F1 Fanatic

Stephane Ratel has said his company will no longer promote the GT1 World Championship series as of next year:

http://gt1world.com/news/details/towards-the-future-for-sro

Is this it for the series? Can anyone see a way back from here?

Unlikely that the series will be saved at this point. It was already an uphill fight to get enough teams signed up to do the whole ’2 cars per manufacturer’ deal using what were basically GT3-spec cars. Credit where credit is due cos Ratel’s fought tooth and nail to keep it going over the past few years, but it just reached the point where it’s no longer a sustainable series.

It would be a shame to see it go. It’s always been a good watch, especially this year with the GT3-esque specification cars. the racing is more often than not very close for the duration of the hour-long races. I wonder how this news will effect the Blancpain Endurance championship too? I’m sure SRO run that as well, do they not? It’s a similar set of cars, be a shame to see that go as well.

The thing I don’t understand is how the GT requlations have become so dispersed throughout the world and across all the series. When I was a kid, growing up watching F1 and slowly learning about GT racing, you had the GT1 cars that were the super hyper sports cars, and then GT2 for the more normal, less steroidy ones. Since then you’d be struggling to use only your fingers and toes to count how many different GT classes there are world wide.

GT racing is obviously a big part of endurance racing, and Le Mans and the Le Mans series especially, but I don’t feel it gets the credit it deserves and is so overshadowed by the LMP cars they share the track with.

I think they all need to get together and have a proper world-wide GT championship encompassing the teams that run in the WEC/ELMS/ALMS, and maybe those in the GT1/3, set out some proper decent, sustainable and long-lived regulations, and visit the world’s almost best tracks (not F1, but as @prisoner-monkeys suggested a while back, those almost-best or classic-and-now-underused tracks) that would give a bit of variety and uniqueness to the series. And then maybe at a handful of events each year race alongside the LMP cars so that we still get the LMP/GT format, but the whole GT class isn’t lost in the hype built up around the LMP’s.

That’s too bad. I’ve seen a few races on SPEED and it was pretty good. It was cool watching GTR’s, Ford GT’s, Lambo’s, and other supercars race each other so closely.

Just watched the Championship Race from Moscow. Seems as if they’ve merged the GT1 and GT3 fields. I’m assuming they’ve done this because the entry numbers have dropped so low? There were only 11 GT1 starters from what I counted. SunRed still only have a single Ford GT, there was no return of the Russian Aston Martin team, despite it being their home race. The Chinese Porsches were once again missing, and Reiter’s Lambos seem to have gone AWOL.

It’s such a shame as GT racing can be exciting, is very road-relevant, and deserves a proper year-long worldwide championship. If only they started merging all these series together… GT1, GT3, Blancpain Endurance… even the Le Mans/WEC GT classes. All into one championship with massive fields, a mix of endurance and sprint races. It would be brilliant.

But with the look of the Russian field, it really doesn’t seem like GT1 will be around next year.