Dear John,

Many thanks for sharing this article. I have revisited it several times since you published it, as the GT1 era of ’95-’97 is my favourite sportscar period.

I think one point must be made regarding the Porsche 911 GT1, and that is it was first and foremost intended for Le Mans, where the GT1 regulations required homologation for road use and one car built. The 911 GT1 was not the first homologation special in this sense, even if one discounts the Dauer 962 as a Group C car with luggage space that certainly did not confirm to the spirit of the Le Mans regs, never mind those of the BPR series. Nissan (Skyline GT-R LM), Toyota (Supra GT LM) and Honda (NSX GT1) all built such.cars in ’95 but they were not particularly successful, resulting in the 911 GT1 being scapegoated to a certain extent in my view. Where BPR fell down was allowing the 911 GT1 into the series the year after denying PC Automotive permission to run the Jaguar XJ220C in the ’95 series, even though it was the competition derivative of a road car (the XJ220S, admittedly another homologation special but at least more than one was built). This double standard gave the impression that the rules could be bent if the price and politics were right, not encouraging to privateers. Of course it is ironic that in the ’97 FIA series Porsche did supply privateers with the 911 GT1 but it was rendered uncompetitive by restrictors because of its dominance in the ’96 BPR rounds it participated in.

I must say that the 911 GT1 is a paragon of virtue compared to the Mercedes CLK GTR, which (as another of your excellent articles reminds us) was neither homologated or existed as a single road car until the end of the ’97 season. It amuses me that the reason given for it not attending Le Mans that year was that it was not sufficiently mature for the 24 Hours rather than it wasn’t actually eligible, but then admitting it wasn’t even compliant to the less stringent Le Mans requirements compared to the FIA GT series would have been embarrassing…

Thanks again for your terrific articles on my favourite period of sportscar racing.

Best,

Greg.

If you can be of help to me, contacting either of those 2 gentlemen, I would be indebted…

Please help…

I work in the research department of RM Sotheby’s we are selling a 1999 Lamborghini Diablo GTR that raced in the 2000 and 2001 SuperTrophy seasons. I have been speaking to SRO and they told me you were the official photographer for the series. We have some of your photos, but I was wondering if you would be willing to sell us some image rights to use these on our website?

The car was number 9/30, driven by Victor Zoboli and Vincenzo Tirella, under the Mig Power Team. Was black livery (18) in 2000, but Silver (18) at Kyalami. I would be very interested to see what photos you have of this car.

Kind Regards,

Cyrus Panthaki

Sir,

Your eyesight is sharp as this does indeed say Hillman on the badge and also on the sheet.

However, the text under the photo actually refers to this as follows:

1935 Hillman Aero Minx
Hillman made a few hundred of these more sporting versions of their successful Minx model between 1935 and 1936. They had 1185 c.c. side-valve 4-cylinder engines and eventually full synchromesh for the 4-speed gearbox, mounted in an underslung chassis.
The cars were not intended as sports cars but rather touring cars; however, some private owners used them in competitions, especially in the major trials that were so popular at the time – for example, three Golds and the Team Award were won in the 1934 MCC Welsh Rally and four Golds were scored in the 1935 London-Land’s End Trial.

Nik,
while this piece was posted here seven years ago, it was actually written and published in 1996.

The arrival of the F1 GTR did raise the bar considerably from the fairly low levels of BPR in ’94, both in performance and budgetary terms. However, I doubt that the McLaren owners’ expenditure was significantly different to that of the F40 brigade, and the arrival of projects such as the Lotus in ’96 showed that there were those who were prepared to work on road cars to convert them to race specification and be competitive. The 911 GT1 was fundamentally a racer that could be reverse engineered to road car specification. Add to that the arrival of a factory team with all the resources that a manufacturer such as Porsche could deploy and the BPR was doomed.

Maybe it was doomed anyway, Ecclestone had issued his ultimatum in late ’96 on TV rights, that would have killed off the BPR. We ended up with the madness and excess that was the first two seasons of the FIA GT Championship. Fortunately, Stéphane took on board the lessons of that particular debacle and saved GT racing, which has evolved to the global competition we have today.