How over the course of two decades GT3 became modern motorsport’s greatest success

No one doubted it was a good idea. Not when there were 42 examples of a new breed of racer on the grid at Silverstone in May 2006. With so many cars, representing eight marques, the FIA GT3 European Championship was an instant success. But no one could have predicted that day how GT3 would go on to conquer the world. Not even its architect, Stephane Ratel. 

GT3 was conceived by the boss of the FIA GT Championship as an entry-level category aimed firmly at the amateur or gentleman driver and with an accent on sprint racing. As it celebrates its 20th birthday, it is much more than that. It is now the predominant GT category around the globe, used in long- and short-format racing, and home to both the amateur driver and the professional.

If there were any doubts about the ascendancy of GT3, its adoption by the IMSA SportsCar Championship for its professional GT class, GT Daytona Pro, in 2022 and then by the World Endurance Championship as LMGT3 in 2024 removed them. And that’s not to forget that the DTM has been fought out by GT3 cars since 2021. 

A total of 23 manufacturers have been represented in the category over its first 20 years, and it is generally reckoned that well in excess of 3000 GT3 cars have been built. Some of them are now resuming their careers in the new-for-2026 GT3 Revival Series. Jointly run by Ratel’s SRO Motorsports Group and leading historic organiser Peter Auto, it is open to cars built between 2006 and 2013. And it’s not the only such initiative.

But the success of GT3 can also be measured in less specific numbers: GT3 has provided the bedrock of the professional careers of hundreds of drivers and given the chance to many more amateurs to live out their dreams by racing Ferraris, Lamborghinis or whatever at some of the biggest sportscar races on the planet. 

The catalyst for the new category was Ratel’s concern about the future of the GT2 class in FIA GTs in the mid-2000s. In a playground increasingly dominated by Porsche and Ferrari, costs were being driven up – and the amateurs, so important to the health of sportscar racing, driven out. Ratel’s solution was to create a new category drawing on all his experience since taking his first steps in motorsport with the launch of the Venturi Gentlemen Drivers’ Trophy one-make series in 1992. 

The GT World Challenge Europe pack jostles into Druids at Brands Hatch in 2025

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

The successor to that series had been the Lamborghini Supertrophy, which started with a version of the Italian manufacturer’s Diablo known as the SV-R in 1996 before its replacement by the GTR in 2000. The GTR was fast, not far off GT2 times when they raced on the FIA GT bill, but much cheaper to run.

“The GT2 cars required an engine rebuild every 5000km, but some of the Lambo V12s went 20,000km between rebuilds,” recalls Ratel. “There were owners who didn’t open their engines for three seasons! They were so much cheaper to buy and run because they were just lightly modified road cars.” 

Ratel reasoned that other manufacturers could follow Lamborghini’s lead. But he didn’t actually need the manufacturers, not since 1999 when he had motivated a rule change at the FIA removing their monopoly on the homologation of GT racing cars.

Mercedes’ domination in 1998 spelled the end of GT1 and left Ratel’s championship as a rump of its former self

Now engineering companies, what Ratel liked to call “specialist tuners”, could develop a car and apply for what was known as a technical passport. It was, he argued, a necessary move if GT racing in Europe was to be saved after the implosion of GT1 that followed on from an explosion of costs. 

Next in line after Porsche’s 911 GT1 ‘parts-bin special’ of 1996 was the Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR, which was allowed to compete in the inaugural FIA GT series in 1997 after a late change of rules, and then the CLK-LM.

Mercedes’ domination of the series in 1998 spelled the end of GT1 and left Ratel’s championship as a rump of its former self, fought out by cars from the former GT2 class now known simply as GT. The series, dominated in 1999 by Chrysler’s Viper GTS-R, was light on numbers and variety.

The category was launched in Monte Carlo at the end of 2005

Photo by: Jean Michel Le Meur/SRO/DPPI

Ratel faced opposition when he presented his ideas for the technical passport to the FIA Manufacturers’ Commission. But he persuaded Max Mosley, president of the governing body, to push it through by telling him he would have blood on his hands for the death of GT racing if he didn’t.

“I asked him what the world was going to think if the FIA let GT racing die after what happened with Group C and the ITC [the International Touring Car series],” remembers Ratel. The finger of blame for the end of Group C and the original world sportscar championship at the end of 1992, in particular, had been firmly pointed at the FIA.

Ratel had a particular marque in mind on the freeing of homologation from the shackles of the manufacturers. “I knew I needed Ferrari back,” he says. To that end, he commissioned a Ferrari GT racer christened the 550 Millennio from Italtecnica Engineering.

It wasn’t a success, but the car that it spawned was. Frederic Dor took his Millennio to Prodrive, with which he rallied for its Allstars customer team, to take a look at the thing. Prodrive reckoned it would be better off starting again. The result was the 550 Maranello GTS, the first car built up from a road car purchased via a small ad in one of the broadsheets. 

The success of that car on the race track (three FIA GT titles and a Le Mans 24 Hours class win) and in the marketplace (10 cars built in period) proved that the tuner model could work. Prodrive would do it again with Aston Martin; it followed the same business model pioneered with the Ferrari, even though it had an official partnership this time.

There were other success stories, too. Reiter Engineering built 135 Lamborghini Gallardo GT3s, Kessel Racing in excess of 60 Ferrari 430s, and Callaway Competition approximately 35 Chevrolet Corvettes. All those cars won races and championships.

GT3 moved into enduros and Audi won Spa in 2011

Photo by: Audi AG

Ratel collected other ideas and concepts for the launch of GT3. Driver grading or categorisation was formalised in year two of FIA GT3s in 2007, but it had its roots in the Venturi series. When Ratel found himself with a field of 60-plus cars, he split the grid according to the experience of the drivers.

The format of two one-hour races per weekend, so prevalent around the world today, came out of the Lambo series. Ratel thought two drivers sharing an SV-R would make sense on the grounds that the car was double the price of the Venturi and he opted for one-hour races “because that’s how far they would go on a tank of fuel”. 

A mix of cars would contest the one-hour FIA GT3 races: front-engined, mid-engined and rear-engined, with V12s, V10s, V8s and flat-sixes. There were cars built around carbon monocoques, spaceframes and unitary construction chassis, so true sportscars and Grand Tourers.

Ratel had wanted to forbid Maserati from racing its MC12 in FIA GTs. His fear was that the carbon-chassis machine would do to the championship what the rule-bending CLK-GTR had done years before

And then the grandest of Grand Tourers, Bentley’s Continental, arrived in 2013. The means to create a level playing field on which such an array of cars could compete was already in place in FIA GTs. It was – and still is – called the Balance of Performance. 

Ratel had wanted to forbid Maserati from racing its Ferrari Enzo-based MC12 in FIA GTs. His fear was that the carbon-chassis machine would do to the championship what the rule-bending CLK-GTR had done years before.

But Mosley dissuaded him of his objections: “Max said, ‘Listen, refusing it will create such a storm. We are going to balance it and then everyone will realise that there is no point doing this kind of car because it will be no faster than a conventional car.’” 

Lamborghini Supertrophy was cost-effective and provided inspiration

Photo by: SRO

BoP was central to GT3 and remains so. There was, at least for the first 15 or so years, no prescriptive rulebook saying what you could and couldn’t do, rather a performance guideline was set and it was up to the manufacturer or the tuner to build a car to meet it.

The benchmark was set by the ubiquitous 997-shape Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, which in 2006 started racing all over the world in the German manufacturer’s one-make series a year after its introduction in the Supercup. The irony was that Porsche opposed the introduction of GT3. Its position was probably closer to outright hostility than mere ambivalence. 

GT3 spread quickly after the launch of the European series. It had its own class in the British GT Championship in 2006 before it took over as the main category in 2007, the same year that series were launched in Germany with the ADAC GT Masters and in South America with the GT3 Brazil Championship. There was also a class for the cars in the FFSA GT Championship in France.

The first FIA GT3 champion was not a fortysomething amateur, but a 19-year-old barely a year out of single-seaters. Sean Edwards launched a career that was cut short by his death in 2013 on the back of his title success driving a Tech 9 Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 Cup.

The following year Christopher Haase would seal the inaugural GT Masters title after just turning 20, and in only his second year of racing. The German had graduated to a Reiter Gallardo LP520 GT3 with more than 500bhp from a one-make series for Dacia Logans with less than 100bhp.

This trend was an important component in the growth of GT3 and remains an ingredient of its success today, though one its architect didn’t see coming. It was pointed out to him by Haase’s team boss, Hans Reiter, that “the gentleman driver was only half the market”, recalls Ratel. “He told me that there were young drivers who wanted to race GT3 cars because they or their parents understood that not every young kid was going to make it to Formula 1.”

‘Specialist tuner’ approach worked well with the Prodrive Ferrari 550

Photo by: Fox/LAT/Getty Images

Others followed in the wake of Edwards and Haase. Laurens Vanthoor, World Endurance Championship title winner in 2024, signed up with Vincent Vosse’s WRT Audi team for 2012 after four years in F3 with a clear intent.

“The idea was to start out racing with WRT in GT3, become an Audi factory driver and then move on to race at Le Mans,” he explains. “The first part happened really quickly; in only my second season I had an Audi contract!” Audi’s withdrawal from LMP1 at the end of 2016 meant he had to join Porsche to continue ticking the boxes.

Audi’s arrival in 2009 with the R8 LMS GT3 came as part of an influx of motorsport big guns as the new decade was dawning. BMW and Mercedes, as well as Ferrari with a factory-sanctioned car for the first time, joined in short order between 2009 and 2011. Porsche got serious too, building a proper GT3 car for 2010 after offering an upgraded version of its Cup car from 2008. 

“We saw that the GT3 could race at the Nurburgring and also at Spa. These were big and important races, and so we knew it made sense to go with the R8” Wolfgang Ullrich

The arrival of Audi in GT3 proved to be a game changer, and for multiple reasons. For a start, endurance racing was part of its agenda. It took the R8 LMS GT3 to the Nurburgring and Spa 24-hour classics in year one of its programme, finishing on the podium at both races.

“We saw that the GT3 could race at the Nurburgring and also at Spa,” recalls Wolfgang Ullrich, head of Audi Sport at the time. “These were big and important races, and so we knew it made sense to go with the R8.”

By the time Mercedes and Ferrari arrived in GT3 in 2011, long-distance racing was very much part of the landscape. For that season, Ratel had launched the Blancpain Endurance Series with Spa at its centre. 

Balance of Performance concept was proved by Maserati MC12 saga

Photo by: Sutton Images/Getty Images

Audi also changed the game in another respect. It involved itself in the best of the teams running its cars in the biggest races. When it notched up its first victory at Spa in 2011, sharing the winning WRT car with eventual BES champion Greg Franchi were two of the German manufacturer’s star drivers from the DTM: Mattias Ekstrom and Timo Scheider.

The model was quickly adopted by Mercedes and BMW, who established pools of factory drivers to be loaned out to customer teams. Porsche already had a factory roster, but expanded it in the GT3 era, while Ferrari eventually followed suit. It resulted in GT3 becoming a career end in itself, not just the stepping stone that Vanthoor envisaged. Just ask Mercedes AMG stalwart Maro Engel or Christopher Mies, who was on Audi’s books for 14 years before moving to Ford. 

Audi may have thrown its weight behind the likes of WRT and Phoenix for the big races, but it entered GT3 with a commitment to provide unrivalled customer support. Few would question that it achieved that over the careers of the two generations of R8.

GT3 had been conceived as a home for the independent team, not the factory. Cadillac’s three-year involvement in GT3 in the Pirelli World Challenge in North America from 2015-17 can be regarded as a footnote in the history of the category. But its full-factory engagement with Pratt & Miller was the catalyst for a rule demanding that manufacturers must sell 20 cars over the first two years of homologation of a new model. 

GT3 machinery has become ever more sophisticated over the years. That’s the natural order of things, but also the result of the magnitude of the prizes on offer. As well as Spa and Nurburgring day-night classics, GT3 machinery could win overall at the Bathurst 12 Hour, one of the rounds of the Intercontinental GT Challenge established by SRO in 2016, long before the arrival of GTD Pro and LMGT3.

With increased sophistication has come increased cost, but the GT3 bubble shows no sign of bursting. Ratel admits that, even though he did bill his launch of GT2 ahead of the 2021 season as an “insurance policy” in case of the GT3 success story reaching its final chapter.

Ratel’s ‘gentlemen’ concept has also helped young professionals

Photo by: Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images

The arrival of two new cars – thinly veiled racers for the road in the forms of Toyota’s GR GT3 and a machine called, like its long-serving predecessor, the Mercedes-AMG GT3 – could represent a further danger to the category.

Ratel appears only mildly concerned about the imminent arrival of the GR and the Merc. They will become the Maserati MC12s of the new era, so where’s the problem? That car was successfully controlled by the BoP. 

BMW M Motorsport head Andreas Roos doesn’t foresee a problem: “We are running in BoP championships, so BoP has to cover those cars and I am sure it will cover them.” And he says that as the manufacturer racing with the humblest of base cars in the M4.  

No one can predict whether GT3 has another two decades in it. The future of what the automotive industry likes to call mobility will decide that. But there’s no doubting its success for its first two.

“For 20 years, the same category, it is global – you can buy a GT3 and race everywhere in the world,” says Vosse. “It is the biggest success story in motorsport history.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the June 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

DTM has been for GT3 machinery since 2021

Photo by: Gruppe C GmbH