In 2024, the crop of standout GT teams was a large one. With so many major championships featuring GT cars around the world hosting events, it’s become a near-impossible task to keep up with it all, let alone analyse the pool of teams and drivers taking part from a bird’s eye view.
There were some truly memorable campaigns from a number of key teams, including SSR Performance, which delivered Lamborghini its first-ever DTM title with Mirko Bortolotti, and Winward Racing, which dominated GTD in IMSA by finishing on the podium six times and winning four of the first five races with a very strong season too in GT World Challenge Europe (also finishing the year with a race win in the Asian Le Mans Series).
Barwell Motorsport also produced perhaps the most dominant campaign in British GT history with its pair of Huracáns, which won six of the nine races during the season and finished 1-2 in the standings. In the GT4 category, Forsetti Motorsport stood out too, taking the team’s title with a pair of Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT4 Evos.
While the new Corvette Z06 GT3.R had its share of growing pains to start 2024, DXDT Racing showed what was possible for the new platform, with eight consecutive Pro class wins, and two more in Pro-Am. It was the catalyst for a step up to IMSA GTD in 2025, with a very intriguing first-year programme.
TGR Team TOM’S thoroughly dominated the fastest GT category in the world, SUPER GT GT500. Its two cars combined for five wins and the series championship, making this the most successful GT500 campaign that one team has ever enjoyed. JLOC captured a long-awaited and very popular first championship in GT300, too, with four wins for the flagship #88 car.
Origine Motorsport was the class of an ever-strengthening GT World Challenge Asia grid with four wins and the Overall, Silver-Am and Teams’ Championships.
AO Racing meanwhile, was stunning stateside with its ‘Rexy’ Porsche in IMSA’s ultra-competitive GTD Pro.
Prior to the season, who’d have thought that Laurin Heinrich and a rotating cast of characters around him would steer AO to a title up against efforts from Corvette and Ford’s factory teams, plus high-profile entries from Heart of Racing, Paul Miller Racing, Pfaff and Vasser Sullivan?
Wins at Laguna, Detroit and Indianapolis were enough to emerge as the top dog – or dinosaur! – in this company.
All of those, and more besides, would have been worthy recipients of DSC’s award this time and on another occasion may have won it, had it not been for the outstanding year for another Porsche customer team.
Dailysportscar’s 2024 GT Team of the Year
Pure Rxcing
From the word ‘go’, the Manthey-operated Pure Rxcing team in the FIA WEC was the class of the field in the new LMGT3 class. Through the eight-race campaign, the Lithuanian-flagged team’s Porsche, driven by Alex Malykhin, Joel Sturm and Klaus Bachler, only finished off the podium twice.
To illustrate just how dominant the team was – in a class which is governed by BoP and features success ballast – it secured the title with a race to spare despite finishing off the podium at the double-points-paying Le Mans 24 hours due to mechanical woes.
Its only real competition over the course of the season came from the sister Manthey car from EMA, which finished second in the standings off the back of wins at Spa and Le Mans.
But that’s not all. Pure Rxcing also took home the 2023/24 Asian Le Mans Series GT title over the winter before the WEC season got underway, with wins at Sepang and Dubai over the course of the five-race campaign.
The only disappointment is that we will not see Pure Rxcing back in the FIA WEC in 2025 to defend its crown.
The good news though, is that it is going prototype racing. It is taking its ruthless approach to winning to the ELMS’ star-studded LMP2 class after a warm-up campaign in Asian Le Mans which got underway earlier this month.
It will be hard to match or better such a strong 2024 campaign in 2025, but DSC can’t wait to see what Edgar Kochanovskij’s team has in store for us.
