Quote:
Originally Posted by Phantom Lord
Hi there!
I've been watching some older Super GT and JGTC races on YouTube and I've got a few queries about the regulations back then. Incidentally, stuff like this is well worth watching!
As you probably know, the current GT500 regs are aligned with DTM - silhouette racers with no real similarity to their road-going counterparts beyond styling cues.
So, my first question is: in the older JGTC era, to what extent were the GT500 cars related to the production models?
Secondly, with GT300 we currently have a mix of mother chassis cars, FIA GT3 cars and JAF-GT300 cars. For the latter category, my understanding is that these are also silhouette racers, mechanically very different from the road cars.
Same question applies here: were the older cars more closely related to production models? I had this idea that back then, smaller teams used to buy actual road-going sportscars and then convert them to race-spec, but I may have that totally wrong...
I've had a bit of a Google on this but not found any definitive resources. Any info would be much appreciated! |
For sure japanese-samurai will be the most expert about this, but as far I remember:
late '90 -> 2002, JGTC gt500 cars were based on street chassis, basically it was some kind of japanese GT class comparable to early '00 GT class of fia GT.
From 2003 -> 2013, during these years, gt500 evolved in a proper silhouette-car prototype class with progressively chassis and aero huge development freedom, coming to the mandatory use of spec and bespoke racing engines as well.
From 2014 -> 2019, gt500 dropped NA engines adopting the 2L turbo NRE and applied to DTM specs, with more or less aero development freedom according to seasons and some waiver like the MR layout for NSX.
This year both DTM and GT500 apply to class-one specs with identical technical specs, infact despite appearences NSX is FR layout.
During years also homologated FIA GT1 specs were allowed in GT500, but just one of them was succesfull (LARK mclaren f1) in late '90.
During 2003-2013 years just few FIA GT1 like murcielago GT1, 550 maranello and DBR9 cars raced, but despite a higher power output, were nowhere close to gt500 cars due much better aero of japanese cars. Not to consider that teams fielding GT1 cars usually had to rely to shitty yokohama or not so great dunlop tyres since bridgestone was dealing only with some gt500 teams.
About gt300, since 2012 gt300 class is basically made by FIA GT3 cars and JAF-GT mother chassis based silouhette cars. Before that season, since late '90 gt300 has always been a mix of FIA gt1/gt2/gt3/gtn cars + various types of prototypes like the mooncraft shiden or the IS350 and customized street based cars like amemiya rx7's or that ford gt with a '90 f1 engine... basically cars without any real spec/regulamentation, it was just bop who kept everything togheter (somehow).