A presentation by Stephane Ratel at the Euro GT4 meeting at the Hungaroring last weekend gave some new insight into a couple of coming programmes into what looks set to be a booming GT marketplace in the seasons to come with new and expanding markets opening up in Europe, North America and beyond.
A presentation slide shows the 13 currently GT4 homologated cars from 12 manufacturers (or their associated ‘tuners’) but below that are a row of three future cars, one has already been announced, the factory prepped BMW M4 GT4 set to go head to head with the current Ekris version of BMW’s sporting coupe.
Either side of that though are a pair of silhouetted cars (both incidentally not silhouette of the intended combatants, but rather placeholder images of a blacked out Porsche!)
Unsurprisingly one image is labelled with Audi, Audi Sport evaluated a version of the Audi TT earlier this year for future suitability in GT4.
However sources are now suggesting that the eventual GT4 car from Audi might actually emerge as a version of the larger R8, Tristan Herbert from Audi SPort Customer Racing telling John Hindhaugh on IMSA Radio this evening that the chassis choice had been a source of debate and that ‘the way the market was moving then perhaps some sort of ‘pared down’ version of the R8 LMS might be the most sensible way to go.’
The other manufacturer listed is Mercedes Benz AMG – is another racing version of the AMG GT set to emerge from the customer motorsport arm of Mercedes? (Updat: apparently yes, our friend and colleague Marcel Ten Caat tells DSC that AMG did indeed announce their intention to launch a GT4 race version of the AMG GT earlier this year).
