GM Planning Global Camaro GT4.R Customer Sales

Photo: Richard Prince/GM

The new Chevrolet Camaro GT4.R will be made available to customers worldwide, according to GM Racing Director Mark Kent, who is targeting sales to begin next year.

The Pratt & Miller-built GT4-spec car, which finished 2nd in its competition debut in Friday’s Pirelli World Challenge GTS season opener at St. Pete, is GM’s first turn-key race car built to a global set of technical regulations.

It will initially compete in PWC and IMSA Continental Tire SportsCar Challenge this year with development partners Blackdog Speed Shop and Stevenson Motorsports, respectively.

“That is our objective,” Kent told Sportscar365. “We haven’t finalized it all, but our goal when we started this process was that by next year we would have a product that would be racing in the hands of other teams in addition to Blackdog [and Stevenson].

“We have received a lot of interest, a lot of tire kickers. But until we figure out the distribution process and price, it’s hard to tell how many of those tire kickers are serious. We’ll find out.

“Based on what we believe we have here, we think it’s an exciting product and we think there’s going to be a lot of interest in the years to come.”

Kent said they have yet to establish the exact market for the SRO GT4-homologated car, which could be used for track days and club racing events in addition to being eligible for GT4 championships worldwide.

GM’s most recent experience with customer race car sales has been with the COPO Camaro, a race-inspired Camaro for the drag strip, which it has limited sales to 69 cars per year based on initial interest.

“We’re going to do something similar with this; we’re going to try and identify the market and see how many we can really sell,” Kent said.

“If you’re only producing four of five, you take this approach. But if you’re producing 400-500, you take a different approach altogether.

“We’ve got to identify that. But we hope it’s a big market.”

Kent said they’re also working through the customer support model, given that teams will likely be utilizing the Camaro ZL1 1LE-based car in a number of different championships.

“The idea of a GT4 car is that you don’t need to support them,” he said. “You buy the car, the car’s capable to go racing.

“You shouldn’t have to have ongoing engineers embedded with the team to help them because that’s really not the idea with GT4.”

With a full season ahead in PWC with two cars, as well as the Stevenson Camaro debuting at the Continental Tire Challenge round at Circuit of The Americas, Kent is optimistic of having a well-sorted car for customers by next year.

“We hope at the end of the year we’ve ironed out all the bugs, we’ve figured out how to operate the car so when someone does buy it, ‘Here’s your owner’s manual. This is how you can compete with this car,'” he said.

“The other half, [the drivers and teams] would like to win some races and poles. We hope that we have a steep but effective learning curve that we can be competitive here as soon as possible.

“They’ve love to win the championships and we hope this product would enable that.”

John Dagys

John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John