This is a bit off topic from karting but I was wondering if the Blancpain GT race teams build their own cars, like F1 teams, or do they modify base cars that they receive from their manufacturers?
They’re turn key GT3 spec race cars from the manufacturers.
GT3 cars are pretty much customer items bought from manufacturers for the most part. The governing body runs tests to balance performance of each car so it’s not proper motorsport.
Also, the teams sell their drives for the most part. I knew someone who was a ‘pro’ in a decent team and he still had to bring 70k a year.
It’s quite frustrating to keep up with BoP rules. It’s insane how many things we have to change to transfer a car from IMSA to SRO. Even stupid rules like in SRO you’re not allowed to put brake blanking on the outside of the grill (IE; tape is a no-no) for who knows why. But IMSA doesn’t care.
For us we have a guy that owns the car, transporter, and brings the sponsor. So he has his set budget then the team has to produce its own budget. The contract dictates who pays for what. Who pays the pro driver, who handles the tire bill, who covers crew costs, etc.
Actually when we ran in GS tape was illegal but you could use any screen you wanted so we had various screens we could drop in to the grills to restrict flow.
In st years prior we were not allowed jack points… of course that did nothing and we just absolutely destroyed floor pans instead. Some rules are really dumb
SRO makes you bolt blanking behind the grill so it can’t be removed easily. IMSA let’s you use QD panels on the outside. We use carbon panels with slider QD’s to make things easy.