The 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed was the stage for many impressive firsts and among them has been the worldwide debut of Audi Sport Customer Racing’s latest product, the ludicrous Audi R8 LMS GT2. With 640 horsepower, it’s faster than its GT3 and GT4 brethren but, somehow, it slots in between the two. Audi Sport says it’s the most potent car to come out of the Customer Racing program, and you’ll be able to see it on track next year as Stephane Ratel Organization (SRO) will allow the GT2 class to compete in series like the GT Sports Club in Europe and the GT World Challenge America across the Atlantic.
Racing has a tendency to become more and more expensive as time goes on. The pattern is as follows: a sanctioning body or a championship organizer proposes a new ruleset for a new category that’s supposed to replace an older, prohibitively expensive one. Everyone involved is happy, the new class is launched, it becomes popular, and as it starts to gain momentum, the cars evolve pushed by factory involvement and, in a matter of years, they become too expensive, and we’re back to square one. This is, broadly, what happened with the (still) highly popular GT3 formula that turned, from one category catering for amateur drivers, to one that comprises the bulk of today’s leading sports car and luxury car manufacturers, many of them pouring serious amounts of money in developing race cars able to win on the world stage. Let’s see how GT2 plans to fix this issue. In a way...
