Celebrating 15 years of GT3
The manufacturers were unconvinced – and even hostile – when Stephane Ratel launched GT3. Now, 15 years on from its debut, they’ve sold more than 2000 cars and counting
When Stephane Ratel presented his ideas for a new tier of GT racing to a group of manufacturers in November 2004, he got a mixed response. Ferrari and Porsche were opposed, while the representative from Mercedes sought him out afterwards to suggest in no uncertain terms that the German manufacturer would never build a car for the proposed class, FIA backing or no. The category was GT3 and, 15 successful years on from its launch in 2006, Mercedes is now one of its top participants, with total sales knocking on the door of 300 cars.
Mercedes isn’t the only manufacturer to have sold GT3 cars in big numbers since it belatedly joined the party when the SLS AMG GT3 was released to customers for the 2011 season. Audi delivered its 200th R8 LMS GT3 midway through 2016, only seven and a bit years after the first iteration made its bow in the hands of a select band of handpicked teams for what was a kind of development year. Ferrari and Porsche, for all their initial opposition, have gone on to produce factory-developed racers for the class by the dozen. The German manufacturer has now sold 83 of its latest-generation 911 GT3-R, based on the 911.2-shape model, and it was only introduced in 2019.
So many cars have been built in significant volumes — there have been more than 50 homologated models from 20 manufacturers — that it’s difficult to put an accurate figure on total GT3 production since 2006. Back in 2013, Autosport estimated that it was somewhere between 800 and 1000. Eight years on, it has to be some way north of 2000 cars.
The GT3 mantra eventually found a warm welcome in the boardrooms of the world’s major sportscar manufacturers because the category has come to represent good business. The reason is that
GT3 spread to the four corners of the globe at a rapid pace. There are top-line series for the cars all over the world. FIA GT3 has not only become the default category for national sportscar racing, but it has been adopted by the important enduro races around the world, from the Spa and Nurburgring 24-hour classics to the Bathurst 12 Hour. It even has a home in the IMSA Sportscar Championship as GT Daytona, and a place under the umbrella of Le Mans 24
Hours organiser the Automobile Club de l’ouest in the Michelinsponsored Le Mans Cup and in the Asian Le Mans Series.
QUICK OUT OF THE BLOCKS
The GT3 concept was launched in Monaco in December 2005. Less than five months later, the FIA GT3 European Championship kicked off at Silverstone with a 43-car grid split between eight marques. Among them was Dodge, which was part of Chrysler, and therefore at the time encompassed in the same automotive group as Mercedes.
The man from Mercedes had told Ratel late the previous year that, if he wanted cars from the group on his grid, he should go to the US and buy some. Merc’s representative was talking about the Dodge Viper Competition Coupe, a car that had started out as a one-make racer but had found its way into series such as the Sports Car Club of America’s World Challenge.“those were his exact words:‘go to America and buy some’,”recalls Ratel.“so that’s what I did. It was quite a financial risk, but for the first race we had nine Vipers split between three teams. I managed to resell all of them.”
There were Porsches and Ferraris at Silverstone too. The Porsche 911 GT3 Cup one-make racer set the benchmark for performance in the new class, even if its builder was antagonistic to the new category. Everything else was balanced around it. It’s worth remembering that the GT3 European series was initially billed as a‘cup of Cups’. That explains the drawn-out podium ceremonies that visitors to Silverstone all those years ago might remember:
there was a separate podium for each marque of car!
Ferrari was represented by a reworked Ferrari F430 Challenge racer developed in Switzerland by sometime Formula 1 driver Loris Kessel. Ratel describes the late Swiss as one of his“gt3 founders”who helped kickstart the category.“loris was a Ferrari dealer and for him to go against the will of the factory was a very brave thing to do,” recalls Ratel.“but that was Loris. He told me,‘i’ll do it, I don’t care’.”
Ratel describes GT3 as an“immediate success”. That’s a reference to the monster grid assembled at Silverstone for the two one-hour races that ran in support of that weekend’s FIA GT Championship round and the way the category subsequently spread around the world.“it took off like a house on fire, and kept growing — there hasn’t been one downturn in its history,”explains Ratel.“for the second year we launched into Germany [with the ADAC GT Masters], and in the third year in 2008 we had a series in Brazil.
It was like‘boom’.”
Today the sun never sets on GT3 racing: it has reached the four corners of the world. There probably aren’t too many weekends of the year when there aren’t GT3 cars racing somewhere.
THE BUILDING BLOCKS
GT3 might have been an instant success, but it had been a long time in the making. There was no eureka moment for Ratel. The building blocks for the category had been slowly falling into place over the preceding 10 years or so.
Ratel launched what was, looking back, a kind of prototype of GT3
in the mid-1990s, when he brought cars from the Venturi series that had been his entree into motorsport together with other one-make GT cars in the Philippe Charriol Supersports Trophy. He concedes it wasn’t entirely a success. The two iterations of one-make Lamborghini series that followed were also vital staging posts on the road to GT3. The Supertrophy Diablo GTR that raced up to the end of 2002 provided much of the inspiration for GT3.
“Those cars could do a similar lap time to a GT2 car at fast circuits,”explains Ratel.“but they were so much cheaper to buy and run because they were just lightly modified road cars. If Lamborghini wanted to do a GT2 car they’d have to spend a fortune reducing the weight and producing a race engine to run with an air restrictor [the means of controlling power in GT racing at the time], and end up not going much faster.”
Why not, thought Ratel, take the concept behind a relatively standard Diablo GTR as the template for a new breed of GT racer, do away with a detailed rulebook, and just balance the performance of the various cars? The lessons learned in the FIA GT Championship on the arrival of the mid-engined, carbon-chassis Maserati MC12 at the back end of 2004 proved that equating the performance of different kinds of GT machinery was eminently possible.
Ratel had wanted to ban a car developed out of sister marque Ferrari’s Enzo with racing very much in mind; he didn’t want it in his championship. But FIA boss Max Mosley came up with an alternative and more conciliatory approach.“he said,‘we’re not
“TODAY THE SUN NEVER SETS ON GT3 RACING: IT HAS REACHED THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE WORLD”
going to ban it, but we are going to balance it against the other cars’,” remembers Ratel.“that way, he told me, the manufacturers would realise there’s no point doing that kind of car because it won’t be any quicker than a conventional car like the Ferrari 550 Maranello or the Chevrolet Corvette C6.”
Another flag in the sand that marked the route to GT3 came in 1999. With FIA GT on its uppers after the series had all but imploded following the glory years of the original GT1 era in
1997 and 1998, Ratel persuaded the FIA that the idea that only manufacturers could homologate cars had to be abandoned.
The same rule that allowed Prodrive to develop the Ferrari 550 Maranello to race in Ratel’s series and at the Le Mans 24 Hours also gave Kessel his chance with the F430 in GT3.
Many of the cars on the grid at Silverstone in May 2006 were produced by what Ratel has always called‘tuners’. Among them were the Lamborghini Gallardos developed in Germany by Reiter
Engineering, another one of Ratel’s“founders”. A Ford GT from Swiss-based Matech Concepts would follow in year two. The route into GT3 for these motorsport engineering specialists was subsequently closed when a new broom swept through the FIA after Jean Todt succeeded Mosley as president, but by then GT3 was already a proven success of which the manufacturers wanted to be a part.
WHY HAS IT BEEN A SUCCESS?
Ex-formula 1 designer Peter Wright, who helped conceive GT3 with Ratel in his role as president of the FIA GT Commission, knows exactly why. And it’s down to the Balance of Performance, which was very much his baby.“the BOP makes the economics of GT3 sound,”he explains.“people malign the BOP, but it has been successful in stopping people spending too much money on the cars. It has turned GT racing into a profit centre for the manufacturers.”
Ratel reckons that limiting GT3 to what he calls“prestige brands and iconic models”is another reason for its success. By‘prestige brands’he means the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Audi, but to illustrate what represents an iconic model he points to Nissan’s GT-R.
“When you have a BOP, you have the danger of Ferrari being beaten by brands from a different market sector,”he says.“if that happens they will go. That’s why it was important to limit who can come and
“PEOPLE MALIGN BOP, BUT IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL IN STOPPING PEOPLE SPENDING TOO MUCH MONEY”
play. I won’t name any names, but there have been manufacturers who have wanted to come in. I couldn’t stop them developing and homologating a car, but I told them their car would not be eligible for any of the SRO championships. If they are excluded from those series, then there is no market and they don’t have a programme.”
A LUCKY ESCAPE FOR GT3
The FIA announced at the back end of 2012 that it was planning to rationalise GT racing and bring the GTE class together with GT3 as part of a so-called convergence. The plan was for a category named simply GT to replace GT3, and the so-called GT+ version to take the place of GTE.
Ratel was vehemently opposed.‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’he cried. Then as now, he insisted that the overt factory competition and customer racing are two different things.“do the maths – look at the price of a GTE car: it’s more than double a Gt3,”he says.“if you have convergence, somehow merge two classes, you are going to end up with a price somewhere in the middle. The GT3 market could not have supported those kinds of costs. You could have forgotten about having 50 cars in the Blancpain Endurance Series [now the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup].”
The convergence plans lingered on for 18 months, but were eventually shouted down by a group of manufacturers with entrenched positions in the GTE arena. It was, suggests
Ratel, a lucky escape.
THE DANGERS AHEAD
New rules come into force in GT3 in 2022, or rather new homologation guidelines. The dangers facing the category are not presented by the latest regulations, argues Ratel, but the places in which GT3 is now finding a home. He points to the DTM’S adoption of the class for 2021, and the replacement of GT Le Mans in IMSA with GTD Pro in 2022. GT3 could yet find a home in the World Endurance Championship and at the Le Mans 24 Hours after the current commitment to GTE comes to an end after 2022.
“GT3 is about customer racing and has never been comparable to what was happening in the DTM or an LMP1 programme, where the money comes from the marketing department,”he says.
“When that happens you have an escalation of costs and performance. What’s happening in the DTM and IMSA are signals that GT3 could cause problems.”
It is the very success of GT3, argues Ratel, that has“put it in danger”.