that day at the home of the British Grand Prix, the foundations on which it was built and from which it rose to sustain unprecedented success through its first 20 years already existed. They just needed to be laid correctly.

The ideas behind a new style of GT racing came from the fertile mind of Stéphane Ratel, then as now the world’s leading promoter of the discipline. He had been formulating and developing the concepts around which GT3 was built for years.

The seeds of the category were being sown all the way back to Ratel’s earliest involvement in motorsport, with the launch of the Venturi Gentlemen Drivers’ Trophy in 1992. More ideas that would prove central to its development were introduced in subsequent years with the formation of the BPR Organisation – Ratel was the ‘R’, with Jürgen Barth and Patrick Peter the ‘B’ and ‘P’ – and the launch in 1994 of what became the Global Endurance GT Series the following year, and the FIA GT Championship that superseded it in 1997, run under the auspices of the Stéphane Ratel Organisation, now the SRO Motorsports Group.

Ratel foresaw problems with GT2, the secondary category in FIA GT in the mid-2000s. The grid was healthy, but the number of manufacturers was dwindling and budgets were increasing, forcing out the gentlemen or amateur drivers who for so long had been a key constituent of the class. Talk of a move towards closer alignment between the rulebooks of the FIA and the Le Mans 24 Hours organiser, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO), was only going to lead to a further increase in costs. The answer was close to home, Ratel realised. It was provided by the Lamborghini Supertrophy, which raced on the FIA GT support bill and was the successor to the Venturi one-make series that had run from 1992–94.

The Lambo series had started in 1996 with the V12-engined Diablo SV-R, which was succeeded by the GTR version, used from 2000 to 2003. Ratel had been searching for a new partner after the end of the Venturi series and approached BMW and Honda about using, respectively, the GTR version of the E46-series M3 built to homologate Munich’s American Le Mans Series racer, and the NSX sportscar.

 “I had a meeting with BMW about doing it with the M3 GTR, but they didn’t take me seriously at that time,” said Ratel. “Then I had another one about using the NSX, but Honda didn’t want to do it.” The next port of call was Lamborghini, courtesy of an introduction from two-times Le Mans winner Gérard Larrousse, whose eponymous Formula 1 team had used the Italian manufacturer’s engine during two stints in the late 1980s and early ’90s and was well-known to Ratel: Venturi owner Didier Primat had a stake in the F1 team when the Gentlemen Drivers’ Trophy was launched. A deal was done and 32 SV-Rs were built in double-quick time in order to be ready for the first race, which was on the undercard at Le Mans. Both the original Supertrophy Lambo and its successor remained true to their road car origins, and were built on the regular production line.

“The Lamborghinis were fast, super-reliable and cost-effective to run,” explained Ratel. “They were not much slower than a GT2 car – the difference in lap times really wasn’t that big – but they were a fraction of the cost to buy and run. The GT2 cars required an engine rebuild every 5,000km, but some of the Lambo V12s went 20,000km between rebuilds. There were owners who didn’t open their engines for three seasons!

“My view was why waste money developing the car to reduce weight, and the engine to run with an air-restrictor [the means by which maximum power was controlled in GT2, along with GT1]. You ended up with expensive, high-compression engines that produced less power than the road version because they were restricted under the regulations. So my idea was that it didn’t matter if you had a heavier car that was closer to production. Actually, it was better: because it was cheaper!”

Ratel identified cars from other one-make sportscar series that that could be incorporated into the category. Moreover, he reasoned that if Lamborghini could produce a quick, reliable racing car on a budget, then so could any manufacturer, or at least their machinery would provide the ideal base for a new type of GT racer. This was another ingredient already in place that opened the door to GT3: under still-fresh FIA regulations, motorsport engineering specialists, so-called tuners, could gain the all-important homologation to compete in the higher echelons of international sportscar racing via what became known as a technical passport. Previously, only the manufacturer (OEM) was eligible to complete the necessary paperwork to certify the car for international competition under the remit of the governing body.

This change had been put in place for the 2000 season during a dark hour for GT racing. The original GT1 class had imploded after 1998, a casualty of an arms race in car development sparked by Porsche’s parts-bin special 911 GT1 that arrived in Global GTs in 1996, and then accelerated by the Mercedes CLK-GTR built for the FIA GT Championship the following year. The withdrawal of multiple manufacturers, frightened off by the costs and the domination by Mercedes with what was a racer first and a road car second, left a GT2-only series for 1999. Chrysler’s Dodge Viper GTS-R ended up doing most of the winning and the grids were lacking in both number of entries and variety. Even before the season kicked off, Ratel knew that car development and the supply of cars needed to be freed from the shackles of the manufacturers.

“I remember the session of the FIA GT Commission,” said Ratel of the meeting at which he put forward his ideas to the manufacturers over the winter of 1998/99. “They were all against me.” He didn’t give up, and went straight to the top. He met FIA President Max Mosley armed with, of all things, a cartoon! It was one of the weekly contributions to French motorsport weekly AutoHebdo by the renowned cartoonist ‘Fiszman’ and depicted Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone standing next to a coffin with ‘RIP BPR’ written upon it and the graves of the Group C and the ITC touring car series. The inference was that Mosley and Ecclestone, who was the FIA Vice-President of Promotional Affairs as well as F1’s ringmaster, had killed off Group C and the ITC.

The FIA might have effectively annexed top-level GT racing in Europe with the creation of a series bearing its name for 1997, but it did not kill it. Now, Ratel told Mosley that it could die on his watch if the proposal for technical passports wasn’t approved. “I showed Max the cartoon and asked him what the world was going to think if the FIA let GT racing die after what happened with Group C and the ITC. I told him it would not reflect very well on him and the FIA. And that is how I got the FIA to accept the technical passport. That was the first victory on the road to GT3 and maybe the most important one.”

Ratel had his eye on one particular marque when he made his proposal. It was the most prestigious of all sportscar manufacturers. “I knew I needed Ferrari back,” he recalled. To that effect, he set up a company known as GT Racing Development to fund the build of a Ferrari 550 Maranello to race at the front of the field in FIA GT against the Vipers. Italtecnica Engineering, headquartered near Turin, built a short run of a car known as the 550 Millennio. Three of them would race in the former GT2 class, now known simply as GT, in the hands of multiple teams, starting in 2000.

The Millennio was only a limited success over the five seasons in which it raced as far afield as North America and the Middle East, but it did spawn a car that would prove pivotal in the revival of the FIA GT series and would play a key role in the success of GT racing worldwide. Moreover, it demonstrated that a tuner could successfully develop a car and build a business out of selling its creation.

Amateur racer and rally driver Frédéric Dor had purchased one of the Millennios. He also competed with Prodrive Engineering’s Allstars customer rally programme and, following a crash during the first test of the Ferrari after taking ownership, spirited it off to Prodrive’s Banbury headquarters near Silverstone to ask their opinion. They were not impressed: they reckoned they could do little with it and suggested that he would be better off starting again. So at Dor’s behest that’s what they did. A road car was purchased from a small ad in The Times and just a matter of months later the ‘Prodrive Ferrari’, as it was often called, was on the grid in FIA GT. It notched up its first victory at its second attempt, at the A1-Ring in Austria in August 2001, and Prodrive went on to build 10 examples in period of a car correctly known as the 550 Maranello GTS. It would finish its career with 21 outright FIA GT victories and a class win at Le Mans. Moreover, it proved that the tuner business model was viable as plans for GT3 were being formulated. When FIA GT3 kicked off in 2006, four of the eight marques were represented by tuners.

A further ingredient that went into the mix to create GT3 was already in place. Ratel knew he would be bringing together an array of cars built around different chassis and engine configurations to race in the new category. At the Silverstone curtain-raiser there was front-, mid- and rear-engined machinery, cars built up from carbon-composite chassis, spaceframes and more run-of-the-mill monocoque structures. Powering them were V12, V10, V8 and flat-six engines. The means of balancing the performance of such contrasting racing cars was already in existence. It said what it did on the tin: it was called the Balance of Performance (BoP).

The first attempt at a rudimentary BoP had been introduced back in 1995. In the season between the Venturi and Lamborghini one-make championships, Ratel had run another series as a stop-gap. The idea of the Philippe Charriol Supersport Trophy was to have a combined series for the Venturi 400 Trophy and Porsche’s 993-shape 911 GT3 Cup that raced in the marque’s Supercup championship on F1 weekends, the Carrera Cup in Germany and other national series. “Despite what we tried to do to the Venturis to slow them down, they were still faster and all of them left us,” remembered Ratel. “It was not a success, but it was a kind of start to the BoP.”

Nearly 10 years on, the idea was revived. When Maserati declared its intent to join FIA GT with an all-new contender that would end up being called the MC12, Ratel wasn’t in favour. The Italian manufacturer’s plan was to develop a new car around the underpinnings of sister marque Ferrari’s Enzo supercar. The MC12 was clearly aimed at the race track, and Ratel believed that it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut and would destabilise a series fought out by the likes of Prodrive’s 550, the Saleen S7-R and the ageing Viper.

“I wanted to forbid the MC12,” he revealed. “We badly messed up when we allowed the Porsche 911 GT1 in 1996 and that eventually destroyed GT racing. I didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.” But Ratel was dissuaded from his opinion by Max Mosley. “Max said, ‘Listen, refusing it will create such a storm. We are going to balance it and then everyone will realise that there is no point doing this kind of car because it will be no faster than a conventional car.’” It was the real start of the BoP, a system that came to be used around the world in multiple categories, not just GT racing.

The Maserati quite literally had its wings clipped: when it was allowed to race for points in FIA GT from the start of the 2004 season, it was in a quite different form to the one in which it had competed – and dominated – in three trial races on an invitational basis at the end of the previous season. The rear wing had been narrowed and the nose shortened to reduce the front overhang, both measures aimed at reducing downforce.

 The late Peter Wright, the godfather of ground-effect aerodynamics that moved the goalposts in Formula 1 and a host of other racing categories, was charged with pegging back the Maserati and balancing it with the other manufacturers’ machinery. The Briton, who died aged 79 in late 2025, had been working for the FIA since the mid-1990s when he became Mosley’s technical adviser and subsequently became President of the FIA Safety Commission.

“Max said to me that if GT racing collapses once, that’s bad luck, and if it collapses twice that’s careless. If it collapses a third time, someone should lose their job,” said Wright in an interview with the author in 2013. “Max basically told Jean Todt [who had become Ferrari CEO in 2004 in addition to his role as boss of the F1 squad] that he could race the MC12, but only if we balanced it with the other cars. We proved that the BoP could work with the Maserati in GT1, and for me GT3 grew out of that success – it was fundamental to its creation. The BoP makes the economics of it sound.”

The BoP was at the heart of GT3. The idea was not to have an expansive rulebook saying what a manufacturer could or couldn’t do, rather to set a ballpark performance target that they had to achieve, based initially on Porsche’s ubiquitous 911 GT3 Cup car. Then it would be up to the builders of the cars to get there, and the BoP would do the rest. The lap times of each type of machine would then be finessed by changes to the weight, power, aerodynamics and ride height.

Another concept was borrowed from the Venturi and Lamborghini one-make series and then improved upon. It was the idea of driver grading or categorisation, a concept that has played a key role in the GT3 success story over its first 20 years.

When Ratel presented his idea for the Venturi series, he sold the first run of cars built by the small French manufacturer based in Nantes on the Atlantic coast of France in double-quick time. By 1993 he had more than 60 entries and needed to split the field. “We divided the cars into three grids of basically 20 each: that was where the idea of categorising drivers according to their experience and speed somehow started,” remembered Ratel. “We had ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ races: ‘a’ was for the complete beginners, the ‘b’ race was for the gentlemen drivers who had a bit of experience, and the drivers in the ‘c’ race were those who had done quite a lot of racing.”

The idea was continued for the Lamborghini Supertrophy from 1996, a series that allowed for two drivers per car and started to attract professional drivers. That complicated the situation. “Suddenly, drivers who had raced in F1 a long time before, or sportscar drivers who were coming to the end of their careers, were being employed by gentlemen to race with them,” recalls Ratel. “We had to continually evolve the system to fit the kind of drivers we were attracting.”

The categorisation rules for the inaugural year of FIA GT3 were loose in the extreme. But they made it clear that the series was aimed at non-professional drivers. Drivers dubbed “well-known” were not permitted: that included anyone under 55 who had raced in F1, won Le Mans or had attained a certain level of results in international single-seaters, as laid out in the guidelines. For the following year, the system was refined, with four levels of grading – and some catchy names for them.

The taglines were proposed by Pascal Witmeur, a long-time racer who had been on the grid for the inaugural BPR race at Paul Ricard in 1994 and was now part of the SRO set-up. “Pascal suggested that we name the categories after the levels of American Express credit card,” explained Ratel. “So you have platinum, gold, silver and green, but I thought that we couldn’t call the bottom category green, so we opted for bronze.” SRO’s ideas were taken on board by the FIA, and by 2015 there was a centralised system that was in use all over the world.

Simplified racing cars and driver categorisation were not the only things that the Lamborghini Supertrophy gave to GT3. The Venturi series was made up of short, one-driver, 30-minute sprints, but because the new Lamborghini Diablo SV-R was more expensive to buy than the French machine, Ratel decided that in the new series two drivers should share a car. “The difficulty was that the Lambo was twice the price of the Venturi,” he said. “I wasn’t sure that I could sell enough cars, so I thought we could make them two-driver races, which meant the costs could be split in half. I didn’t want endurance races, because refuelling would have increased the budgets. We went for one-hour races, because that was exactly how long the SV-R could go on a tank of fuel. That’s how the format of two one-hour races started. It’s still in use today in many of SRO’s championships and in lots of other series too. Back then, it was something new. That kind of format didn’t exist before.”

Everything was in place for the birth of GT3 when Ratel presented his idea to the FIA GT Commission in November 2004. The concept met with what he called “total disinterest”, though there was overt opposition. Ratel remembered both Porsche and Ferrari, two marques central to GT racing worldwide, being against his plans. “They had their one-make series running on different continents and saw GT3 as a threat,” he said: “They were saying, ‘No, no, no’. They were completely against it.”

The stance of DaimlerChrysler, the giant corporation created out of the merger of Mercedes and Chrysler in 1998, perhaps signified the antipathy towards GT3 around the table. There was potential in an existing race car built by Chrysler’s Dodge brand to be part of GT3, reckoned Ratel – the Viper Competition Coupe powered by a monster 8.3-litre V10 developed from a pick-up truck engine. The idea was given short shrift by its representative at the meeting, long-time Mercedes homologation expert Gerhard Lepler.

“He told me that I would receive no help from Mercedes or Chrysler,” recalled Ratel. “He said: ‘If you want our cars, you must go to America to buy them.’ So that’s exactly what I did: I contacted Dodge in America and placed an order for nine cars.” Each of them would be on the grid at the inaugural FIA GT3 race at Silverstone in the hands of three separate teams.

Ratel did find supporters around the table, including Maserati. It had started the Maserati Trofeo spec series with a car known as the GranSport Light, which Ratel believed could be a good starting point for another GT3 racer. There was also backing from Aston Martin and its new motorsport partner Prodrive. In 2004 they had formalised a deal that heralded the British manufacturer’s long-awaited return to top-level sportscar racing.

After its successes with the Ferrari 550, Prodrive agreed a licensing deal to develop the DB9 for racing using the same business model: it needed to sell cars to recoup its costs. The first product of a relationship announced in November 2004 was the DBR9 GT1/GTS contender, a car that made a flying start to its career. It claimed a GTS class victory at the Sebring 12 Hours round of the American Le Mans Series the following March, and backed it up with an outright win at the opening round of the 2005 FIA GT series at Silverstone in May. This second car resulting from the new partnership to roll out of Prodrive’s factory was effectively a demonstrator that hinted at its future involvement in GT3.

 Dor was again a key player in Prodrive’s latest venture, and in the GT3 story. “Fredy was really in favour and part of our discussion group,” said Ratel. “He was pushing for it.” He and Dor were definitely singing from the same hymn sheet. Dor described the paradox of building a lightweight car for GT1 with less power than the road car as “a nonsense”. “The cars were expensive to buy and run,” he said. “To be competitive you needed something that was almost like an F1 engine. My idea was to build a £250,000 Aston Martin race car that still had 600bhp.”

Dor’s plan initially received push-back from Aston boss Ulrich Bez. Eventually Frédéric got the go-ahead and was allowed to present the car on the marque’s stand at Le Mans in 2005. Bez stipulated only one condition: he could choose the colour and went for blue. And thus the very first GT3 car received a launch at the most important sportscar race of them all.

Another fan of the GT3 concept was Hans Reiter. His Reiter Engineering company had ongoing experience of developing the Lamborghinis for GT racing. It had exploited the technical passport system introduced for 2000 to build a Diablo for FIA GT that year and then replaced the car with the new Murciélago in 2003. By the time Ratel was casting around his ideas for GT3, there was a new Lamborghini in production, known as the Gallardo, and Reiter saw its potential.

“The way the GT3 rules were proposed made total sense,” recalled Reiter, who had first met Stéphane Ratel when Schnitzer mounted an FIA GT Championship campaign as BMW’s factory entrant with the McLaren F1 GTR in 1997. “The regulations made such a difference. With the Murciélago GT1, we took a street engine with 600bhp, put air-restrictors on it and reduced it to a figure of 400 and something. And then we spent millions getting it back up to 550bhp – still 50bhp down on what it had on the road.” Just like Dor, Reiter described that as “a nonsense”, only he prefixed it with the word “total”.

“Everything was so simple,” explained Reiter. “In the first year of FIA GT3 initially we were not competitive. We had too little aero, so we were allowed to scale up the rear wing because there wasn’t a rule saying it had to be this wide and this deep. We made a bigger wing. Two seconds or
a second and a half found straight away. Bang, no problem.”

The line of tuners putting up their hands to build GT3 cars was crucial in Ratel getting his ideas across the line at the FIA. Among them was a joint project that ensured Ferrari would be represented in the new category. Kessel Racing and JMB Competition, two teams with history in FIA GT, combined to produce a GT3 version of the 430 sportscar, which had hit the market in 2004. The result of the collaboration was an upgraded version of the Prancing Horse’s latest one-make racer for its Challenge series, to be built by Kessel in Lugano, Switzerland.

Ratel described it as a “brave move”. Team owner Loris Kessel, who died in 2010 at the age of 60, also happened to be a Ferrari dealer, so the description of his decision to tread where the factory chose not to was accurate. “It was quite something,” Ratel continued. “But that was Loris. He was a bold, independent man.”

Momentum was growing when Ratel went public on his plans for GT3 at his traditional press conference on the eve of the Spa 24 Hours, the blue riband round of the FIA GT Championship, in July 2005. He outlined his vision for a European series for the new breed of GT racer. It would be, he explained, a ‘Cup of cups’: there would be a separate classification for each model of car and the winner of each cup would get to stand on the podium. The original plan for the series called for three teams of three cars representing each brand.

 This concept, which was quietly forgotten early in the life of FIA GT3, reflected the origins of some of the cars and a hope that it might tempt in more manufacturers. “There were some brands talking about doing one-make series at that time,” said Ratel. “So I thought offering them a platform where they could bring their cars to us would be a cost-effective way for them to do that without launching a full-blown championship.” Another consideration stemmed from Ratel’s confidence that he was going to get a big grid for his bold idea: “If you have a lot of cars, you have a lot of losers.” The ‘Cup of cups’ idea meant there would be more silverware to go around at the end of each race.

Ratel’s confidence that he was going to get the field he wanted proved well placed. At Spa in July 2005 he had outlined hopes of having five manufacturers on the grid. At the launch of the series at the start of December in Monte Carlo, which followed on from the confirmation of the championship by the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council in October, there were nine different marques of car lined up in Casino Square, adjacent to the route of the F1 track. Two of them – Lotus with its Exige Sport GT3 and Venturi’s Heritage GT3 – did not participate in the series, while the Ferrari was not ready to be presented. After a press conference at the Hôtel de Paris, the teams packed up their cars and set off, not for home, but along the Riviera coast from Monaco to the Paul Ricard circuit.

The first round of BoP testing would take place at the French circuit over the following two days. GT3 was most definitely up and running. And it
had all happened only slightly more than a year since Stéphane Ratel’s idea had met with little enthusiasm from the world’s manufacturers.