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.

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.

I’m working on a plastic model of the 1996 Porsche GT1. Got any photos of the 1996 racing car with intercooler removed? Plumbing / tubing / wiring and Bowden cables are all part of the story, references are thin on the ground. Now there’s a McLaren F1 kit too!

Cody

if you are still looking for photos please send me a mail at jbr7447703 at aol.com

I should be able to help as I have a new source of material

jb

También lo firman Saleen s7,maseratti MC12,y por que no BMW Z4 (v8) cuando el de calle es v6…