Next month, SRO Motorsports Group will celebrate 20 years of its defining formula, GT3, with the inaugural FIA GT3 European Championship race having taken place at Silverstone on 6th May 2006.
The story of GT3, however, can be traced back to a decade before then, and it’s these roots which are being placed under the spotlight at Circuit Paul Ricard this weekend.
The Lamborghini Supertrophy, the Italian marque’s first one-make series, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, with the competition for V12-powered Diablo SV-Rs having held its maiden event as a support race to the 1996 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Lamborghini Supertrophy, the brainchild of Stéphane Ratel, built on his previous experience running the Venturi Trophy, and outside of Le Mans initially supported the BPR Global GT Series.
SRO would go on to run the Supertrophy for seven seasons, with it visiting five continents during its time, and acting as the test bed for many of the ideas that have gone on to make GT3 racing so successful.
“When we started GT3, it came as part of a full programme which included balance of performance, driver categorisation and the format of these short races with two drivers, all things that I had experience in,” Ratel tells DSC.
“This weekend we have a very important celebration, which is 30 years of the Lamborghini Supertrophy, and that was really the laboratory for everything else we did.”
The Lamborghini Supertrophy was, in an era which featured some of the most extreme GT cars the sport has seen, based on the premise that keeping cars close to the specification in which they left the production line would help to keep a lid on costs.
“It’s with the Lamborghini Supertrophy that we found out that cars unrestricted, heavier, and close to the road car origin could be as fast as the GT2s of the time, which had built up competition engines with restrictors,” explains Ratel.
“Basically, you were spending a lot of money to make the car a lot lighter, and then you would put on restrictors, and then you would develop the engine. So you were spending the money twice, and at the end, if you were taking cars closer to the origin, non-restricted, not gaining so much weight, you would have almost the same performance.”
As well as keeping development and production costs down, staying closer to the road car also helped keep a cap on running costs. With the engines running much easier, durability skyrocketed.
“Instead of rebuilding the engine every 5000 kilometres, you would do 30,000 kilometres with the engine,” Ratel says. “That’s GT3, and that was born with SVR.
“Also with SVR, we started having pro drivers coming, we had gentleman drivers, and in the middle we had guys that were not really gentlemen. So we created the categorisation of drivers. We were really the first ones to do it, and that has really conquered the world.”
Driver categorisation is now the norm across all major sportscar series. The FIA’s medal-based system, which is used across ACO, IMSA, SRO and ADAC competition, is the primary example, but organising bodies such as Creventic and manufacturers’ one-make series have also devised their own versions.
Lamborghini Supertrophy also helped lay the groundwork for what would become the ultimate method to contain development costs in GT racing: Balance of Performance.
“We didn’t have really restrictors in the old-fashioned way,” Ratel continues. “With the sealed air box and installing the engine, you would put the bolt on…we didn’t have that.”
“That was really balance of performance that helped us with balancing these cars together. So all of these really came from these years, and 10 years later, we started GT3. We did seven years of Lamborghini Supertrophy, we experienced all of these, and that created the beginning of GT3.”
The legacy of Lamborghini Supertrophy flows throughout the paddock at Circuit Paul Ricard this weekend, far beyond the bumper 58-car, 10-manufacturer field of SRO’s premier GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup.
Over a dozen of the Italian brand’s supercars are on display, whilst Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe, Supertrophy’s successor, is kicking off its 2026 campaign.
The key difference between Supertrophy and Super Trofeo is that the latter is organised by Lamborghini’s in-house Squadra Corse department.
Throughout its formative years, Lamborghini was famously opposed to motorsport, but it is through the success of series like Supertrophy that it has become a major player in the GT customer racing scene.
And as it celebrates Supertrophy’s anniversary, Lamborghini is also beginning the next chapter of its racing history, with the European racing debut of the Temerario GT3. Team TGI by GRT and Rutronik Racing will each field a factory-supported Pro entry in the GT World Challenge Europe season opener.
Images courtesy of SRO & Lamborghini
