New Glickenhaus GT Car Completes First Shakedown

Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus has completed the first shakedown of its new GT3-designed race car that will compete in the Nürburgring 24 later this year.

Company founder Jim Glickenhaus gave the SCG 004C its first track mileage at the Cremona Circuit in northern Italy on Tuesday before handing the wheel over to race driver Thomas Mutsch for further tests.

The car, which is the competition version of the in-development 004S road model, is the successor to the 003C which captured the outright Nürburgring 24 pole in 2017.

Glickenhaus told Sportscar365 that the 004C racer will make its competitive debut in the opening round of the NLS series (formerly VLN) in March.

SCG will then campaign the SPX-class car in the second VLN round and the six-hour Nürburgring 24 qualifying race in April ahead of the main 24-hour event in May.

The car is powered by a naturally-aspirated 6.2-liter V8 tuned engine developed from a General Motors LT4 block. The engine conversion was carried out by Italian company Autotechnica Motori, which also worked on the Honda-based engine found in the 003C.

As was the case with its 003C predecessor, the 004C is being developed by Italian race engineering firm Podium Advanced Technologies in partnership with SCG.

“The interesting thing about using the small-block Chevy is that it’s a pushrod engine,” said Glickenhaus.

“It can’t rev very high, but GT3 engines can’t rev very high anyway with the restrictors. You get a very low center of gravity and it’s a very compact engine, so there’s a tremendous amount of space around it to blow air around and keep it cool.

“This morning when we were running, we even had to start taping the radiator to get the temperatures up because the oil temps were getting low.”

After driving and observing the car on its first shakedown, Glickenhaus said that it should manage to improve on the performance of the 003C at the Nürburgring.

“The car was much nicer to drive in this first outing than I thought it would be,” he suggested.

“One thing we’ve added is two inches more suspension travel versus the 003C, so we think that’s going to help us in a couple of ways.

“On the Nordschleife, you can fly and land, and that suspension travel really helps to soften the landing a bit.

“The other thing about the car for the Nordschleife is that with the low-end torque, we’re going to be able to be faster coming out of the turns than we were with the 003C.

“We also believe that the 004C has better aero balance. With the new design of the nose, we’re getting very nice downforce and we’re able to use a more aggressive wing.

“We’re actually going to go with a full GT3 wing. Before we were running a wing with a little lower drag. It gave us tremendous speed on the Döttinger Hohe [straight] but now we think we will still have good speed but we’ll also have more balance and downforce.”

The 004C is 100 kilos lighter than the 003C while Glickennhaus reckons that it will provide “25 percent” more high-speed cornering downforce at the Nürburgring.

The car’s track testing program is set to continue next week with a 30-hour simulation at Aragon involving a group of drivers.

Following its preliminary shakedown, SCG published an on-board video of the car in action at Cremona.