IMSA GTD, FIA GT, World Challenge, DTM, GT Masters, N24, VLN, SuperGT, and various SRO series, to name a few, are all run with FIA GT3 specification cars, and literally thousands of them have been built over the years. And that’s just the top-level professional stuff. It seems like every country in the world has its own pro-am or pure am GT3 series. Hell, how many Porsche customers have bought GT3 Rs to run in Porsche Club events?
So once these cars are no longer competitive or prohibitively expensive to update to current regulations, what can be done with them? I think I have an idea.
As of this writing there is a basically new Porsche GT3 R, an old Viper GT3, and a 2017 Lamborghini Huracan GT3 on RacingJunk.com, just looking for somewhere to race. If you wanted to add in one-make racers like 911 GT3 Cups and Ferrari Challenge racers, you can add another 13 cars to that number, and the price drops to under $70,000 to start.
Audi bragged that it built over 200 R8 GT3 LMS race cars between 2014 and 2018. And that’s just one manufacturer. Think about how many of these race cars are being pumped out of motorsport studios within Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Acura, Aston Martin, Nissan, Bentley, BMW, Mercedes, and McLaren. And that’s to say nothing of the no-longer-built GT3s from Cadillac, Callaway, Lotus, Dodge, Ford, Morgan, Jaguar, Venturi, Ascari, and Maserati. So where are they all? Let’s see them race! On ovals!
Don’t tell me there aren’t enough rich dudes out there to run a small Saturday night series on paved ovals touring the country. Not only would this be fun for the fans, but it would be a great way for small town America to see some exotic metal doing what it does best. Imagine an old Reiter Engineering-built Gallardo getting dragged out of storage to run a Pabst Blue Ribbon livery at Kalamazoo Speedway, the self-proclaimed fastest 3/8ths mile oval in the world. Can you see it? I can see it. This kind of race has the potential to draw professional talent and potentially a national streaming deal. How cool would that be?
Yeah, it’s a weird idea that probably won’t ever happen, but I’d be way more likely to watch this than that weird SRX series that ran this summer.
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